Virtual deterrence, while not new, has gained some currency in recent years as a means to both avert nuclear war and expedite nuclear disarmament. "Virtual," in this instance, means abolishing nuclear weapons, which the United States maintains primarily to deter, or prevent, other states from attacking us with theirs. Instead,...

Americans who favor it claim that nuclear energy makes us less dependent on Middle Eastern oil with its attendant price spikes (those that aren't a product of speculation, that is). But nuclear energy plants don't do much to ease the national debt. As Jeff Goodell reports in his Rolling Stone...

If you're not a regular reader, you may be surprised to learn the federal government seeks to ram through a new nuclear facility that's intolerable on a number of counts.

1. Its intended purpose is to build plutonium pits -- the living, breathing heart of nuclear weapons, where the chain...

"The vastly ambitious CMRR project has greatly detracted from the attention needed to solve existing nuclear safety problems at LANL," writes Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) in its latest newsletter. LANL, of course, is the Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the United States'...

The light shining on the safety of nuclear energy as a result of the Japanese nuclear crisis has been of such powerful wattage that it's even flushing safety issues with nuclear weapons labs and manufacturing facilities out of hiding. Roger Snodgrass reports for the Santa Fe New Mexican.

On...

When the massive tsunami smacked into Fukushima Daiichi, the nuclear power plant was stacked high with more uranium than it was originally designed to hold. . . the equivalent of almost six years [almost 4,000] of the highly radioactive [spent] uranium fuel rods produced by the plant . . ....

Blink and you might have missed it. Or, more to the point, fallen asleep before you got to item number 42 under "Other Matters" of the International Atomic Energy Agency's latest report on Iran's nuclear program. It reads:

On 15-16 February 2011, the agency conducted an inspection at the Bushehr...

At Dictator Watch, Roland Watson asks, "Why Are There No Protests in Burma?"

Thus far Burma's military dictatorship has been immune to the uprisings to which the world has been witness to -- or engaged in -- elsewhere. Perhaps that's because Burma comes in a close...

On January 26, influential country musician Charlie Louvin died at age 83. He and his brother Ira performed and recorded as the Louvin Brothers, until they split up in the early sixties, when Charlie began a solo career. Perhaps because of the spare instrumentation of Charlie's guitar and Ira's mandolin,...

It's only natural that highly charged words find themselves coupled with the word "nuclear." It's almost as if they're attracted by a magnetic force. Three examples spring to mind.

Holocaust: Most frequently, of course, it's used in reference to the slaughter of Jews in World War II. When appended to...

At first glance, Social Security seems innocuous enough. What's not to like? It's as American as, well, the Great American Century. Also, until recent years, it's managed to straddle the political divide from Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt, under whose administration it was instituted, to Republican President Dwight Eisenhower.

But today...

As recently as last month, the term "nuclear apartheid," in all its unsavoriness, reared its ugly head again. Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency denounced the IAEA's approval of a plan for a nuclear fuel bank as "nuclear apartheid" (because of the implied infringement on a state's...

When you think of a nuclear treaty such as New START, a decrease in the number of nuclear weapons naturally comes to mind. While that's been true in the past, New START leaves the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia more or less intact. In March 2010 Hans...

The incarnation of "sexy," that is, that cropped up a few years ago: exciting or trendy in a general, not erotic, way. That settled, let's move on to a paper that Christopher Ford wrote for the Hudson Institute in which he weighs, in classic nuclear-strategist mode (bearing in mind...

When the subject of torture in the abstract is broached, the conversation tends to wend its way toward the terrorist and the ticking time-bomb scenario. You know how it goes: a terrorist group announces that a nuclear bomb it's planted in a major American city will be detonated unless its...

In the words of the old Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen song, as made famous by Frank Sinatra, nonproliferation and disarmament, like love and marriage, "go together like a horse and carriage." Nonproliferation -- preventing states that don't currently possess nuclear weapons -- works in tandem with disarmament --...

It's not just the Obama administration against which Republican senators under the guidance of Jon Kyl pit themselves when they oppose New START. In fact, perhaps bewitched by Tea Party-style incoherence, they've also placed themselves in the unlikely position of bucking the national defense establishment, to which traditionally they've been...

That is, six times the cost of the division of the Manhattan Project (to develop nuclear weapons during World War II) that was based in New Mexico. The heart of it -- what later became known as Los Alamos National Laboratory. Odds are, with the Cold War consigned to history,...

"Senator Kyl's recent statements begin to seriously call into question where the cat and mouse game between the administration and Kyl's office will end," writes Chris Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in an indispensable post. Minority Whip Kyl (AZ), to whom Senate Minority Leader Mitch...

Along with Richard Lugar (R-IN), Jon Kyl, the Republican Senate whip from Arizona, is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's (KY) go-to guy on nuclear issues. We wrote yesterday at Focal Points:

After Republicans picked up six seats in the Senate earlier this month, prospects for the passage of the new...