The passing of Israeli statesman Shimon Peres on September 28, 2016 was deeply felt by U.S. diplomats who had worked…
Seek and Destroy – The Mine Ban Treaty
Signed in Ottawa, Canada on December 3, 1997, the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer…
The Long, Incomplete Road for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
The movement to limit or even prohibit the testing of nuclear weapons has been around almost since the dawn of…
“The Cold War Was Truly Over” — The 1986 Reykjavik Summit
After the 1985 Geneva Summit, where President Ronald Reagan and leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, met for the first…
Brexit — Now What?
The decision by referendum of the British electorate to depart the European Union — after a campaign in which facts…
“A Box Sealed for 70 years” — Opening U.S. Embassy Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
A mountainous country in Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan was ceded by China and formally incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1876.…
Resolving the Czechoslovak Gold Dispute
As the Third Reich annexed the Sudetenland and Poland and the German war machine pushed through the Eastern Front towards…
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea — The CIA Mission to Raise a Soviet Sub
In March 1968, a K-129 Soviet nuclear submarine cruising in the Pacific Ocean mysteriously disappeared from Russian radar. Following an…
China’s Fight for Tiny Islands — The Taiwan Straits Crises, 1954-58
Recent disagreements over Beijing’s claim to the South China Seas (in which a tribunal constituted under the UN Convention on the…
Agent Orange and the Vietnam War
In 1961, United States forces in Vietnam began to use chemical herbicides and defoliants on South Vietnamese crops, bushes, and…