WMD Archive

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bellicose speech yesterday, in which he announced that Russia had recognized the independence of two separatist regions of Ukraine and would deploy military forces there as “peacekeepers,” suggests that after months of military posturing and diplomacy, a full-scale invasion may well be at hand. But while it is still impossible to know for sure how the crisis will play out, one consequence of it is already certain: There is no more use in dancing around reality using terms like “strategic competition” or “great power tensions” to describe relations between the West and Russia. We are in […]

On Christmas Eve in 2002, I was suddenly dispatched from my base in Tokyo, where I was the New York Times bureau chief at the time, to Seoul, the capital of South Korea, to cover reports that North Korea was about to reactivate a nuclear reactor that had previously been taken out of service as a result of painstaking negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang. The United States suspected that if operations resumed at the reactor, which had supposedly been built for research purposes, the North Korean government would soon begin reprocessing its spent nuclear fuel to build up a supply […]

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s 10th Review Conference has been postponed repeatedly due to the coronavirus pandemic, perhaps a symbol of the degree to which global efforts to curb the proliferation of nuclear weapons and reduce global stockpiles have stalled in recent years. North Korea continues to expand its nuclear capabilities, and the U.S., China and Russia are all investing heavily in modernizing their arsenals. And efforts to bring Iran back into compliance with the nonproliferation regime have been set back by the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the multilateral deal known as the JCPOA, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that […]