For over 40 years Ploughshares Fund has supported the most effective people and organizations in the world to reduce and ultimately eliminate the dangers posed by nuclear weapons.
Since official relations between Washington and Tehran were severed in 1980, five American presidents spanning a period of three decades — from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush — have struggled to figure out how to deal with Iran. As a candidate for the presidency in 2007, then-Senator Barack...
The Iran nuclear accord, concluded in July 2015, has fundamentally improved the outlook for European security. Iran is now much less likely to obtain nuclear warheads, and its missile programs are proceeding more slowly than expected. As a result, current US plans to build additional interceptor...
In the United States, anything nuclear is inherently presidential. Any change in nuclear policy requires presidential leadership and sustained engagement. Moreover, decisions to pursue new initiatives must be made early in a new administration, and then executed over a number of years. Coming...
The 2016 US presidential campaign has, among other things, reminded the public that the president has the sole authority to launch a nuclear attack. While public discussion focused on the temperament, judgment and character of the person occupying the office of the presidency, it has also raised...
The Defense Department has proposed to build a new, powerful nuclear cruise missile called the Long-Range Standoff weapon (LRSO). In our opinion, this weapon is unnecessary, incredibly expensive and would move the United States closer to actually using a nuclear weapon — an unthinkable action....
Russia and the United States have started rebuilding their Cold War nuclear arsenals, putting us on the threshold of a new and dangerous arms race. But we don’t have to replay this drama. The US plan to rebuild and maintain its nuclear force is needlessly oversized and expensive, expected to...
Speaking in Berlin in 2013, President Barack Obama offered to reduce US deployed strategic nuclear forces to about 1,000 warheads, or one-third below the limits of the 2010 New START Treaty. This is sound policy, as the US military has determined that it can ensure the security of the United...
Dear 45th President, welcome to the White House. You now have an opportunity to make a lasting impact on national and international policy. But whatever your priorities may be — national security, education, immigration, the deficit or the environment — one issue can trump them all: nuclear...
President-elect Donald Trump will soon have to focus seriously on nuclear policy. With this in mind, Ploughshares Fund invited some of the best thinkers in the field to come up with ten bold ideas to help make America safer and more secure. ...
Right now the world faces two existential threats: climate change and nuclear weapons. While climate change gets a great deal of attention in the press, the grave danger posed by nuclear weapons is too often forgotten. And yet former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry argues that the risk of a...
We are releasing our new report, "10 Big Nuclear Ideas for the Next President" at an event you can watch on Facebook via livestream. At this event, Wednesday, Nov. 16 at 12:45pm ET / 9:45 am PT, you can see these ideas discussed...
This is the situation confronting proponents of the process begun October 27, when—by a vote of 123 for, 38 against, and 16 abstaining—the First Committee of the UN agreed “to convene in 2017 a United Nations conference to negotiate a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons.”
Back in March 2014, a delegation of US bishops made a historic visit to Qom, Iran and held a meeting with Iranian religious leaders. On November 17, an audience at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC will have the chance to hear firsthand what they discussed in Qom,...
For the first time in its 71 years, the global body voted to begin negotiations on a treaty to ban nuclear weapons. All nine nations with nuclear arms (the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea) opposed the resolution. However, with a...
In November, US citizens will head to the ballot box to elect a new president - yet among the American populace, the necessity of elections is increasingly up for debate. Data from the World Values Survey...