The June 16 Geneva Summit produced little mention of arms control, and that is probably a positive sign. Arms control agreements, at least good ones, do not appear overnight.

The Biden-Putin summit in Geneva did not disappoint the very low expectations set out for it. To move beyond symbolism and signaling, however, the Biden-Putin proclamation has to be translated into practical progress.

A focus on traditional threats and national security should give way to a greater focus on emerging threats and cooperative global security.

For the first time in the 70-year history of the Doomsday Clock, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board has moved the hands of the iconic clock 30 seconds closer to midnight. Read the Science and Security Board’s 2017 Doomsday Clock Statement. Read the press release. Watch the videotaped Doomsday Clock Announcement. … Continued

North Korea recently tested a small ballistic missile that can carry a nuclear warhead. These smaller, solid-fuel missiles matter because—tipped with nuclear warheads or chemical or biological weapons—they threaten South Korea as well as US troops and American citizens in the South.

The Bulletin’s writer’s guidelines stress that “our job is to tell a story.” My job as the publication’s first multimedia editor is to enhance our story-telling toolkit and develop new platforms for our esteemed coverage of existential threats like nuclear weapons and climate change. In 2018 we explored new ways to bring out the facts, science, and meaning … Continued

In the end, a peaceful resolution to the North Korean nuclear situation will involve direct negotiations and gestures of good faith by both sides, such as a reduction or a halt of military exercises by the United States, South Korea, and Japan, and a reciprocal moratorium on nuclear weapon and ballistic missile testing by the DPRK. Such steps will generate a great deal of opposition from US defense officials who believe that military might and sanctions are the only forms of leverage that will work against the North Korean regime. But the Agreed Framework and its collapse provide an important lesson about the pitfalls of the pursuit of regime change.

Young people drive social movements. Nuclear disarmament advocates should more aggressively recruit help from Gen Z.

Even if North Korea is now capable of fabricating a relatively light-weight, “miniaturized” atomic bomb that can survive the extreme reentry environments of long-range rocket delivery, it will, with certainty, not be able to deliver such an atomic bomb to the lower 48 states of the United States with the rocket tested on July 3 and July 28.

Despite its initial realpolitik appeal, the killing of Iran’s nuclear scientist will likely damage US interests in four ways.

When formulating its nuclear energy policy, the new Obama administration will have to face the reality that advances in technology, combined with politics and ideology, have made it much harder to prevent nuclear energy use from contributing to the spread of the Bomb. To avoid a future Hobbesian nuclear jungle, the United States and other world governments will need to agree on tougher nuclear controls.

It is a relief to me as a bench scientist, but a positive surprise to me as a biodefense professional, that all of the discussants in this roundtable argued in favor of publicly available pathogen sequences. This is an indication of the closing gap in thinking between life scientists and policy experts. In the past, … Continued

A survey of books on the catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, three years after the earthquake and tsunami known collectively as 3/11.

A short conversation with Werner Herzog—a renowned filmmaker with a penchant for the offbeat—about his aims in making the documentary Meeting Gorbachev.

There actually were some things to celebrate in the past year.

Thanks to recent developments in Syria and Iran, there has never been a better opportunity to eliminate chemical weapons from the Middle East.

Nuclear programs are often overlooked when it comes to budget reductions because many officials and analysts believe that those programs consume only a small part of the overall military budget. A closer analysis demonstrates that this is not the case.