“Nuclear weapons are like a rifle hanging on the wall in a play. We did not write the play, we are not staging it and we do not know what the author intends. Anyone could take the rifle from the wall at any time.” — Mikhail Gorbachev, What Is atRead...

Author’s Note: As this year unlike any other grinds to a bleak close, I offer – in the spirit not of prophecy, but satiric thought-experiment – ‘alternate universe’ visions of the near future. And bear with me, dear reader, as I first appear to lose my mind…   “The extremelyRead More

Thirty Novembers ago, leaders of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) met in Paris to inaugurate a post-Cold War order of peace and prosperity. The Conference – encompassing North America and Soviet Asia as well as Europe – had convened at Summit level only once before, inRead More

Editor’s Note: The Spectator’s Sean Howard will be back next week with his regular, monthly column, but he sent along a press release from Peace Quest Cape Breton about an important development in the progress of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW):   On October 24Read More

  “The labyrinthine design ensures the unfamiliar are quickly lost…”––Charles Kenny, Close the Pentagon: Rethinking National Security for a Positive Sum World “Between mouthfuls of wine the soldier keeps his eyes lowered on this disorderly network which becomes more complex every minute. He does not know what to say. …Read More

We live, do we not, in an age of chronic partisan dysfunction in Washington, a chasm unbridged even by the coronavirus crisis? But on one issue both sides can reach with ease ‘across the aisle’: the Pentagon budget. On July 21 and 23, the House of Representatives and Senate adoptedRead More

The New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ recently reported how, in the depths of the Big Apple’s COVID-19 lockdown, musician David Mansfield discovered a rusted hatch in his overgrown backyard. Prizing it open, he descended a ladder to a nuclear fall-out shelter, a claustrophobic capsule – or “David Bowie tinRead More

“It was an awesome spectacle; anyone who has ever seen an atomic explosion will never forget it. And all in compete silence; the bang came minutes later, quite loud though I had plugged my ears, and followed by a long rumble like heavy traffic very far away. I can stillRead More

“The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve…” Shakespeare, The Tempest   “That’s a dark thinking that I have a hard time understanding…” Marshall Billingslea, President Donald J. Trump’s Special Envoy for Arms Control   On May 15,Read More

“The unease and fear are appropriate and can be useful, all the more so as the self is liberated from convoluted efforts at falsification and denial.” — Robert Jay Lifton, The Climate Swerve   On February 8, as COVID-19 fast-approached a slow-moving British government, BBC World News aired a discussionRead More