In the controversial legacy of the Nixon presidency, the administration's effort to curb and control the spread of the world's weapons of mass destruction is often overlooked. And yet by the time President Nixon left office under the cloud of the Watergate scandal, his actions on this front had surpassed those of all his predecessors combined and laid the foundations of WMD arms control and nonproliferation policies that persist to this day. In Averting Doomsday, Patrick Garrity and Erin Mahan explore and assess Nixon's record, addressing not only nuclear but also biological and chemical weapons. Drawing substantially on presidential recordings and other primary sources not widely consulted, the authors shed new light on milestones such as the first SALT agreement on strategic nuclear weapons and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, as well as the renunciation of US offensive biological weapons and a Seabed treaty. The WMD-control landscape had accumulated many divergent visions and interests over time-technical, diplomatic, domestic political, and utopian. The Nixon administration had to adjust to and build on this eclectic foundation, creating a new layer of policies to deal with WMD that substantially set the course-and perhaps limited the options-for future administrations in ways that are still with us.

This business history analyzes the connections between private business, disarmament, and re-armament as they affected arms procurement and military technology transfers in Eastern Europe from 1919 to 1939. Rather than focusing on the negotiations or the political problems involved with the Disarmament Conferences, this study concerns itself with the business effects of the disarmament discussions. Accordingly, Schneider-Creusot, Skoda, Vickers, and their respective business activities in Eastern European markets serve as the chief subjects for this book, and the core primary sources relied upon include their unpublished corporate archival documents. Shifting the scope of analysis to consider the business dimension allows for a fresh appraisal of the linkages between the arms trade, disarmament, and re-armament. The business approach also explodes the myth of the 'merchants of death' from the inside. It concludes by tracing the armaments business between 1939 and 1941 as it transitioned from peacetime to war.

Despite deep roots in local community organizing and peace activism, the peacebuilding field over the past two decades has evolved into a stratified, and often disconnected, community of academics, policymakers, and practitioners. While the growth into a more recognized and professionalized field has led to significant improvements in how decision-makers and influential thinkers accept peace and conflict resolution theory and practice, it has also left certain communities behind. Individual activists, community-based groups, and locally-led civil society organizations - in other words, the people most directly experiencing the results of violent conflict and striving to overcome and transform it - remain notably on the margins of what has become the more recognized "international peacebuilding field." As a result, the inherent links between policies and practices of the global North, particularly the United States, where much of the professional peacebuilding community is concentrated, and the daily realities of rising violence and collapsing order experienced by communities in the global South, are glossed over or apportioned to the fields of political science or international affairs. Similarly, the daily community level efforts of people and groups within the United States and other global North countries seeking to address drivers of violence and injustice in their own communities are largely disconnected from the struggles of communities living inside recognized war zones for a more peaceful and just future. These disconnects within the peacebuilding field have increasingly become obstacles to its further evolution and improvement. Without a serious shift in direction toward more integrated, interconnected, and intersectional understanding and approaches, the peacebuilding field threatens to become just another Western-driven industry in which powerful decision-makers, politicized funding, and large international bureaucracies sustain themselves. Reconnecting the field with its roots of community-based activism, organizing, and courageous leadership is urgently needed, and a necessary step to improving our collective efforts to build a more peaceful, just, and sustainable world. Drawing on the voices and experiences of community-based peace leaders around the world, this book envisions a new way of working together as a truly local and global peacebuilding field - one in which undoing the roots of violence and injustice is not something that takes place "in the field", but in the streets of our own neighborhoods and in solidarity with others around the world.

The early 1980s were a tense time. The nuclear arms race was escalating, Reagan administration officials bragged about winning a nuclear war, and superpower diplomatic relations were at a new low. Nuclear war was a real possibility and antinuclear activism surged. By 1982 the Nuclear Freeze campaign had become the largest peace movement in American history. In support, celebrities, authors, publishers, and filmmakers saturated popular culture with critiques of Reagan's arms buildup, which threatened to turn public opinion against the president. Alarmed, the Reagan administration worked to co- opt the rhetoric of the nuclear freeze and contain antinuclear activism. Recently declassified White House memoranda reveal a concerted campaign to defeat activists' efforts. In this book, William M. Knoblauch examines these new sources, as well as the influence of notable personalities like Carl Sagan and popular culture such as the film The Day After, to demonstrate how cultural activism ultimately influenced the administration's shift in rhetoric and, in time, its stance on the arms race.

Space is again in the headlines. E-billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are planning to colonize Mars. President Trump wants a "Space Force" to achieve "space dominance" with expensive high-tech weapons. The space and nuclear arms control regimes are threadbare and disintegrating. Would-be asteroid collision diverters, space solar energy collectors, asteroid miners, and space geo-engineers insistently promote their Earth-changing mega-projects. Given our many looming planetary catastrophes (from extreme climate change to runaway artificial superintelligence), looking beyond the earth for solutions might seem like a sound strategy for humanity. And indeed, bolstered by a global network of fervent space advocates-and seemingly rendered plausible, even inevitable, by oceans of science fiction and the wizardly of modern cinema-space beckons as a fully hopeful path for human survival and flourishing, a positive future in increasingly dark times. But despite even basic questions of feasibility, will these many space ventures really have desirable effects, as their advocates insist? In the first book to critically assess the major consequences of space activities from their origins in the 1940s to the present and beyond, Daniel Deudney argues in Dark Skies that the major result of the "Space Age" has been to increase the likelihood of global nuclear war, a fact conveniently obscured by the failure of recognize that nuclear-armed ballistic missiles are inherently space weapons. The most important practical finding of Space Age science, also rarely emphasized, is the discovery that we live on Oasis Earth, tiny and fragile, and teeming with astounding life, but surrounded by an utterly desolate and inhospitable wilderness stretching at least many trillions of miles in all directions. As he stresses, our focus must be on Earth and nowhere else. Looking to the future, Deudney provides compelling reasons why space colonization will produce new threats to human survival and not alleviate the existing ones. That is why, he argues, we should fully relinquish the quest. Mind-bending and profound, Dark Skies challenges virtually all received wisdom about the final frontier.