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Heeding the warning of bioterrorism
The Hill
by Barry Kellman
January 25, 2010

The warning is clear:  Bioterrorism is a serious danger to the United States, says the Report Card Grading Government on Protecting the United States, released Tuesday by the congressionally-mandated commission charged with assessing threats of weapons of mass destruction.  We are unprepared for a catastrophic bio-attack, and the rest of the world is in far worse shape.

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Biological weapons hazards
LA Times
LTE by Barry Kellman
December 16, 2009

Characterizing the Obama administration's decision to not support international monitoring of the Biological Weapons Convention as "ducking the issue" manifests a serious misunderstanding of how to reduce biological weapons threats.

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Stepping into the Biopolicy Breach
The Hill
by Barry Kellman, BSG Member
December 15, 2009

The Commission on Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism identified two existential threats: nuclear and biological weapons. Bioweapons are easier to make and could be used repeatedly to inflict widespread terror and death. There is a 50-50 chance of a bio-attack against the U.S. by 2013.

Last week, at the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) Meeting in Geneva, Under Secretary of State Ellen Tauscher announced President Barack Obama’s strategy for countering biothreats. By announcing at this forum, the administration highlights the imperative of global cooperation to address biothreats and signals an implicit commitment to the centrality of the BWC in this domain.

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Arms Control Has Been Bipartisan
Wall Street Journal
LTE by Ambassador Thomas Graham, Jr.

In "Why Democrats Fail at Arms Control" (op-ed, Sept. 24), Stephen Rademaker argues that Democratic presidents have failed with Russia on strategic arms control agreements because of "their excessive enthusiasm and ambition." I disagree. In fact, at least until 2001, the conduct of the strategic arms control process in the U.S. was remarkably bipartisan.

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One Small Step for the Council, One Giant Leap for Humankind
Huffington Post
by Jonathan Granoff and Rhianna Tyson Kreger

President Obama's historic Security Council summit on nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation should be seen for what it is: an extremely important step towards a safer, saner, more secure planet.

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Nuclear Testing and Proliferation: An Inextricable Connection
Disarmament Diplomacy
by Thomas Graham, J.r and David Hafemeister

President Obama's call in Prague to complete the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) was widely praised on the global stage. But what will be entailed for the United States to ratify the CTBT and reinvigorate international efforts to secure the remaining signatures and ratifications so that the Treaty can at last enter into force?

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Nuclear Weapons Free: Let's Support President Obama
Huffington Post
by GSI President Jonathan Granoff
August 27, 2009

Nuclear weapons are abhorrent in anyone's hands.

Imagine if the Biological Weapons Convention said that polio and small pox as weapons are banned universally but the plague as a weapon can be brandished and held at the ready by nine countries because these special countries are uniquely moral, restrained, trustworthy, and responsible.

Such is the incoherence in which the world is living under the sword of nuclear annihilation.

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Mr. Obama and Nuclear Weapons
Washington Post
Letter to the Editor
Thomas Graham, Jr.

April 13, 2009

Anne Applebaum claimed that worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons was President Obama's idea ["Yes, We Can . . . Disarm?" op-ed, April 7]. But President Ronald Reagan called for the elimination of "all nuclear weapons," which he denounced as "totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization."

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North Korea and Six Party Talks: Resolving a Nuclear Crisis
by Kevin Davis
Disarmament Times
Fall 2008, Vol. 31, No.3

August 11 was the day many expected North Korea to be removed from the United States' list of state sponsors of terrorism as a result of Pyongyang's progress towards dismantling its nulear program. The day, however, came and passed with the United States taking no action, and some observers grumbled that the on-again, off-again Six Party Talks, which aim at resolving the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula, had once again come to a stand still. But even given this most recent hurdle, these misgivings are premature. Indeed, if one looks back at the talks' progress thus far, patience and guarded optimism should be the rule of the day.

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One Way to Save the Relationship
The St. Petersburg Times
Op-ed by Rose Gottemoeller
August 29, 2008

For anyone who cares deeply about U.S.-Russian relations, events in Georgia are as great a tragedy as they are for the inhabitants of the region — the Ossetians, Abkhaz, Georgians and Russians alike. Against the backdrop of this war, the agenda for cooperation with Russia is quickly being thrown into doubt.

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Nuclear Weapons: What Obama actually said on deterrence
The Washington Times
by John Hollum
August 1, 2008

...The central element of Mr. Obama's approach to nuclear weapons is his steady focus on the emerging security threat that terrorists, not susceptible to deterrence, will acquire a nuclear weapon. Beginning from his first days in the Senate, he concentrated on bipartisan efforts with Sen. Richard Lugar to lock up loose nuclear materials. In October, he made answering the nuclear terrorism danger a centerpiece of his campaign, and laid out further steps to thwart terrorists' efforts to acquire the highly enriched uranium and plutonium they could use to build a bomb.

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The Test of Leadership
The Washington Times
July 9, 2008
by James Goodby

Much has been written about what the next president's priorities should be. Iraq? Health care? The environment? The economy? Seldom mentioned is a danger many Americans have chosen to forget - the atom bomb. The damage done to one of the world's great cities by just one atom bomb, not to mention the thousand times more powerful hydrogen bomb, would eclipse any other imminent danger faced by humanity.

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The Misperception Trap
International Herald Tribune
April 16, 2008
by Rose Gottemoeller

On my way out of Moscow on the day when George Bush and Vladimir Putin met for the last time in Sochi, Russian blogs were alight with complaints about how Putin had lost big at the NATO summit meeting in Bucharest the day before...

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Restoring U.S. nuclear-free leadership
Washington Times
April 2, 2008
by Thomas Graham, Jr. and Max Kampelman

After a long dry spell, the seeds planted by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva in 1985 and Reykjavik in 1986, appear to be bearing fruit. Their declaration in Geneva that "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought," set the stage for the historic Reykjavik meeting at which the two leaders came tantalizingly close to finally abolishing their nations' nuclear arsenals.

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Addressing the nuclear threat
The Courier-Journal
November 7, 2007
by Jonathan Granoff

Religious leaders gathering this week at the Festival of Faiths in Louisville must make a forceful call to forge a consensus of conscience and reason: Nuclear weapons are unworthy of civilization. No other threat to human survival is as immediate and hazardous as the 27,000 warheads still in existence.

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Old thinking about a new threat: The politics of missile defenses
International Herald Tribune
June 8, 2007
By Theodore Postol and James Goodby

"President Vladimir Putin's compromise proposal to President George W. Bush concerning the U.S. ballistic missile defense system currently slated to be installed in Poland and the Czech Republic makes very good sense. By using a Russian early warning radar in Azerbaijan, the United States would have the ability to track and engage all Iranian long-range missiles launched against both the East and West Coasts of the United States, thus turning the barrel of the U.S. missile defense away from Russia and directly and unambiguously onto Iran."

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Time for US Values in the Heavens
Op-Ed by Jonathan Granoff
Published in Commondreams.org and The Huffington Post
February 10, 2007

It is high time that the US returns to its own values. We are the first country founded on confidence in the power of law. We rejected the law of power asserted by the British overreaching empire. Let’s not let this Administration’s quest for “full spectrum dominance,” a radical assertion of empire, blind us to our own values and self interest. It is time to negotiate prohibitions against an arms race in space.

Click here for a PDF version of the article

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The Global Forum on Preventing Bio-Terrorism—Heeding the Call
Journal of Homeland Security
August 2006
By Barry Kellman

"United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has issued a call for a global forum on preventing biological terrorism. Bio-terrorism is, according to the Secretary-General, “the most important under-addressed terrorist threat” that “requires new thinking on the part of the international community.” Annan has earlier drawn international attention to bio-terrorism, but his recent comments are far more pointed in how he characterizes the threat and what he requests the world to do. It is imperative that the communities of scientists, government officials, and other experts who are concerned about bio-terrorism take up this call."

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Think Again: US-India Nuclear Deal
Foreign Policy
July 2006
By Thomas Graham, Jr., Leonor Tomero, Leonard Weiss

A nuclear deal announced in March would allow the United States to sell nuclear materials to India and, in return, bring parts of India's nuclear program under international safeguards. But the pact undermines decades of nuclear non-proliferation work and gives too much freedom to a state with a questionable nuclear history.

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Space Weapons and the Risk of Accidental Nuclear War
By Ambassador Thomas Graham, Jr.
Arms Control Today
December 2005

The United States and Russia maintain thousands of nuclear warheads on long-range ballistic missiles on 15-minute alert. Once launched, they cannot be recalled, and they will strike their targets in roughly 30 minutes. Fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, the chance of an accidental nuclear exchange has far from decreased. Yet, the United States may be contemplating further exacerbating this threat by deploying missile interceptors in space.

Washington - Negotiators in Beijing have left the most recent round of the six-nation talks on stability and nuclear disarmament on the Korean Peninsula confronted with a North Korean demand that they could have seen coming. Pyongyang wants to retain the right to build light-water reactors and wants the other parties in the talks - China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and especially the United States - to guarantee that right.

The controversy over the Iranian nuclear program is neither a new issue nor is it a crisis. But if the United States does not handle this issue carefully, the result could be that Iran would leave both the negotiating table and the Non-Proliferation Treaty and all parties would be worse off.

By Bush administration officials' accounts, there is no greater threat than nuclear terrorism, and no government takes that danger more seriously than ours does. Yet the administration's insistence on getting its own way and refusal to discuss other countries' security concerns are blocking treaty negotiations aiming to limit the amount of nuclear-weapon materials worldwide that terrorists could buy or steal.

At the close of the Gleneagles Summit this week, Russia will take over leadership of the Group of Eight, the "super club" of countries that in theory are driving the world economy and political system. Even prior to Moscow's ascension, that notion had been coming in for increasing derision. What about India and China? commentators have been asking. And why should Canada, hardly an international powerhouse, get a seat at the table?

The danger of a nuclear holocaust may never have been greater, yet the 188 signatories to the global pact against nuclear weapons have rarely been more divided, arms experts and diplomats said.

WASHINGTON In spite of the Bush administration's recent calls for quick passage, some conservatives are campaigning vigorously to block ratification of the Law of the Sea Convention, a treaty governing the use of the world's oceans, in the U.S. Senate. That's worrisome because the convention, a treaty the United States has spent decades perfecting, is in America's, and the world's, interests and should be passed now.

In 1958, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan made clear the reason the United Kingdom acquired nuclear weapons. Referring to the British nuclear weapon program, Macmillan said in a television interview that "the independent contribution [i.e., British nuclear weapons] . . . puts us where we ought to be, in the position of a great power." Likewise, in a November 1961 speech, French President Charles de Gaulle said that "a great state" that does not have nuclear weapons when others do "does not command its own destiny." And after the May, 1998 Indian nuclear tests, Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee announced with pride. "We have a big bomb now, India is a nuclear weapon state." Although, it is an historical accident, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China) are the five nuclear-weapon states sanctioned by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT)-the central instrument of international security in today's world.

In his memoir, A World Transformed, former President George Bush in discussing the Gulf War made the following observation: ''Trying to eliminate Saddam would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. There was no viable exit strategy we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that one hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in the bitterly hostile land.''

It is time to admit that Iran will follow North Korea's example and become a de facto nuclear-weapon state in the absence of a U.S. preventive military attack or a powerful international diplomatic offensive. Unilateral U.S. military action against Iran is not in the cards anytime soon, for reasons that the situation in Iraq makes painfully clear.

This article is based on a longer paper prepared for the 52nd Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs in LaJolla, California, August 10-14, 2002.

What positive and constructive role can the United States play in controlling the weaponisation of space? Will leadership come from the United States or will it come from the international community more broadly? Is the weaponisation of space inevitable, and will it follow inexorably from the historical weaponisation of land, sea and air? These and related questions are becoming prominent as the United States and other states make increasing investments in space both for military and commercial purposes. This paper provides some answers to these questions.

Twenty years have passed since we had a good fight over nuclear weapons, so in a way, the furor that has greeted the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review ought to be welcomed. The last time we got into a debate over "usable" nuclear weapons was in the age of the neutron bomb -- the late 1970s and early '80s -- and it was a useful argument to have.