Peace and Security
Smaller Arsenals Beat Bigger Ones
After years of leaving his nuclear weapons policy on the back burner, President Barack Obama called last month for major reductions in U.S. and Russian strategic stockpiles. Obama made these remarks outside Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, nine days and 50 years after...
Syrian Dead End
We're at it again. After months of commendable restraint, President Barack Obama has decided to send weapons to the besieged Syrian rebels. This is either a bid to overthrow a friend of Iran or a ploy to capture Syria's oil. Or both. Sound familiar? It should. Back in...
Washington Goes AWOL
Grave New World
On the web, Or on the phone, One thing's sure: You're not alone. In my own malcontent civic organization, Veterans For Peace, we've always known we were being watched. We are, after all, against war. And we're impolite enough about it to hold up signs. We've been...
Fantasy Budgeting Won’t Make Us Safer
The watchword in Washington has been "cut" for some time. But the House of Representatives headed in the opposite direction when it adopted its version of the National Defense Authorization bill. The bill authorizes $552 billion in military spending next year. That's...
Locking Up Our Future
Finally, there's a sign that our national passion for locking up more and more Americans could be subsiding. Our "correctional population" is gradually shrinking after decades of robust growth. We had 2.9 million people behind bars in 2011, down from 3.2 million in...
The War on Terror Has Not Made Us Safer
Two days after the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in front of my institute's office around the corner from the White House. We had just been evacuated again. The police patrolling the streets didn't have a clue what was going on. So we sat on...
A Radioactive Waste of Money
Can a single example illustrate why the federal budget is so hard to get under control? A somewhat obscure nuclear processing plant on the Savannah River in South Carolina might do the trick. The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, known by the awkward acronym MOX,...
Egging On North Korea
As our dust-up with North Korea stumbles inexorably onward, the U.S. media is tearing its hair out over how any sovereign nation could possibly act so irrationally. Well, how about looking in the mirror? North Korea's policies and supreme leader may seem kooky, but...
Charting a New Course on Illegal Drugs
As Manuel, a Colombian farmer, showed me his peppercorn crops ravaged by the defoliant sprayed in a futile effort to kill his neighbor's drug crops, he explained why the Drug War could never be won. No matter how much money or chemicals drug warriors threw at...
