Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: From the President

Speaking Out on the Insanity of Nuclear Weapons

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The following article was originally published in The Nation on January 28, 2026.

Speaking Out on the Insanity of Nuclear Weapons

At a time when nuclear dangers are not just rising, but multiplying, we need all hands on deck in sounding the alarm and advocating for abolition of nuclear weapons.

February 6, 2026 | Ivana Nikolić Hughes and Peter Kuznick

Near the end of his life, Robert McNamara wrote an essay for Foreign Policy, titled “Apocalypse Soon.” In it, the controversial former US Secretary of Defense and president of the World Bank argued that we “must move promptly toward elimination—or near elimination—of nuclear weapons.”

McNamara is known for his moderating role during the Cuban missile crisis, which might have saved us from the end of the world. In “Apocalypse Soon,” he writes about this experience and how it shaped his own views on nuclear weapons. But hardly is McNamara alone in examining his role in national security in his final years and concluding that he needed to speak out about nuclear weapons.

Others with long-time service at the highest levels of government have sounded the alarm. In 2007, former Republican secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, former Democratic secretary of defense William Perry, and former Democratic senator from Georgia Sam Nunn wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, titled “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.”

Today, of the “four horsemen of the apocalypse,” Bill Perry and Sam Nunn are still alive. Nunn was involved in cofounding and leading the Nuclear Threat Initiative, while Perry, at nearly 100 years old, has his own William J. Perry Project, dedicated to “working to end the nuclear threat.” In 2014, in an interview with three Columbia University students, Perry shared that he was afraid we were already in a new nuclear arms race. More than 10 years later and with the seeming expiration of New START, the last remaining arms control treaty between the United States and Russia, we may be in an entirely new phase of this new race.

What is desperately needed is people currently in office coming to the same inescapable conclusion that these statemen had reached, while they can do something about it. It is quite shocking that of 100 senators, only Ed Markey has publicly urged the Trump administration to accept the offer of the Russian President Vladimir Putin to extend New START for another year. Markey, a veteran of nuclear policy, has championed many arms control causes during his time in Congress. But even Markey has yet to firmly stand behind nuclear abolition, by, for instance, endorsing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. He shouldn’t wait until he too is out of office and nearing the end of his life. Many in Congress look up to him when it comes to nuclear issues, and his actions have the potential to be transformative.

The last three presidents have spoken about nuclear weapons in sobering terms. President Obama gave a speech in Prague, in which he stated, “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” That declaration helped him win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Although Obama wisely negotiated New START, he also went along with the plans to modernize the US nuclear arsenal at the unimaginable price tag now approaching $2 trillion. President Trump has spoken about the need to “denuclearize,” making the argument that nuclear weapons cost too much and that they could destroy the world over and over again. And yet he has gone on to violate international law on repeated occasions and has so far refused to extend New START, potentially setting the arms race ablaze. In 2021, we had otherwise hawkish Joe Biden to rescue us from the Treaty’s expiration, but it remains unclear whether we can be saved this time. Without an extension of New START or a replacement agreement, we would likely witness a dramatic and terrifyingly dangerous growth in the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the US, the two nuclear superpowers that possess some 87 percent of the world’s approximately 12,500 nuclear warheads.

And it’s not just former or current officials who need to talk about this problem. Those with large platforms could play a huge role. Imagine if Michele Obama talked less about fashion and more about peace, if Taylor Swift devoted a tiny fraction of her time to ensuring that her millions of fans won’t all die in a nuclear war, and if professional athletes embraced this as a political cause, the way they had embraced political causes in decades past. In 1982, celebrities were right there with a million ordinary Americans gathering in Central Park, calling out the insanity of nuclear weapons. Senator Ed Markey was there, too. And young Mikhail Gorbachev watched from a distance. The US public opinion had a profound impact on the late Soviet leader.

One group bears a special responsibility in sounding the nuclear alarm, and that is the scientists themselves. Although the scientists who originally brought nuclear weapons into the world are long gone, many of them did their share of trying to eliminate their own creation, including Joseph Rotblatt, who was the architect of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, alongside the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, an organization he founded. Carl Sagan devoted a good part of his last two decades speaking for peace and disarmament, and explaining the impact that nuclear war would have on the entire planet through nuclear winter. We still have some celebrity scientists, like Neil de Grasse Tyson. They need to get involved, too!

A week ago, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an organization started by the likes of Einstein and Oppenheimer, unveiled its Doomsday Clock, according to which, it is 85 seconds to midnight, the closest we have ever been to human destruction of the planet. We need all hands on deck. Let’s not leave this task only to those thinking about the world as they prepare to make their exit.

Ivana Nikolić Hughes is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a senior lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University. Her research on ascertaining the radiological conditions in the Marshall Islands has been covered widely, including by the Los Angeles Times. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Group to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

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

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February 6, 2026
ACURA Symposium: Mr. President, Renew New START for the Sake of Peace.

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The following article was published in American Committee for US-Russia Accord (ACURA) Exclusive on January 28, 2026.

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ACURA Symposium: Mr. President, Renew New START for the Sake of Peace.

The New START Treaty expires on February 5th.

As of this writing, little is known about the Trump administration’s intentions with regard to renewing the treaty.

While Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed his desire to extend the treaty, it is possible that Trump is being influenced by a coterie of neoconservatives to hold off on extending New START.

Meanwhile, the usual chorus of unreconstructed hawks who staff most of DC’s think tanks are urging the administration to hold off, as it would be seen as a “reward” to Vladimir Putin.

Others claim extending New START is contrary to US national security interests.

We believe this line of thinking is both short-sighted and dangerous. In order to draw public (and hopefully Congressional) attention to the risks involved of not renewing, we present the following contributions from experts in arms control, international relations, and US-Russian affairs who believe the Trump administration ought to renew New START.

—Katrina vanden Hevel and James W. Carden for ACURA

Cynthia Lazaroff is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and founder of Women Transforming Our Nuclear Legacy. She is author of Dawn of a New Armageddon, a personal account of the Hawaii missile scare published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Hiroshima Day.

The Doomsday Clock is ticking closer to midnight.

New START, the last remaining arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia, the two countries which together possess 87% of the world’s estimated 12,241 nuclear weapons, is set to expire on February 5^th.

The stakes are high.

Abandoning New START’s nuclear warhead limits could lead to the unchecked expansion of U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals and accelerate the perilous arms race underway between the U.S., Russia and China. More nuclear weapons will not make us safer but instead increase the likelihood that they will one day be used, whether by accident, blunder, miscalculation, mistake or intention.

Wargaming exercises conducted by nuclear war planners and experts that simulate scenarios involving the U.S. and Russia that start with the use of one nuclear weapon repeatedly end up in an apocalyptic escalation to full-scale nuclear war. A global all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia would kill a minimum of 360 million people directly, and an estimated more than 5 billion people would die of hunger due to a global famine caused by nuclear winter.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry has sounded the alarm on the terrifying nuclear risks of our time: “Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger,” he told me in an interview in 2017, five years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “Because we don’t understand the dangers, we make no serious attempt to repair the hostility between the United States and Russia, and so we are allowing ourselves to sleepwalk into another catastrophe. We must wake up.”

It’s time to wake up.

To back us away from the brink, Trump should make a deal with Putin now to continue to abide by the New START Treaty limits on intercontinental-range nuclear weapons which cap each side’s deployed nuclear warheads at 1550.

At the same time, the two leaders should agree to abide by the treaty’s verification provisions, including data exchanges, notifications on movements of strategic forces and on-site inspections. They should also restart a dialogue and cooperation on nuclear risk reduction.

This would buy time. Time to end the threat of nuclear war before it’s too late.

The only way to eliminate the possibility of nuclear Armageddon wiping out humanity is to eliminate nuclear weapons.

This is why Trump and Putin should build on the momentum of extending the New START limits and take the bold step of opening negotiations on denuclearization which the U.S. President has suggested he wants.

Disarmament is the way forward. The goal of these negotiations should be the irreversible and verifiable reduction and elimination of all nuclear weapons. This would fulfill U.S. and Russia’s mutual obligation to negotiate a treaty for complete disarmament as mandated by Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Such action would demonstrate leadership by the presidents of the two largest nuclear possessor countries and lay the groundwork for engaging China and the other nuclear-armed states down the line. The U.S., Russia and all nuclear-armed states should join the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, now signed or ratified by the majority of the countries in the world.

Skeptics say this is delusional, naïve, all an impossible pipe dream. And who can blame them, given the high geopolitical tensions, the war raging in Ukraine, and the toxicity in U.S.-Russia relations.

But they are sleepwalking on the gravity of what’s at stake. If we are to survive our planet’s most dangerous time, it’s an existential imperative that Trump and Putin act now to preserve the world for future generations and take steps to end the threat of nuclear annihilation forever.

Cynthia Lazaroff is the Founder of Women Transforming Our Nuclear Legacy and NuclearWakeUpCall.Earth. She is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and the author of Dawn of a New Armageddon.

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

In 1962, US President John F. Kennedy stated in his State of the Union Address that “the world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution.” Kennedy was talking about all of humanity and not just a single person, and the threat of nuclear warfare as a world-ending event, rather than some singular act. Today, arguably more than ever, humanity needs to work ever harder to eliminate nuclear weapons that could destroy human civilization and possibly life itself.

In a world where nine states are nuclear-armed, and each of them could begin a chain of events that leads to nuclear annihilation, this task is rather complex. But the first step in the necessary journey is quite clear – the United States and Russia must come together to negotiate reductions in their arsenals, each of which on its own could cause hundreds of millions of deaths from explosions alone and billions more from ensuing environmental changes. With nearly 90% of the world’s arsenals and warheads numbering in the thousands, the United States and Russia have a responsibility to initiate the process of winding down the nuclear age.

Fifteen years ago, an important step in limiting both the number of warheads and the delivery vehicles on the part of the two countries was achieved with the New START Treaty. Its impending expiration is not only a threat to the prospect of disarmament, but could lead to a potential reversal in the reductions that the world had seen since the end of the Cold War. If the treaty is not extended and subsequently re-negotiated, we could return to a trajectory of arsenal increases, rather than decreases (or no changes) that have characterized the past four decades.

The United States government should accept the offer of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, to extend New START for another year, and should subsequently push for negotiations for an enhanced New START or a replacement treaty. There is not a moment to lose.

Paul R. Grenier is President of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy. He worked for many years as a simultaneous interpreter for the U.S. Defense and State Departments, serving as lead interpreter for US Central Command’s peacekeeping exercises with post-Soviet states.

It is hard to see how America’s interests are well served by convincing powerful states that we are not only untrustworthy, but also irrational and possibly insane.

In my 2024 essay, (The Need for Trust: Reflections on the Quincy Institute’s ‘The Diplomatic Path to a Secure Ukraine’), I noted that, thanks to deceptions of various sorts, the Russian state was losing any incentive to trust the United States. More recent actions taken by, or participated in, by the United States, show evidence of something worse than untrustworthiness. They suggest an American side that may have taken leave of its senses.

It is well known that, according to Russia’s published military doctrine, an attack on critically important Russian state or military facilities can activate a nuclear response. Despite this, the US/CIA has, as far as we know, actively supported Ukrainian attacks on Russian strategic assets (the attack on the Belaya air base in Irkutsk). Although the US side now (unconvincingly) denies it, it appears that we also supported Ukraine’s Dec. 29, 2025 assassination attempt on President Putin (the attack on his Valdai residence in Novgorod).

Today, to this already disastrous diplomatic atmosphere, ideological fans of American hegemony want to add the further insult of abandoning the New START treaty, the sole remaining vehicle of arms control between the two nuclear superpowers.

What arguments do they mobilize in support of taking this step?

Atlantic Council VP Matthew Kroenig tells us we should abandon New START, among other reasons, because the Russian and Chinese leaders are evil. “Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping,” Kroening writes, “care less about the well-being of their citizens and more about their own lives, their regimes, and their militaries.” Therefore, argues Kroenig, there should be no limits on how many missiles target Russian command and military centers. And yet Kroenig’s argument is plainly circular. Putin and Xi don’t care about their own people because they are evil. How do we know they are evil? Because they don’t care about their own people. Meanwhile, would it not be easy enough to demonstrate that, for at least the last century and right up until the present moment, U.S. leaders have shown remarkable indifference to human life? Should the American state therefore also be targeted from the outside with an unlimited number of warheads?

Kroenig argues that “Russia has violated almost every treaty it has signed.” To support this very questionable assertion, Kroening links to an American Academy of Arts and Sciences paper which, though it provides some not very impressive supporting evidence, also notes that it is the United States that has repeatedly withdrawn from key arms control agreements, as it did with Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002 and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in 2017 — even though, as this same article points out, “In both cases the counterparts—Russia and Iran—were complying with the agreements.” (emphasis mine)

What is striking about these arguments against preserving arms control is how weak they are. They begin with their conclusion. In the present case, that conclusion is that America’s nuclear weapons development must face no restrictions. Subsequent assertions are then measured not against their truth value, but against their utility for supporting this pre-determined conclusion.

As we may learn from G.K. Chesterton, rationality of this kind — which revolves around a closed circle of assumed ‘facts’, all the while divorced from the messiness and moral ambiguity of reality — is the ‘rationality’ of the insane.

Peter Kuznick is Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University and co-author, with Oliver Stone, of The Untold History of the United States.

The world has entered a dangerous new phase of superpower confrontation and potential war. On June 10 of this year, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a powerful two-and-a-half minute video that began with devastating scenes of atomic bomb-caused destruction in Hiroshima and warned that “we are…closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.” On October 20 of this year, Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Agency SVR, said, “The world is now experiencing the most fragile moment for international security since World War Two.”

We should heed their warnings. The progress we have made in reducing nuclear arsenals from the 1980s peak of 70,000 to under 13,000 today is being reversed and all nine nuclear powers are modernizing their arsenals to make them more accurate and more lethal. If New START is not extended, we will plunge headlong into a new Cold War-style nuclear arms race and very likely a period of global nuclear anarchy. There will be no binding legal restraints upon the size of nuclear arsenals for most nuclear powers, aside from the universally ignored Article 6 of the NPT, which should, but does not, constrain the five original nuclear powers.

The U.S. and Russia–the parties to New START–possess 87 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons and relations between the two nuclear behemoths blow hot and cold over Russia’s highly provoked but still unwise invasion of Ukraine and Trump’s unprovoked and unjustified bombings of Iran and Venezuela. Both countries are poised to dramatically increase the size of their nuclear arsenals when New START ends in less than a month. Russia has already introduced a series of terrifying new nuclear weapons and delivery systems—the Oreshniks, Burevestniks, and Poseidons. The U.S. is pouring $1.7 trillion into its own 30-year modernization with Trump demanding a 50 percent jump in military spending in the new budget.

Extending New START while negotiating an expanded new treaty is necessary but not sufficient in light of recent developments. On August 20, 2024, New York Times’ David Sanger reported that the U.S. is planning to simultaneously fight a nuclear war against Russia, China, and North Korea. That same day, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists carried an even more alarming article by Jack O’Doherty explaining that U.S. nuclear planners were divided between those who still believed in deterrence theory based on the threat of mutually assured destruction and those who believed technological advances made feasible a preemptive strike knocking out the other side’s retaliatory capability, including, for the first time, its nuclear-armed submarines.

Added to this lunacy is the danger of nuclear proliferation. 73 percent of South Koreans say they want their country to develop its own nuclear weapons. In November, Foreign Policy published an article arguing that Japan should develop its own nuclear weapons. Five days earlier, Foreign Affairs wrote that Japan, Germany, and Canada should do so. Zelensky has called for Ukraine to have nuclear weapons. Other countries are itching to get their hands on them as well, especially in response to recent attacks that make countries feel the only way to protect against what happened in Ukraine, Iran, or Venezuela is to have nuclear weapons.

Fears of war between the U.S./NATO and Russia or China keep growing. In 2023, Gen. Mike Minihan predicted war with China in 2025. Others say 2027. In November, Admiral Thomas Buchanan described U.S. plans to win a three-front nuclear war and keep enough weapons in reserve to maintain U.S. hegemony. This should be a wakeup call if one is still needed. Extending the New START Treaty in such volatile and precarious times is an absolutely necessary first step if we want our species to continue, but we must do much more and quickly if we want to avert the risk of nuclear war and annihilation.

Emma Claire Foley is Campaign Director of Defuse Nuclear War at RootsAction.

U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons are already more than capable of destroying civilization as we know it. Mainstream policy discourse around the U.S. nuclear arsenal has largely been captured by a basic assumption that more nuclear weapons are better, an approach that relies on unrealistic assumptions of control, restraint, and perfect knowledge in a scenario where nuclear weapons are used.

Many such analyses assume that political problems can be effectively addressed with military solutions, and that diplomacy is somehow a weakness. It favors instead keeping the United States on the brink of conflict with Russia and China as the only way to prevent conflict from occurring.

And, as the fate of the nuclear sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) program suggests, it’s very possible for the nuclear weapons policymaking process to produce weapons that lack a clear strategic purpose in anyone’s mind. Without New START, there will be one fewer check on the many factors that drive the continued development of U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals.

Criticism of the treaty frequently focuses on the need instead for arms control negotiations including the U.S., China, and Russia. These three countries should indeed take steps toward trilateral arms-control negotiations. Yet such negotiations would require tremendous work as well as policy sacrifices from the United States that are not forthcoming. Extending the treaty is a relatively easy, mutually beneficial step well within the Trump administration’s demonstrated capabilities that would help maintain a marginally safer status quo than what would exist without the treaty.

Those who advocate allowing the treaty to lapse and adopting still more aggressive nuclear weapons policies fatally underestimate the risk inherent to possessing nuclear weapons and keeping them ready to use. The road to a more peaceful order is walked with concrete steps toward limiting the potential for conflict, not endlessly pursuing global American military dominance.

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January 28, 2026
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.

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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.

[/fusion_text][fusion_button link=”https://usrussiaaccord.org/acura-exclusive-are-the-russians-coming-by-peter-kuznick-and-ivana-nikolic-hughes/” 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 ACURA HERE[/fusion_button][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

January 16, 2026
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.

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December 15, 2025
Pope Leo XIV Must Follow in Francis’ Footsteps and Stand up for the Environment and Against Nuclear Weapons

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The following article was co-authored by Christian Ciobanu and Ivana Nikolić Hughes, originally published in Common Dreams on May 9, 2025.

There is much that Pope Leo XIV can do to advance a better world. Following Francis, he has big shoes to fill.

09 May 2025 – Pope Leo XIV has been elected as the new leader of the Catholic Church. The new Pope will have big shoes to fill. The sheer humanity of Pope Francis—who embraced the poor and downtrodden, comforted the sick, and worked tirelessly to help the victims of wars, from Gaza to Sudan, from Ukraine to the Democratic Republic of the Congo—will be hard to match. By all accounts, Pope Leo XIV will find his own way and his own voice as the new pontiff. At this critical moment, he must also follow in his predecessor’s footsteps to protect our planet from destructive human activities, including the launch of nuclear war.

Pope Francis left a mark on the Church and the world in a way that previous papacies may not have, and not only for the ease of communication and the endless access to his writings, photos, and videos. Images of the Pope embracing Vinicio Riva, who was severely ill with a rare genetic skin condition, in 2013, or crossing St. Peter’s Square alone in the midst of the pandemic in 2020, were shared all across the globe. They became symbols of unconditional love, especially for those least fortunate, and of our joint pain amidst the worldwide upheaval wrought by COVID-19.

War to Pope Francis was always a crime against humanity, a violation of our dignity, and a failure of diplomacy.

His Holiness made the news in other ways. He furthered the conversations about the role of women in the church, LGBTQ belonging, priest celibacy, and more. Caught between those who pushed him to do more on these issues and those who scolded him for even raising them, the pontiff stuck to unity in the church, while keeping the conversations going, rather than shutting them down. He was unapologetic about deploring war, wherever it had taken its ugly roots, and eager to build bridges where connections were tenuous, including between the U.S. and Cuba. He spoke for humanity and for peace, regardless of prevailing narratives, popularity, or politics. War to Pope Francis was always a crime against humanity, a violation of our dignity, and a failure of diplomacy.

Perhaps less widely covered, but arguably with furthest reaching impact, were his stances on the environment and nuclear disarmament. They should be a part of his enduring legacy and must be positions that Pope Leo XIV embraces wholeheartedly. There are many reasons why we humans need to protect the environment and why we need to eliminate nuclear weapons. They range from security to economy to human health. But the moral reasoning is strong, and Pope Francis was a superb messenger of this critical argument. His message must live on and be embraced most forcefully not just by the new pontiff, but also other interfaith leaders.

In his 2015 Encyclical Laudato Si, Pope Francis called for universal responsibility of all members of the human family to care for one another, the Earth and all creatures on it. Covering topics such as pollution, climate change, the issue of water, and the loss of biodiversity, Pope Francis seamlessly alternated between scientific evidence and ethical reasoning. He highlighted the human impact on the environment and other Earth inhabitants from the emissions of greenhouse gases that arise primarily from burning of fossil fuels, and that have warmed the globe by more than one degree Celsius over the past several decades. Speaking of the loss of species and the human role in the destruction of their ecosystems, such as forests and woodlands, the Pope wrote, “Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which our children will never see, because they have been lost forever. The great majority become extinct for reasons related to human activity. Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence, nor convey their message to us. We have no such right.” Here was not just an argument based on self-preservation, ecosystem services provided to humans by intact nature, or dependence of future discoveries on conservation of existing ecosystems. Here was an argument that reached into the very essence of what it means to be human.

Francis understood that it’s not enough to just talk about these topics, but that action was sorely needed, from activities of well-meaning individuals to negotiations in the halls of the United Nations, and everywhere in between.

Pope Francis condemned nuclear weapons—even their existence, thereby introducing an urgent moral argument into the geopolitical considerations of all states, and most especially those that retain or rely on nuclear weapons for so-called security. He challenged the widespread notion that nuclear weapons keep us safe, arguing instead that the mere possession of these uniquely dangerous arms is immoral. He stated so in a Vatican conference in 2017, and then again in 2019, while visiting Hiroshima. He was a staunch supporter of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), a UN treaty that aims to eliminate all nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. In fact, Holy See was the first States Party to the treaty, having signed and ratified it on September 20, 2017, the very first day that the TPNW was opened for signatures. In his message to the President of the First Meeting of States Parties, in June of 2022, Pope Francis stated that “a world free of nuclear weapons is both necessary and possible,” furthermore referring to existing disarmament treaties as “moral commitments.” He was supportive of not only the treaty’s elimination clauses, but also of its humanitarian provisions for victim assistance and environmental remediation. “Here my thoughts go to the Hibakusha, the survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to all the victims of nuclear arms testing,” the Pope emphasized, putting on display his seemingly boundless empathy.

Of course, Pope Francis did not bring these topics to the Catholic Church. From other Popes, to major Catholic thinkers, to dedicated clergy, Church leaders and followers have a long history of contributing to discourse on existential threats to planetary life, including from nuclear weapons. But the Pope set these topics ablaze during his time at the helm of the Catholic Church. On nuclear weapons, he did not equivocate or fall under the false spell of nuclear deterrence. He saw nuclear weapons for what they are, and he told us so in no uncertain terms, thus changing the Church’s official stance on nuclear weapons. Francis understood that it’s not enough to just talk about these topics, but that action was sorely needed, from activities of well-meaning individuals to negotiations in the halls of the United Nations, and everywhere in between.

There is much that Pope Leo XIV can do to advance a better world. But on the environment and nuclear weapons, following the path that Pope Francis blazed will be essential. Other religious and spiritual leaders should join him–as should we all.

Christian Ciobanu is the director of Policy and Advocacy at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Coordinator of Reverse the Trend, and a TPNW adviser to the Republic of Kiribati.

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

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May 12, 2025
How Trump Can Turn Back the Doomsday Clock

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The following article was co-authored by Ivana Nikolić Hughes and Peter Kuznick, originally published in Transcend Media Service on February 3, 2025.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has reset the minute hand on the Doomsday Clock 26 times since its debut in 1947, most recently in 2025 when it moved from 90 seconds to 89 seconds to midnight.

30 Jan 2025 – The Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has just announced its latest Doomsday Clock reading. In 2023, following nearly a year of the war in Ukraine, the clock reached 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it had ever been to the hypothesized nuclear Armageddon. This reading was maintained in 2024, as the Ukraine war marched towards a second anniversary and the war in Gaza dominated our screens and attention. This year, the Board moved the clock’s hands one second closer to midnight. One could argue that a larger jump would have been warranted. Insistent militarization, modernization, and expansion of nuclear arsenals loom in the background, while the devastating consequences of climate change, including most recently in southern California, remind us that climate change is here to stay and associated risks are growing. Humanity is facing dire threats.

Since the clock’s birth in 1947, it has become a widely recognized symbol of humanity’s ability to self-destruct. Fourteen Presidents, seven Democrats and seven Republicans, have led the US during this time. Five presided over a turn of the clock’s hands away from midnight: four Republicans (Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Sr.) and only one Democrat (Kennedy). The hands of the clock have moved closer to midnight by a staggering 19 minutes and ten seconds during Democratic administrations, while Republican administrations have overseen a movement of the clock’s hands away from midnight by a substantial 13 minutes and 39 seconds. If each US President approached their time in office as a race against the Doomsday Clock, rather than a race to US hegemony, Americans and the world would be far safer. President Trump has inherited a country and civilization that is closest to irreversible self-destruction, making a fundamental course reversal more important than ever. The following three objectives would ensure that President Trump can do exactly that.

End the Wars. The first and most important tasks for President Trump are to end the war in Ukraine, stabilize the Middle East by negotiating a genuine two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, and embrace China as a competitor rather than an adversary, re-committing to the one-China policy and welcoming a genuine economic rivalry. Preventing further deaths and destruction, as well as potential escalation with unimaginable consequences if any of these wars were to turn nuclear, should be at the top of Trump’s agenda. Each of these instances of peace-making would likely shave a couple of minutes from the Doomsday Clock, not to mention earn Trump a shot at the Nobel Peace Prize.

Return to the Nuclear Weapons Negotiating Table. Once the Ukraine war is in the back mirror, Trump needs to return to the negotiating table with Russia on nuclear weapons. The two countries have the world’s largest nuclear arsenals that threaten to not just kill hundreds of millions of people throughout the northern hemisphere, but to impact global climate and food supplies in a catastrophic manner through the effects of nuclear winter. The bilateral meetings will need to add China either from the onset or once progress has been made on the reduction of the two largest arsenals. There will also be a moment to bring in the United Kingdom and France, who are the remaining two nuclear weapon states according to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Finally, the four states that are outside of the NPT (India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan) will need to be brought in for bilateral and multilateral negotiations that address their specific reasons for having nuclear weapons, e.g. the status of Kashmir in the case of India and Pakistan. Ultimately, all nine nuclear armed states will need to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and give up their arsenals, just as most of them have done with other weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological weapons. Trump has the power to start this process.

Take Forceful Action on Global Warming. The world is burning, literally and figuratively. Temperatures have risen across the globe due to greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity. This is a statement of fact, supported by scientific understanding acquired and data collected over many decades. The extraordinary period of global warming has been accompanied by other planetary impacts, including sea level rise, widespread wildfires, more dangerous storms, and intensified dry and wet weather extremes. Just in the last year, parts of North Carolina were devastated by Hurricane Helene, while New York experienced a drought in November, with wildfires popping up in and around the city for days. No place is safe and “drill, baby, drill” will only make matters worse. President Trump needs to work with Congress on national legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in every way possible, work with the UN and the international community to support green economy transformations abroad, and with both to adapt to changes already afoot. He has next to him a man who has led the revolution in electrifying transport. More ingenuity, creativity, and government support will be needed to ensure that we can preserve a livable planet for generations to come. Trump should not shrug this problem away, nor shy away from working with other countries to address it.

The likelihood of Trump acting on this agenda is small but not zero. To his credit, the US President warned in 2023, “We have never been closer to World War III than we are today under Joe Biden. A global conflict between nuclear-armed powers would mean death and destruction on a scale unmatched in human history. It would be nuclear Armageddon. NOTHING is more important than avoiding that nightmare. We will avoid it. But we need new leadership.” He reiterated this message in his talk last week to the Davos World Economic Forum, explaining, “Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about today, because you don’t want to hear it. So, we want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible.” Putin quickly responded that he is open to new arms control talks as well as to the extension of the New START Treaty, the last remaining arms control treaty, which is set to expire in a little more than a year. But Trump’s closest advisors have been singing a different tune. Echoing Project 2025, some have been pressuring Trump to increase the funding for nuclear weapons and expand the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal after years of cuts. There is even talk about restarting nuclear testing and developing new types of nuclear weapons.

Dangerously loose talk has also been coming from outside the new administration. Recently, Rear Admiral Thomas Buchanan, director of planning and policy for the U.S. Strategic Command, said that if a nuclear exchange were necessary, “we want to do it in terms that are most acceptable to the United States” and to make sure we retain sufficient capacity to deter potential adversaries.

Days ago, former Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who is currently the secretary of Putin’s Security Council, observed, “Against the backdrop of increasing conflict and aggravation of geopolitical rivalry in the world, the risks of a violent clash between major states, including with the participation of nuclear powers, are growing.”

The road ahead is rocky, unclear, and extremely dangerous. There is much that President Trump can do to make the country and the world better off, from building a fair and prosperous economy, to addressing threats from AI and pandemics, to investing in education, science, technology, and infrastructure, to treating undocumented migrants with the compassion they deserve. But the path to moving the Doomsday Clock’s hands is clear. We must not reach midnight because, despite the fanciful musings of Admiral Buchanan, there may be no one around to deter America’s then non-existent adversaries.

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 a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University.

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February 4, 2025
The Sanctification of Jimmy Carter is a Disservice to his Legacy

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The following article was co-authored by Ivana Nikolić Hughes and Peter Kuznick, originally published in American Committee for US-Russia Accord (ACURA) on January 16, 2025.

“Carter’s 42-year post-presidency was a different story, that of a towering moral presence in his years out of office—a man who richly deserved the Nobel Peace Prize he received in 2002.”

In 2019, Jimmy Carter shared his thoughts on China with the congregants at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia. “Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody?” Carter asked. “None. And we have stayed at war.” The U.S., he calculated, had enjoyed a paltry 16 years of peace in its 242-year history, making it “the most warlike nation in the history of the world,” repeatedly trying to force others to “adopt our American principles.” “How many miles of high-speed railroad do we have in this country?” he asked rhetorically, noting that China had built some 18,000 miles of high-speed rail while the U.S. had “wasted, I think, $3 trillion” on military spending.

“The difference,” Carter told the congregation, “is if you take $3 trillion and put it in American infrastructure you’d probably have $2 trillion left over. We’d have high-speed railroad. We’d have bridges that aren’t collapsing, we’d have roads that are maintained properly. Our education system would be as good as that of say South Korea or Hong Kong.” According to the Costs of War Project at Brown, the accurate figure for the amount of money the U.S. has spent on its post-9/11 wars is closer to $8 trillion.

Jimmy Carter is deservedly being honored as he is being laid to rest for his truthfulness and integrity, traits especially appreciated given that he took office in 1977 following years of mendacity surrounding the U.S. invasion of Vietnam and Watergate, and the revelations of wrongdoing exposed in the extraordinary Church Committee hearings. But the Carter of the last couple of years of his presidency bore little resemblance to the man who challenged American hubris in his 2019 comments on China or the mythic image being etched into Americans’ memory in the days since his passing.

Carter is being remembered as a humble Georgia peanut farmer who rose to the governorship and then the presidency on the strength of his character and his reputation as an enlightened pro-Civil Rights southern governor. Billboards have popped up around the country with his image and the word “Character” with the letters C-a-r-t-e-r highlighted.

Most obituaries, however, fail to mention that his rise to the highest office also came by way of nominating super hawk and neocon favorite Henry “Scoop” Jackson, “the senator from Boeing,” for president at the 1972 Democratic Convention. Soon after, Carter joined the Trilateral Commission, founded by David Rockefeller with the purpose to bolster international capitalism. The Commission’s Executive Director Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Columbia professor and son of a Polish diplomat, recognized Carter’s potential and took him under his wing, eventually serving as his foreign policy advisor and speechwriter during the 1976 campaign. Carter ran as an outsider, but quickly appointed 26 fellow Trilateralists to his new administration, including staunch anti-communist Brzezinski as National Security Advisor, fair-minded Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State, and liberal Atlanta mayor Andrew Young as UN Representative.

Despite being surrounded by many conservative advisors, Carter’s initial priorities were fairly progressive. He sought to cut defense spending and decried the nuclear hypocrisy involved in the U.S. asking other countries “to forgo nuclear weapons” while the U.S. kept building them. In his inaugural address, he pledged not only “to limit the world’s armaments” but to “move this year toward the ultimate goal—the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this Earth.” He even spoke truthfully about Vietnam, promising never to repeat the “false statements and sometimes outright lies” his predecessors had used to deceive Americans about the war.

His presidency got off to a strong start. On his first full day in office, he unconditionally pardoned hundreds of thousands of young Americans who had evaded the draft during the Vietnam War. On March 15 of that year, he signed a presidential directive instructing administration officials “that we should attempt to achieve normalization of our relations with Cuba” and later that year on September 1, the two countries each opened an interest section in the other’s capital. Six days later, Carter signed the Panama Canal Treaty, gradually turning the canal back to Panama after seven decades of U.S. control. Between 1977 and 1979, he slashed military aid from $210 million to $54 million, cutting off some of the most violent and repressive governments in the Southern Cone and Central America. In 1978, he achieved his most memorable foreign policy success in negotiating the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. In December of that year, Carter announced that the U.S. would establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China and end them with Taiwan. Even as late as 1979, Paul Warnke, Carter’s choice to head the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, secured passage of the SALT II Treaty with the Soviet Union. On the domestic front, he nominated more women and members of minority groups to the federal judiciary than all his predecessors combined. He promoted conservation. He established the Departments of Energy and Education. When he left office, the national debt stood below $1 trillion. That number would triple under Reagan and has now skyrocketed to $36 trillion.

But there was another, more troubling, side to the Carter presidency, largely engineered by Brzezinski, who aimed to infect Carter with his own hatred of Soviet communism. He insisted, from day one, on giving the President’s daily briefings by himself with no one else present and wrote in his memoirs that he was soon gratified to hear his own words coming out of Carter’s mouth. Brzezinski bragged about being “the first Pole in 200 years in a position to really stick it to the Russians” and urged Carter to use the Soviet Union’s record on human rights to discredit it on the world stage, even though the Soviets had made significant progress in the preceding two decades. Brzezinski wrote to Carter that a president must be “feared” and urged him “to pick some controversial subject on which you will deliberately choose to act with a degree of anger, even roughness, designed to have a shock effect.” Carter chose to denounce Soviet behavior in Africa, leading Brzezinski, an outspoken foe of any arms control agreement with the Soviets, to exult on several occasions that “SALT lies buried in the sands of the Ogaden.”

There was more. He supported repressive regimes in Iran and El Salvador and the genocidal Pol Pot government in Cambodia, and reactionary movements like the Contras in Nicaragua, governments that openly trampled on the human rights that Carter properly extolled. Carter made serious, deadly, and dangerous foreign policy decisions, repeatedly favoring Brzezinski’s hawkishness to Vance’s diplomacy. The Carters spent New Year’s Eve 1977 at an obscenely lavish dinner for 400 guests in Tehran where Carter proclaimed his loyalty to the Shah, who had come to power in a 1953 CIA-run coup that toppled the extremely popular, democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh, a former Time Man of the Year who the U.S. ambassador reported had the “backing of 95 to 98 percent of the people.” “There is no leader,” Carter toasted the Shah at the New Year celebration, “with whom I have a deeper sense of personal gratitude and personal friendship.” Little more than a year later, Islamic revolutionaries overthrew the Shah, whom Carter then welcomed into the United States under pressure from Brzezinski, Rockefeller, and Henry Kissinger. Outraged Iranian students stormed the American Embassy and seized more than 50 hostages they held for 444 days, putting a final nail in the coffin of the Carter Presidency, in addition to the almost 15 percent inflation resulting from Federal Reserve head Paul Volcker’s extreme measures to curb inflation. In El Salvador, following the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, left-wing insurgents were close to overthrowing the government and seizing power, but Carter restored military aid to the government, opening the door for much worse cruelty enabled by Ronald Reagan.

However, the most appalling and outrageous betrayal of decency occurred in Afghanistan where Brzezinski prevailed upon Carter to to unleash an insurgency against the pro-Soviet government that came into power following a coup in 1978. Afghanistan was one of the world’s poorest countries where life expectancy stood at 40 years and only one tenth of the population was literate. Recognizing this, the new Soviet-friendly rulers attempted to reform the backward nation, instituting programs for women’s education, land reform, and industrialization that angered the Muslim zealots or mujahideen. Initially loathe to arm and train these fanatics, who murdered teachers found to educate women, sometimes skinning them alive, Carter finally gave in to Brzezinski, who was intent on giving the Soviets “their own Vietnam.” On July 3, 1979, Brzezinski wrote a note to Carter predicting that the new U.S. policy of aiding the mujahideen would “induce a Soviet military intervention.”

The ploy worked. On Christmas Eve, almost six months after U.S. aid began, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev sent in over 100,000 Soviet troops to restore order. Though the U.S. had deliberately provoked the invasion and American leaders secretly celebrated, Carter publicly called it “the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.” Within weeks, he announced the Carter Doctrine, threatening the Soviets with war if they intervened in the Gulf region. In case Carter’s warning wasn’t entirely clear, the following month, Assistant Secretary of State William Dyess reiterated the threat, declaring, “The Soviets know that this terrible weapon has been dropped on human beings twice in history and it was an American president who dropped it both times.” In actions that warmed the cold cockles of Brzezinski’s heart, Carter withdrew the U.S. Ambassador from Moscow, took SALT II off the table, pulled the U.S. team out of the upcoming Moscow Olympics, and deployed Secretary of Defense Harold Brown to Beijing to discuss establishing military ties. U.S. and Saudi money flowed into Pakistan to support the insurgents, which led, under Reagan, to the arming, funding, and training of the zealots who attacked the United States on 9/11.

Jimmy Carter came to office promising to promote human rights and democracy and cut military spending. He failed on all fronts. Military spending shot up from $115 billion in his first budget to nearly $180 billion in his final one. The Doomsday Clock by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was at nine minutes to midnight when he entered office in 1977 and at four minutes to midnight when he left in January 1981. As Anne Cahn detailed in her book Killing Détente, “By the 1980 presidential election, the choice in foreign and defense policy was between that of the Carter administration, which favored the MX missile, the Trident submarine, a Rapid Deployment Force, a ‘stealth’ bomber, cruise missiles, counterforce targeting leading to a first-strike capability, and a 5 percent increase in defense spending, and that of the Republicans under Ronald Reagan, who favored all of these plus the neutron bomb, antiballistic missiles, the B-1 bomber, civil defense, and an 8 percent increase in defense spending.” Carter opened the door to the even more harrowing excesses and brutality of the subsequent Reagan administration.

Carter’s 42-year post-presidency was a different story, that of a towering moral presence in his years out of office—a man who richly deserved the Nobel Peace Prize he received in 2002. The Carter Center, which he and Rosalynn founded in 1982, advances international peace, democracy, human rights, and understanding. Carter worked to ease conflicts around the globe, including on the Korean Peninsula, and in Darfur, Syria, Ukraine, and Palestine. He championed Palestinian rights and a two-state solution, boldly condemning egregious abuses in the Israeli-occupied territories in his 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

Papering over the errors, betrayals, hypocrisies, and reversals of the Carter Presidency, as much of the posthumous commentary has done, does not serve his legacy or advance the causes he so passionately espoused. If we fail to comprehend how the bipartisan U.S. foreign policy establishment, which Eisenhower labeled the military-industrial complex and Obama-advisor Ben Rhodes called the “blob,” transformed a well-meaning young president, committed to creating a more just and peaceful world, into a hardline Cold Warrior who betrayed many of his principles, we lose an opportunity to learn from Jimmy Carter’s errors and advance the dream that drove him to become the moral force we rightly remember him as.

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 a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University.

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January 17, 2025