Arms Control & Disarmament

In accepting the Nobel Prize in 1949, William Faulkner asked, "There is only the question: When will I be blown up?" A device capable of annihilating humankind fundamentally altered the way states calculated their relationships to the rest of the world.

As Nicholas Thompson writes in his review of a new biography of the scholar-diplomat, "George F. Kennan had two really big ideas. The first was containment, which he presented in the 'X' article, published in Foreign Affairs in 1947, but which he had been refining for years in speeches. The idea was that there is a middle ground between diplomacy and war. If the former fails, the latter is not inevitable. ... Kennan’s second big idea wasn’t original, but it was important. The word some political scientists use to describe it is 'realism'; another way to put it is that Kennan was skeptical about American competence in foreign affairs.”

Two trends represent Korea today: South Korea's extraordinary economic boom and North Korea's stagnation and provocation. To move the peninsula forward, writes one of South Korea's leading politicians, regional and international players must take a bolder and more creative approach to achieving security.

Is reducing the world's nuclear arsenals to zero possible, or even desirable? Bruce Blair, Matt Brown, and Richard Burt argue that it is; Josef Joffe and James Davis disagree.