It is not easy to read the runes of the Hanoi summit between the US and North Korean leaders, President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un. A lot of western press has dubbed it a failure but that is not enough to understand what is going on. Continue reading
nuclear weapons
Arms control: scanning the landscape
Even before President Trump announced the USA would withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987 (see my last blog post on this), the arms control landscape did not present a happy picture. Experts from SIPRI and from the Russian Institute, IMEMO, met in October and discussed the problem. The occasion marked the 25th anniversary of the SIPRI Yearbook being published in Russian, thanks to translation effected through IMEMO, together with a Russian supplement produced by IMEMO. We captured some of the key themes in this short film in SIPRI’s Spotlight series.
The crumbling architecture of arms control
At a political rally on Saturday 20 October President Trump announced that the US will withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987. This confirms what has steadily unfolded over the last couple of years: the architecture of US-Russian nuclear arms control is crumbling. Continue reading
2 minutes to midnight?
On 25 January, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced the current time on its long lasting Doomsday Clock: two minutes before midnight, the Editorial Board decided, with midnight, of course, equalling apocalypse. The following day, The Economist, a magazine, carried a cover story on ‘The Next War: the growing threat of a great power conflict’. Are things really that bad? And if so, what can be done about them? Continue reading
The nuclear triptych of 2017
Nuclear weapons have come into the political limelight in 2017 as they have hardly done since the 1980s. North Korea, the Iran nuclear deal and the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons create a triptych – one panel for arming up and nuclear confrontation, one for arms control, and one for complete nuclear disarmament. Which way is the world headed? Continue reading
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