Context Included: Obama on Iran | Newsweek Politics: Conventions

Underqualified for the Overrated
Christopher Hitchens 10/10/2009 12:00:00 AM
Alfred Nobel had one odd thing in common with Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway and Marcus Garvey. He had the chance to read about his own death in the newspapers. It seems that he was so depressed by the emphasis that the obituarists laid on his pioneering work on dynamite—the WMD of its day—that he resolved at once to upgrade his real death notice by endowing an award for international peace.
The Stakes? Well, Armageddon, for One.
Jon Meacham 10/3/2009 12:00:00 AM
On Nov. 2, 1945—All Souls' Day in the Catholic tradition—J. Robert Oppenheimer spoke to scientists at Los Alamos. "It is clear to me that wars have changed," he said. "It is clear to me that if these first bombs—the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki—that if these can destroy 10 square miles, then that is really quite something. It is clear to me that they are going to be very cheap if anyone wants to make them." Oppenheimer basically had it right: nuclear weapons are not particularly cheap, but the knowledge, once unleashed, could not be contained. This was a persistent concern among the scientists who made the Manhattan Project come to life, including Albert Einstein, who wrote FDR in 1939 about "extremely powerful bombs of a new type." (The Pulitzer Prize–winning book American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, is essential reading about the beginnings of the bomb.) Those present at the creation feared what has come to pass: the steady proliferation of the means of Armageddon.
A Return to Reality
Fareed Zakaria 9/19/2009 12:00:00 AM
By canceling plans to station antiballistic-missile systems in Poland and the Czech Re-public, President Obama has traded fantasy for reality. Keep in mind a few facts about missile defense. Since the 1980s, the United States has spent well over $150 billion to develop such systems. That's more than the total cost of the Manhattan Project or the Apollo mission to the moon. Yet in 25 years the program has not produced a workable weapons system, something unprecedented even in the annals of the Pentagon's bloated budgets. A group of leading scientists, including 10 Nobel laureates in physics, wrote a letter to Obama in July, arguing that the Polish and Czech interceptors "would offer little or no defensive capability, even in principle." That's why the Bush administration proposed deploying the system only in 2018, by which point, it hoped, the thing would actually work.
Missile Yield
John Barry 9/18/2009 12:00:00 AM
President Obama's announcement that he would cancel the missile defense system in Central Europe was more than the careful balancing act it appeared to be. It shows how he has decided to handle the future of U.S. missile defenses worldwide: he'll put them to sea.
Shopping for a New Policy on Iran
Mark Hosenball 9/12/2009 12:00:00 AM
The Obama administration has accepted a long-awaited Iranian offer to negotiate, but responded skeptically to it. It was "not really responsive to our greatest concern," Iran's nuclear program, says a State Department spokesman. Tehran proposed talks on a range of issues last week but indicated it wouldn't discuss shutting down its uranium-enrichment program. Israel has signaled an end-of-year deadline for military action, but U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice said last week that President Obama would be "taking stock" with permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (plus Germany) later this month.
Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb
Jonathan Tepperman 8/29/2009 12:00:00 AM
On Sept. 24, President Barack Obama will bring together 14 world leaders for a special U.N. Security Council meeting in New York. On the agenda: how to rid the world of nuclear weapons. The summit is the latest step in the administration's campaign to eliminate nukes, a priority Obama stressed on the campaign trail and formally announced in April during his speech in Prague. U.S. attempts to stop Iran from acquiring the bomb and to pry the weapons out of North Korea's fingers are also key parts of this campaign.