In 1983, a Columbia University undergraduate named Barack Obama wrote an article, “Breaking the War Mentality,” for the school publication Sundial. Obama expressed the hope that someday humanity would abolish nuclear weapons and create a “nuclear free world.” Obama never abandoned that dream. The Nobel Foundation awarded him its Peace Prize last December in large [...]

The uncontrolled 60,000-acre Las Conchas Fire in New Mexico, which began June 26, is raging near Los Alamos National Laboratory, but the lab says that its nuclear materials are protected. Los Alamos was the birthplace of the atomic bombs that the U.S. developed during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project and dropped [...]

The U.S. will cut its nuclear weapons stockpile, use such weapons only as a deterrent, and pump more money into the infrastructure to create and sustain such weapons, according to the new nuclear weapons policy released today by the Obama administration. "Preventing nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism is now at the top of America’s nuclear [...]

Yesterday marked Leo Szilárd’s one hundred and fifteenth birthday. Leo Szilárd: peripatetic Hungarian genius, imperious habitue of hotel lobbies, soothsayer without peer among scientists. Among twentieth century scientists Szilárd stands out as the great prophet who anticipated both the advent of Nazism and the coming of the nuclear arms race. Part of the group of brilliant [...]

Two foundational beliefs have colored our views of nuclear weapons since the end of World War 2; one, that they were essential or at least very significant for ending the war, and two, that they have been and will continue to be linchpins of deterrence. These beliefs have, in one way or another, guided all [...]