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We are sleepwalking into nuclear catastrophe

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The following article was authored by Dr. Ivana Nikolić Hughes and Prof. Peter Kuznick, published in Responsible Statecraft on January 20, 2026.

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We are sleepwalking into nuclear catastrophe

As Trump’s invasion of Venezuela shows, the premier non-proliferation treaty has eroded and risks becoming irrelevant

In May of his first year as president, John F. Kennedy met with Israeli President David Ben-Gurion to discuss Israel’s nuclear program and the new nuclear power plant at Dimona.

Writing about the so-called “nuclear summit” in “A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion,” Israeli historian Tom Segev states that during this meeting, “Ben-Gurion did not get much from the president, who left no doubt that he would not permit Israel to develop nuclear weapons.”

President Kennedy was alarmed by the prospect of a world in which more states came to possess nuclear weapons and saw Israel’s acquisition of nuclear arms as particularly problematic. He reasoned that if we could not convince our allies not to develop these weapons, there was little hope of convincing those with whom we had less friendly relations.

Kennedy’s fear of nuclear proliferation only grew after the terrifying events of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, which demonstrated to him just how easily human civilization could end should nuclear weapons be used in a war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. A world with “15 or 20 or 25 nations” that are nuclear armed would necessarily become ever more dangerous, Kennedy stated in his famous 1963 American University commencement address. This diagnosis would become the fundamental rationale for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was negotiated in the years after Kennedy’s death and signed by key states in 1968, entering into force in 1970.

Kennedy recognized that to get a commitment from non-nuclear armed states to maintain their non-nuclear weapons state status, states with nuclear weapons would have to give something in return, namely access to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and the promise of eventual disarmament. This idea of a “grand bargain” would eventually turn into the three pillars of the NPT. Five states that had acquired nuclear weapons up to that point (U.S., USSR, U.K., France, and China) would get to keep their nuclear arsenals, while agreeing to negotiate “in good faith” towards not just nuclear but general disarmament. Everyone else would forgo the ability to obtain nuclear weapons. Peaceful use of nuclear energy would be available to all.

The NPT has now been in existence for over 55 years and has garnered an impressive membership of 191 States, with five states — four of which happen to be the other nuclear-armed states — outside of the treaty regime at this time: India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan (plus South Sudan). Israel did develop nuclear weapons after Kennedy’s death, with its first nuclear weapon becoming operational by 1967, prior to the negotiations of the NPT. India and Pakistan became nuclear powers in 1974 and 1998, respectively, and their recurrent conflicts have threatened the whole world ever since.

Only North Korea has reached nuclear-armed status since, when it tested an atomic bomb in 2006. Having been an NPT States Party, North Korea left the treaty in 2004 after learning the following lesson from Saddam Hussein’s toppling in 2003: Get nuclear weapons or face the prospect of a regime change war, that is, unless you toe the line drawn by the United States and its friends.

That message has only grown stronger since that time, including in Libya and Syria. But the message from the recent Venezuela invasion is even more clear: No national or international laws of any kind need apply. We will do as we please. Law is for whiners and wimps.

The 11^th Review Conference of the NPT will take place April 27-May 22 of this year at the U.N. headquarters in New York City. This gathering occurs every five years, and this year’s conference promises to be particularly contentious amid so much conflict around the world. The last two review conferences in 2015 and 2022 (the latter was postponed from 2020 due to COVID) did not produce an agreed-upon substantive outcome document.

A third failure in a row could set the treaty back in a serious way, potentially unleashing both vertical and horizontal proliferation. In fact, recent articles in Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy encouraged Japan to develop its own nuclear weapons, with the former also recommending that Germany and Canada join the nuclear club, while the latter threw South Korea in the mix.

The threats to the NPT are many, from states and publics that are more skeptical of nuclear energy, which once upon a time was going to be “too cheap to meter,” to the lack of any meaningful progress on disarmament on the part of the five nuclear weapons states party to the treaty. Now there’s even a new arms race afoot. And at no time has the message been clearer to all non-nuclear weapons states: you are either with us or you better have nuclear weapons. If you belong to neither category, we will find you, take your leader in the middle of the night, and take your oil.

But the idea that all countries would be in one of two camps and that all who don’t support the U.S. agenda should have nuclear weapons, is of course preposterous. A world with “15 or 20 or 25 nations” that are nuclear armed would lead to nuclear war and nuclear annihilation faster than we could imagine. But that is exactly where we are heading if the lawlessness is left unchecked and the U.N. continues to be sidelined and emasculated.

In fact, the true lesson of the many decades of the NPT is that non-proliferation without earnest disarmament on the part of the nuclear weapons states and without a solemn commitment to international law does not work. Further weakening of the U.N. Charter, as we have seen play out in Venezuela, will surely make matters worse. Only sober efforts at diplomacy and negotiation, including by extending and re-negotiating the New START Treaty between the U.S. and Russia, can save us from ourselves.

_________________________________________

Ivana Nikolić Hughes is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Group to the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Peter Kuznick is a professor of history and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington, D.C. He is also the author of numerous books, and co-author (with Oliver Stone) of The Untold History of the United States.

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January 20, 2026
Review of Martyrs to the Unspeakable by James Douglass

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A new book details the tragedies of and the connections between the devastating assassinations of America’s foremost 1960s leaders.

On December 8, 1999, in what should have been “the trial of the century,” a jury of 12 convicted Lloyd Jowers, alongside the United States government, of conspiring to murder Martin Luther King, a man whom the very same government celebrates this month with a national holiday. More than a quarter of a century later, scores of American students are still taught that James Earl Ray, an avowed racist, acted alone in killing the legendary civil rights leader. From withdrawn security, to the fact that James Earl Ray wasn’t even at the Lorraine Motel at the time of the shooting, to the admission of Jowers to taking the gun from the man in the bushes, to the testimony of Jesse Jackson that the shot came from the bushes, and more, the list of King’s assassination inconsistencies with the official narrative is long, leaving little room for doubt. Certainly, the jury felt that way in coming to their verdict in less than an hour.

The trial was initiated by the King family. And while the country has celebrated not just MLK himself, but his wife Coretta Scott King, including since her passing in 2006, it has ignored her deeply held beliefs that the government conspired to murder her husband. “There is abundant evidence of a major high-level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr… the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband. The jury also affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James Earl Ray, as the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame,” Mrs. King shared after the trial. A real way to honor her and her husband’s legacy would be not to build them more statues, although those are nice, but to speak and teach their truth.

The story of MLK’s murder, plus three more – those of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Senator and Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, is told in James Douglass’s magnum opus, Four Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK. In a painstaking effort to document – through declassified records, witness testimonies, autopsy reports, interviews, and more – what really took place leading up to and during these murders, Douglass paints a picture of a government not only spying on its own leaders and citizens, but so deeply committed to the Cold War and the economic forces benefitting from war and maintenance of poverty, that nothing, not even murdering those who wish to change the status quo is out of bounds.

Each story is devastating on its own, but together, they break one’s heart completely. Two brothers, two preachers, two white, two black, all unimaginably young – JFK was killed in 1963 at the age of 46, Malcolm X in 1965 at the age of 39, and MLK (age 39) and RFK (age 42) in 1968, just two months apart. In less than five years, we killed our best and brightest, setting up scapegoats that were meant to take the fall for us all. The four martyrs were extraordinary men who thought deeply and passionately about the world. They loved this world. Their own words, which Douglass quotes over and over and over again, at once lift one’s spirits and then bring on a wave of sadness at the thought of it all. “Why, why, why?” as John Lewis shouted while watching the news of RFK’s murder from a hotel room in Los Angeles.

It is impossible not to think about the corollary question of what if. What if JFK had lived? Did his murder sentence the others to death, too? What if all four had lived? What if any one of them had?

This is not the first time that Douglass has investigated assassinations. He has also written two other books about the unspeakable: JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters and Gandhi and the Unspeakable: His Final Experiment with Truth. The new book is less focused on the details of the JFK assassination story than the original. Instead, it sets up the connections between JFK and his brother, of course, but also with MLK, and between MLK and RFK and between MLK and Malcolm. JFK is the starting point. MLK feels like the center of the story.

Douglass borrows the term unspeakable from the Catholic philosopher Thomas Merton who refers to it as “the systemic, organized evil that permeates our public life, the void of responsibility and awareness in which atrocities can be committed without anyone seeming to do them.” The book contains endless references to declassified documents, witness statements from interviews and court testimonies, forensic reports, and more. In each case, a piece here and there that does not fit in the lone shooter puzzle would be disquieting, but not disqualifying. Put together, however, they appear to exonerate the accused, and implicate a web of people spanning FBI, CIA, the Mafia, and local police departments, where individuals connected with the CIA led investigations – or rather cover-up – efforts. The man behind it all appears to be J. Edgar Hoover, the long-time Director of the FBI who presided over the Bureau under six presidential administrations.

Douglass seamlessly moves between the individual narratives and the stories that connect them. To him, the answer to the why question is the existence of nuclear weapons. The final sections of the book are devoted to the Cuban Missile Crisis, a 12-day ordeal during which the Kennedy brothers prevailed, alongside Khruschev, but also got lucky. We all were lucky! The world could have ended in October of 1962. Once the Kennedy brothers internalized this, it was time to ensure it could never happen again. It was time to turn towards peace.

In telling the story of the four murders, Douglass is clearly heartbroken, but capable of expressing hope, the kind of hope that comes along as one travels the path of truth. He is most pained, his suffering on full display, when he talks about the present. We are living in challenging times, and Douglass, with 88 years under his belt, is tormented by the state of the world, most notably by what many and he himself see as a genocide in Gaza. He ends the book with a short story about yet another assassination for which no one was ever punished, the murder of the Swedish diplomat Folk Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg, in Jerusalem in 1948. Just like with Gandhi, who was killed in that same year, the unspeakable seems to know no borders and can take place far from the US shores, the CIA, the Mafia, and the FBI.

Douglass wants us to recognize that assassinations have painful consequences. While individuals can change and have indeed changed the course of history, for better and for worse, people coming together in pursuit of peace and liberty is the only way out of the mess we find ourselves in. The ball is in our court.

James Douglass’s Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK is available for purchase from Orbis Books HERE.

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January 19, 2026
ACURA Exclusive: Are the Russians Coming? by Peter Kuznick and Ivana Nikolić Hughes

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The following article was authored by Peter Kuznick and Ivana Nikolić Hughes and published in American Committee for US-Russia Accord (ACURA) on January 15, 2026.

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Are the Russians Coming?

As the European leaders push for the Ukraine war to continue, they increasingly warn of an all-out war with Russia by the end of the decade, if not sooner.

In 2018, historians Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano wrote a book titled The Russians Are Coming, Again. The title was a play on the popular 1966 anti-Cold War movie The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming. If one listens to Europe’s leaders today, it quickly becomes clear the Russians are definitely coming again. Nearly four years into the Ukraine war and a year into the Trump Presidency, the conflict continues to take thousands of lives and decimate Ukraine. But unlike during the Biden era, it is the European leaders now that drive the push not only for this war to persist, but for a direct war with Russia by the end of the decade, if not sooner.

As it has become increasingly evident that Ukraine’s battlefield position is steadily if incrementally worsening at the same time that its corruption scandal is dragging down President Zelensky and those around him, including the once-powerful Andrey Yermak, European political, military, and intelligence leaders have been discussing openly the imminence of war with Russia in an increasingly desperate, voluble, and shrill manner. The more Zelensky’s position weakens and the worse Ukraine’s battlefield prospects become, the more Zelensky and his European backers seem to dig in their heels, resisting concessions that would end the war, including territorial changes that Putin demands after nearly four years of fighting, limits to the size of Ukraine’s army, and a formula for security guarantees that does not include NATO membership for Ukraine nor troops from NATO countries.

The Trump Administration’s newly released National Security Strategy (NSS) chastised the Europeans for being delusional regarding their “unrealistic expectations” when it comes to settling the nearly four-year-old war. But that hasn’t deterred them from seeking a peace plan that, unlike the original 28-point plan, promulgated by Stephen Witkoff and Jared Kushner after speaking with both Russians and Ukrainians, ignores Russia’s red lines in its Ukraine-friendly 20-point alternative. The NSS was so contemptuous of Europe, warning it faced “civilizational erasure” and political irrelevance, that European leaders attempted to prove their importance and resolve by rallying even more strongly around the Ukrainian cause. Recognizing that they could no longer count on the same level of U.S. military support that they had since the Cold War ended, the Europeans endeavored to find a way to rebuild their own defenses while assisting Ukraine. That promise amounts to keeping Ukraine in the fight at any financial or human cost, while frightening the European publics into ponying up whatever money is needed for rearmament. To justify cuts to the social programs that had enriched European life in recent decades, the leaders took a page from the old Cold War playbook, using the threat of Russian military aggression ⎯ a threat made credible by the Russian invasion of Ukraine ⎯ to convince peace-loving Europeans that the danger was palpable and the situation urgent.

The persistent justification for continued war is the logic-defying claim that a Russian “victory” in Ukraine will bring bloodthirsty Russian hordes to Europe’s capitals. As Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary General said on December 11, Europe is Russia’s next target and the war could begin by 2029. “Conflict is at our door,” he warned and Europeans need to prepare for a war reminiscent of World Wars I and II, “for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured… a conflict reaching every home, every workplace, destruction, mass mobilization, millions displaced, widespread suffering and extreme losses.”

From Blaise Metreweli, the new head of Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency who highlighted the “expansionist and revisionist Russia,” to France’s highest military official General Fabien Mandon who warned “of a major high-intensity war outside national territory in Europe, which would involve France and its allies, particularly European allies, by 2030,” to Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius’s demands that Germany become “war-ready” instead of “defense-ready” as early as 2028, the echoes of Rutte’s warnings have been loud, clear, and far too dangerous. Mandon went so far as to warn French governors that they had to be ready “to accept losing [our] children” in the coming war. Italian Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, NATO’s top military official as chair of NATO’s Military Committee, has even stated that “preemptive strikes could be considered defensive actions.”

These pervasive threats have led the Wall Street Journal to report on December 15, “European security officials now regularly broadcast a message nearly unimaginable a decade ago: Get ready for conflict with Russia. Rarely a week goes by now without a European government, military or security chief making a grim speech warning the public that they are headed toward a potential war with Russia. It is a profound psychological shift for a continent that has rebuilt itself after two world wars by trumpeting a message of harmony and joint economic prosperity.”

Europe’s elected officials have not been left far behind in fueling the war fever sweeping the continent. German Chancellor Fredrich Merz has compared Putin’s war in Ukraine to Adolf Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland in 1938, and the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has warned that “Putin’s aggression does not stop in Ukraine.” France’s Macron has also maintained that Russia has no intention of stopping in Ukraine. Russian aggression “knows no borders,” he warned in March in a nationally televised speech. He asked, “Who can believe today that Russia would stop at Ukraine?”

It is striking that the three hawkish heads of state who form the backbone of the “coalition of the willing” and who are leading their citizens down the primrose path are deeply unpopular at home. While the numbers fluctuate, upon last reading, Macron’s approval rating was between 11 and 15 percent; Starmer’s at 19 percent; and Merz’s at 25 percent. Still, recent polling suggests that the scaremongering is having the intended effect. A poll released on December 4 showed that a slight majority of citizens in nine European countries believe that there is a “high” or “very high” risk of war with Russia, including 77 percent of Poles, 59 percent of Belgians and Dutch, and half of Germans, French, and Spanish. Only 34 percent of Italians agreed. Still, only a third of EU citizens told a Gallup poll in March 2024 that they would be willing to fight to defend their country, a number that bottomed out at 14 percent in Italy and stood at 23 percent in Germany.

European leaders’ resolve was never more apparent than at the recent meetings in Berlin where the “coalition of the willing” came up with a menu of ways the Europeans could provide security guarantees for Ukraine, ranging from boots on the ground to financial aid to intelligence support. There, the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk declared, “Now we have a simple choice — either money today or blood tomorrow. And I am not talking about Ukraine only, I am talking about Europe.” “All European leaders have to finally rise to this occasion.”

Well Donald Tusk need not worry. All European leaders, with a couple of glaring exceptions, have risen to the occasion and are broadcasting the idea that Putin’s Russia is a mortal threat to Europe. They, along with their allies in the military, intelligence community, “defense” sector, and media have convinced more than half of Europe that Russia was knocking at the door, ready to invade. While the thought that a Russia that had taken four years and hundreds of thousands of casualties to conquer 20 percent of Ukraine would want to take on NATO—with or without U.S. nuclear backing—is a dangerous form of scaremongering and preposterous to many, intelligent people keep repeating this idea.

Among those who think it absurd and has repeatedly said so is Vladimir Putin himself. President Putin dismissed such charges as “hysteria” by Europeans who had been “indoctrinated with fears about an inevitable clash with Russia.” “I have repeatedly stated: this is a lie, nonsense, pure nonsense about some imaginary Russian threat to European countries. But this is being done quite deliberately,” he said. Russian leaders have even offered to put this in writing.

And yet, the mainstream media keep sticking to the script. A December 19 Reuters article stated that, “U.S. intelligence reports continue to warn that Russian President Vladimir Putin has not abandoned his aims of capturing all of Ukraine and reclaiming parts of Europe that belonged to the former Soviet empire, six sources familiar with U.S. intelligence said, even as negotiators seek an end to the war that would leave Russia with far less territory.”

US Director of Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, responded angrily to a post by one of the Reuters authors, reaffirming this conclusion. She wrote, “No, this is a lie and propaganda @Reuters is willingly pushing on behalf of warmongers who want to undermine President Trump’s tireless efforts to end this bloody war that has resulted in more than a million casualties on both sides. Dangerously, you are… fomenting hysteria and fear among the people to get them to support the escalation of war, which is what NATO and the EU really want in order to pull the United States military directly into war with Russia. The truth is the US intelligence community has briefed policymakers, including the Democrat HPSCI member quoted by Reuters, that US Intelligence assesses that Russia seeks to avoid a larger war with NATO. It also assesses that, as the last few years have shown, Russia’s battlefield performance indicates it does not currently have the capability to conquer and occupy all of Ukraine, let alone Europe.”

It seems that according to the US intelligence chief, the Russians are NOT coming. Whether or not this assessment will reach the European halls of power remains to be seen.

Peter Kuznick is Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.

Ivana Nikolić Hughes is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Chemistry at Columbia University.

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January 16, 2026
Are Governments Playing Roulette with Nuclear Weapons?

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In January 2026, Dr. Ivana Nikolić Hughes, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a senior lecturer in chemistry at Columbia University, joined the Emory Pharma Speaker Series about the risks of nuclear weapons and the long-term impacts of radioactive contamination.

Dr. Hughes explained the dangers of isotopes like Iodine-131, Strontium-90, Cesium-137, and Plutonium-239, emphasizing their persistence in the environment and the severe health risks they pose, particularly to children and females. She highlighted the scale of nuclear explosions from Hiroshima to Castle Bravo, as well as additional threats such as electromagnetic pulses, ozone depletion, nuclear winter, and nuclear famine.

Drawing on decades of research and field studies, including her work in the Marshall Islands, Dr. Hughes stressed the urgency of eliminating nuclear weapons, advocating for international awareness, scientific engagement, and sustained efforts toward disarmament to ensure global human and environmental safety.

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January 16, 2026
January 7: Sadako Sasaki and Her Enduring Message

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Today, January 7, we honor the birthday of Sadako Sasaki, a hibakusha who died at 12 years old from leukemia caused by radiation exposure after the Hiroshima bombing.

Sadako’s story lives on through the 1,000 paper cranes she folded in hope that her wish for peace would come true. Her life remains a powerful symbol of the human cost of nuclear weapons and the global desire for a world without them.

Each year, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation hosts Sadako Peace Day in early August at the Sadako Peace Garden in Montecito, California. During this event, community members gather to remember Sadako and all hibakusha, participate in paper crane ceremonies, share poetry, music, and reflections, and reaffirm the commitment to nuclear disarmament and peace.

We also share President Ivana Nikolić Hughes’s poem honoring Sadako, delivered at the Choose Hope Symposium in Hiroshima below:

I think of you often

I think of you often,
Dear Sadako,
Sometimes I sit in my favorite chair,
And I cry

I think about where I was
When I was two
Toddling around
In my safe home

And I think of you
At age two
Bathing in radiation
In flattened and burning Hiroshima

I think about where I was
At age 12
Dreaming of going to America

I didn’t think then
About
What America had done to you

When you were 12,
You were in the hospital
You were folding paper cranes
You didn’t live to be 13

I learned to fold paper cranes
After my daughter was born

My mother and I
Hung them over Inge’s crib
As a mobile
She looked at them often

Even then, I didn’t know your story
I would learn it later
When it was time

I saw your statue in Hiroshima
Yesterday
I saw what you mean
To children, to people
You bring light to this world

You didn’t get to grow old
Dear Sadako
They didn’t let you
I wonder how you would have changed
And how many origami you would have folded

You wanted to write
On the wings of a paper crane
PEACE
You wanted the paper crane
To fly all over the world

It now does
But peace has not come
We need to fold more cranes
And send them everywhere

I think of you often
Dear Sadako

[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

January 7, 2026
Save the Date! 21st Frank K. Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future by Richard Falk

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Save the date for the 21st Frank K. Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future on Tuesday, April 7, at 6 p.m. at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara. This year’s lecture will be delivered by Professor Richard Falk, who will address the legal, moral, and political challenges shaping humanity’s future in an age of conflict, nuclear weapons, and global instability.

Professor Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Princeton University, where he taught for forty years. He is a leading scholar of international law and international relations and has served as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories.

Falk is the author or editor of more than 75 books, including This Endangered Planet, which in 2022 was named one of six books essential to understanding the upcoming century by the Council on Foreign Relations; his autobiography Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim; Power Shift; Achieving Human Rights; The Great Terror War; Revisiting the Vietnam War; and his latest book Liberating the United Nations. His work has shaped global debates on nuclear abolition, human rights, and world order, and he continues to write and speak internationally on the ethical responsibilities of global citizenship.

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December 26, 2025
TMS: A World in Chaos

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The following article was authored by Dr. Ivana Nikolić Hughes and published in Transcend Media Service on December 22, 2025.

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A World in Chaos

Nuclear disarmament should be the first step in unraveling the chaos.

Today, we find ourselves in a world in chaos. It is a world in which the globe is warming at an alarming pace, matched perhaps only by the rate of progress of AI, with the jury still out on even the qualitative sign of its contributions to society. It is a world in which the divisions between the haves and the not haves, within and across societies, echo with the vibes of the Gilded Age, while all other kinds of social disagreements keep the crowds busy arguing on social media and elsewhere. It is a world in which birth rates are collapsing across the developed world, leading to degradation of the family unit, an essential building block of thriving communities. And then there is the possibility of nuclear annihilation, lurking in the background, threatening at any moment to disrupt the life chain that has led to us being here following billions of years of evolution.

Because I teach first year college students and my own children, ages 14, 20, and 24, are now either young adults or reaching that stage, I often think about the time that I was their age, which was in the 1990s. I came to the US as a foreign exchange student my senior year in high school in 1994. At the time, my own country of Yugoslavia was falling apart, so I knew and experienced chaos at the national level. But what we’re experiencing today is different because chaos seems to be the state of everything from family to local to national to international levels.

It is precisely because so many things contribute to the chaos, that the existential threat of nuclear weapons and the need for nuclear disarmament is largely out of view, forgotten, ignored, or worse, justified. When it comes to this topic, things could not be more different today than they were in the 1990s. Of course, this was the end of the Cold War and in 1994, the year that I came to the United States, the Doomsday Clock by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists stood at 17 minutes to midnight, the furthest it had ever been from midnight, with midnight denoting nuclear annihilation. Today, the clock is at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to human destruction of life on the planet via nuclear war and other anthropogenic means.

Why does this matter when so much else seems to be going in the wrong direction? Below I outline three key points and argue that nuclear disarmament should in fact be the first step in unraveling the chaos.

Currently, nine countries in the world possess 12,500 nuclear warheads, most of which are far more powerful than the bombs that were used in attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They are US, Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. All of these states are involved in hot wars and conflicts like Ukraine or the Middle East, or in adversary tensions and potential conflicts. While there is of course danger that a nuclear weapon could be used deliberately, in times of such widespread conflicts and tensions, arguably a bigger worry may be that an accident or a miscalculation will lead to the use of nuclear weapon quite simply because a leader might believe their country is under attack or is about to be attacked. This could happen in the fog of war or due to a technical glitch alone. The risk of the use of a single nuclear weapon is both real and high.

War games from Washington DC have shown repeatedly that the use of a single nuclear weapon under many different scenarios would lead to a full-blown nuclear war. It’s not just that most simulations suggest a spiral into a nuclear war, it’s that all of them do. Part of this is a result of long-standing policies such as launch-on-warning, but part of it is due to the time scales involved in such decisions, which are only getting shorter and shorter.

Nuclear weapons are different from other weapons because they threaten to kill hundreds of millions of people in a matter of minutes, not days or hours. At the same time, nuclear war would alter the environmental conditions on the planet by destroying the ozone layer and altering the climate in the most dramatic way we refer to as nuclear winter. Nuclear winter and the resulting nuclear famine alone are estimated to result in the deaths of billions of people depending on the exact scenario of the nuclear war that takes place. This quite simply would be the end of the world as we know it. For this reason alone, nuclear weapons must be eliminated. In the words of John F. Kennedy, we must abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us, as he stated in 1961 during his address to the United Nations General Assembly.

There is more of course to the nuclear threat than the mere possibility of annihilation. There are the wasted resources in all of the nuclear armed states, but especially in the United States, which spends more on nuclear weapons than all of the other nuclear possessors combined. There are the people who have been harmed since the beginning of the nuclear age, from the victims and survivors of the atomic bombings in Japan to communities around the world who were subjected to the fallout, radiation, and displacement due to nuclear testing.

But there is also the insidious way in which the notion that nuclear weapons keep us safe – and I posit that nothing could be further from the truth – undermines our ability to cooperate genuinely and to treat other countries as collaborators in addressing various threats to humanity and the planet and in creating a better world. What we are currently doing is basing the foundation of human security on threats of annihilation. Until such thinking is eradicated, resources are redirected for human needs inside the nations that possess nuclear weapons and beyond, and genuine cooperation is established at the international level, we will continue to not just be in a state of chaos, but to teeter on the brink of the ultimate destruction.

_________________________________________

This essay is adapted from a presentation at the webinar A World in Chaos: Collapse and/or Restructuring held on 16 Nov 2025.

Ivana Nikolić Hughes, Ph.D. is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, a senior lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University, and a member of the Scientific Advisory Group to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Her writing has appeared in TRANSCEND Media Service, The Hill, The Nation, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Scientific American, Truthout, Common Dreams, The Diplomat, and elsewhere. wagingpeace.org

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December 22, 2025
The Root Causes of Senseless Violence

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The following article was authored by Dr. Ivana Nikolić Hughes and published in Common Dreams on December 15, 2025.

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The Root Causes of Senseless Violence

A view from the front of a college classroom amid fresh carnage both near and far.

I write this from the front of a Columbia classroom in which about 60 first-year college students are taking the final exam for Frontiers of Science. Yes, it’s a Sunday, but the class is required of all Columbia College students and so having the exam on the weekend ensures that there won’t be conflicts with the exams for other courses they are taking. The 60 students in my classroom are a fraction of the nearly 740 taking the course this semester.

The exam began at 2 pm, less than 24 hours after the shooting at Brown University, and just hours after many of us learned about the shooting in Sydney, Australia. Given these devastating events, I offered this morning that anyone who was adversely affected could take the exam later in the week or take what at Columbia is called an incomplete, which means that they would take the final exam at the start of next semester and only then be assigned a grade. Only about two dozen students took this offer, some sharing personal stories about having close friends from childhood or high school among the victims at Brown. It makes sense that the high-achieving students that Columbia attracts would have high-achieving friends at Brown. Some also hail from Providence and have had impacted family members.

It’s hard to process now, as my students are going through a 30-page exam (there are lots of figures and tables in it, plus spaces for them to add their answers, but yes, it’s a long exam) the senselessness of mass shootings in general, with the one in a classroom full of primarily first-year college students going through a Saturday afternoon final exam review for Principles of Economics weighing heavily as I sit here. Many of the students in Frontiers of Science also take a course here named Principles of Economics. The parallel is heartbreaking. I cannot imagine what I would have done had a shooter walked in on the review I held just a few days ago. I don’t think any of us can, except for those who have experienced mass shootings themselves. Sadly, it seems that at Brown there are two students with such prior experiences.

As I look at my students, still busily working on the exam, and recall the joys I’ve experienced teaching them and getting to know them this semester, I feel that we owe them so much more than what’s on offer at the moment.

As is typical in American society, there will be thoughts and prayers, and arguments about gun control and how we haven’t done enough to ensure that the incomprehensible violence does not happen again. I was in my final year of college when Columbine happened in 1999. I remember seeing the news in the townhouse near the Caltech campus that I shared with three housemates. We were devastated then. More than 25 years after Columbine, the feeling of devastation is sadly familiar, but also insidious.

The fact that the second shooting of the weekend took place in Australia, a country with strict gun laws, complicates the debate somewhat, demonstrating that this is not just about gun control. Sure, more gun control in the US would help; after all, our rate of mass shootings per capita is far higher than in all of the other developed countries. But I think that the problem is far deeper than lack of gun control. The problem lies in having a state, a society, a world, in which violence is not only excused and sanctioned on a regular basis, but celebrated both as a matter of history, but also the present and the future.

We salute our troops, flaunt our deadliest weapons as a matter of pride, justify wars in the name of democracy, and applaud leaders who may have committed war crimes and belong in courtrooms rather than in polite society. Journalist Glenn Greenwald recently made this last point when discussing why so many young people are buying what Nick Fuentes is selling and not what main in the mainstream media would want them to buy.

It is a sick society that spends far more on the military than on diplomacy, education, its veterans, and infrastructure combined. In their recent book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, William Hartung and Ben Freeman demonstrate not only that most of the defense budget ends up in the pockets of the arms manufacturers, but that the funds have also been allocated to projects that have put our troops in harm’s way. Our investment in the military is costly all around, while it elevates violence here and abroad as the ultimate arbiter of disputes and disagreements. The US President John F. Kennedy once said that we will have war as long as the conscientious objectors are treated as traitors, while people who kill during times of war are treated as heroes.

The pinnacle of this sickness, is the possession of nuclear weapons, a constant threat to ourselves and our so-called adversaries, but also the rest of the world. The belief that nuclear weapons keep us safe runs deep through society, and elevates the risk of ultimate annihilation at any moment. Buried deep in this narrative is the justification of the atomic bombings as the tool that brought World War II to a close, while historical analysis demonstrates that Japan would have surrendered without its citizens being incinerated, blown apart, and sickened by the power unleashed from the atom. Justifying the murder of innocent civilians can only beget more violence in the long run, whether in Gaza, or at Brown, or at Bondi Beach.

There are more forms of sanctioned violence, including torture of prisoners, the death penalty, and the killing of suspects at the hands of police. As it is now, these examples send a message that even beyond war, violence and death are the answer. As shocking and horrifying as it is, it is perhaps not surprising that there are individuals, many likely with mental illness, that take this message to heart and commit senseless violence themselves.

As I look at my students, still busily working on the exam, and recall the joys I’ve experienced teaching them and getting to know them this semester, I feel that we owe them so much more than what’s on offer at the moment. Not only do they deserve not to be thinking of mass shootings while studying for their college exams, but they definitely deserve to inherit a world in which peace is sacrosanct and sanctioned violence is not the answer.

[/fusion_text][fusion_button link=”https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/mass-shootings-sanctioned-violence” title=”” target=”_self” link_attributes=”” aria_role_button=”0″ alignment_medium=”” alignment_small=”” alignment=”center” modal=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” sticky_display=”normal,sticky” class=”” id=”” color=”custom” button_gradient_top_color_hover=”” hue=”” saturation=”” lightness=”” alpha=”” button_gradient_top_color=”#004c7d” button_gradient_bottom_color_hover=”” button_gradient_bottom_color=”#004c7d” gradient_start_position=”” gradient_end_position=”” gradient_type=”” radial_direction=”” linear_angle=”180″ accent_hover_color=”” accent_color=”var(–awb-color1)” type=”” bevel_color=”” bevel_color_hover=”” border_top=”” border_right=”” border_bottom=”” border_left=”” border_radius_top_left=”” border_radius_top_right=”” border_radius_bottom_right=”” border_radius_bottom_left=”” border_hover_color=”” border_color=”” size=”” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” fusion_font_family_button_font=”” fusion_font_variant_button_font=”” font_size=”” line_height=”” letter_spacing=”” text_transform=”” stretch=”default” margin_top=”” margin_right=”” margin_bottom=”” margin_left=”” icon=”” icon_position=”left” icon_divider=”no” hover_transition=”none” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_color=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_delay=”0″ animation_offset=””]Read Article in Common Dreams HERE[/fusion_button][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

December 15, 2025
What can you do for disarmament?

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user_select=”” content_alignment_medium=”” content_alignment_small=”” content_alignment=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” sticky_display=”normal,sticky” class=”” id=”” margin_top=”” margin_right=”” margin_bottom=”” margin_left=”” fusion_font_family_text_font=”” fusion_font_variant_text_font=”” font_size=”” line_height=”” letter_spacing=”” text_transform=”” text_color=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_color=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_delay=”0″ animation_offset=”” logics=””]

People always ask us what they can do to advance nuclear disarmament and help the peace movement. We know that figuring out what actions to take in the face of existential issues can be overwhelming. But you don’t need to be a diplomat or an expert to make a difference. Nuclear weapons are an issue that affects us all, and we are all able to contribute. So, what can you do?

NAPF has put together a new page of recommendations to answer these questions. We emphasize the importance of learning, acting locally, and advocating to your elected officials. Check it out!

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Knowledge gives us the power to make change. Explore NAPF’s new learning hub to discover more about the issues, and check out this new action oriented page to learn how you can have an impact. No step is too big or too small in the pursuit of nuclear disarmament. You can use these resources to get started today.

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December 12, 2025
NAPF Peace Award Honoring Pope Francis Received at the Vatican

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NAPF Peace Award Honoring Pope Francis Received at the Vatican

The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Distinguished Peace Leader Award honoring the late Pope Francis has now been received at the Vatican by Fr. Antonio Spadaro, S.J., Under-secretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education. The award recognizes Pope Francis’s moral leadership on nuclear disarmament and his historic stance that both the use and possession of nuclear weapons are morally unacceptable. His strong support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons helped elevate the humanitarian and ethical urgency behind global abolition efforts.

The award was first presented at NAPF’s 38th Evening for Peace on September 26 at the Hilton Santa Barbara Beachfront Resort. During the program, Santa Barbara City Councilmember Kristen Sneddon, speaking on behalf of Mayor Randy Rowse, introduced the Santa Barbara City Proclamation declaring September 26 “An Evening for Peace.” The proclamation highlighted NAPF’s more than forty years of local and international leadership and recognized this year’s honorees, Martin Sheen and Pope Francis.

Founded in 1982, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to building a just and peaceful world free of nuclear weapons. The Foundation continues its work through education, advocacy, and its engagement with the United Nations, including efforts to promote and implement the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

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December 12, 2025