January 31st, 2011
This month and next, Canada shoulders one of the least coveted leadership posts within the United Nations system – the presidency of the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament (CD). The travails, frustrations, and abject failure of the CD, the UN’s only disarmament negotiating forum, have become legendary over 15 years of regular meetings that have produced […]
Read MoreJanuary 19th, 2011
Limiting or banning the operations of nuclear attack submarines in the Arctic Ocean is not disarmament, but it could advance efforts toward a nuclear-weapon-free Arctic and world. The proposal to convert the Arctic region into a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone[i] is generally understood as a long range objective. Building declaratory support in principle for the […]
Read MoreJanuary 14th, 2011
On January 17, 1961 President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned Americans that an emerging “military-industrial complex” would wield unhealthy and unwarranted influence – “economic, political, and even spiritual”—0ver their political life if it was left unchecked. The warning came in Eisenhower’s extraordinary farewell address to the nation, days before John F. Kennedy entered the White House. […]
Read MoreJanuary 6th, 2011
The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect warns that “an escalation in the situation [in Côte d’Ivoire] could easily lead to the commission of mass atrocities….”[i] Protection is far from guaranteed, but the international effort to date is serious. All the ingredients for long-term strife punctuated by explosive violence are in abundant supply in […]
Read MoreDecember 29th, 2010
From the earliest days of the current, and by all accounts undiminished, insurgency in Afghanistan, conventional wisdom has regarded Pakistan as a key, if not the key, to Afghan stability. But for Pakistan to become a part of the solution in Afghanistan, India will have to be recognized as part of the problem. The recent […]
Read MoreDecember 23rd, 2010
It was genuinely a landmark moment yesterday (December 22) when the US Senate voted of 71 to 26 to ratify the New START Treaty. Of course, in the ponderously slow path toward nuclear disarmament no single success is ever enough – and the same goes for this one. But without this ratification there would have […]
Read MoreDecember 19th, 2010
“You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.” These are said to have been the last words of US Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke.[i] He didn’t say how to do it, but he left behind enough other words to make clear his view that the focus of his country’s efforts would have to shift from fighting […]
Read MoreDecember 10th, 2010
As the US White House and Senate continue to wrangle over a complex set of compromises that may or may not lead to ratification of the New Start Treaty,[i] elsewhere, notably in the Parliament of Canada, there is growing recognition that before too long global nuclear disarmament will require the guidance of a formal roadmap […]
Read MoreDecember 5th, 2010
The new Strategic Concept of NATO is certainly no nuclear abolitionist document, nevertheless it does, as Canadian NGOs urged a year ago, situate NATO nuclear policy unambiguously under the disarmament imperative of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In January 2010 a group of Canadian civil society organizations[i] hosted an Ottawa conference of 65 experts, including […]
Read MoreNovember 29th, 2010
The new Strategic Concept certainly doesn’t cure NATO’s addiction to nuclear weapons, but there are some encouraging moves towards a 12-step program. Evaluated from a global zero perspective, the Strategic Concept (SC) approved at the 2010 NATO Summit (in Lisbon)[i] represents classic denial – not only are nuclear weapons not acknowledged as a problem, dependence […]
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