In the atomic age, who needs the four horsemen of the apocalypse – pestilence, war, famine, and death – when one will do? In mid-October, North Korean ‘Supreme Leader’ Kim Jong-un rode a white horse up a snow-peaked mountain, gazing from the summit with a “mien” so “dignified” – inRead More

I did not weep, I turned to stone inside…Dante, Inferno   I rarely cry, but on the evening of 8 December 1987, glued to radio coverage of the signing of a nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Soviet Union, I wept with a relief I had neverRead More

Last November I lamented ‘The Lost Art of Arms Control,‘ the abject failure to build on the platform left by the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, and US President Ronald Reagan, who famously urged Gorbachev to “tear down” the Berlin Wall dividing Europe into nuclear-armed camps. Nearly 30Read More

“The road to hell,” the saying goes, is “paved with good intentions.” If a path to peace in Korea, however long and winding, emerges from the currently scheduled June 12 Singapore summit between President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un, it will have been paved by the best and worstRead More

Part I: Sham Success and Ersatz Humanitarianism   On April 14 the US, UK and France launched missile and air strikes on three suspected chemical weapons (CW) facilities in Syria. The action was taken in response to an alleged chlorine and sarin nerve gas attack by government forces on AprilRead More

On March 22, President Trump tweet-sacked National Security Adviser (NSA) Lieutenant-General H.R. McMaster, naming as his replacement John Bolton, one of the most hawkish, controversial and unpopular officials in the trigger-happy administration of George W. Bush. Bolton learned the news while appearing on the Fox ‘News’ Channel, his soapbox inRead More