We should work to bring the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty into force rather than developing new, putatively more useable, nuclear weapons. At the very least we should continue U.S. adherence to the moratorium.

The urgency for such a commitment to deal with the nuclear threat — a danger with no precedent in human history — has been expressed powerfully and dramatically by Father Bryan Hehir, former dean of Harvard Divinity School, in his keynote address on “Ethical Considerations of Living in the Nuclear Age” at a Stanford University conference in 1987:

For millennia people believed that if anyone had the right to call the ultimate moment of truth, one must name that person God. Since the dawn of the nuclear age we have progressively acquired the capacity to call the ultimate moment of truth and we are not gods. But we must live with what we have created.

This is our challenge.

You might want to step back to Apocalypse Soon, especially if you missed it the first time around.

I couldn't find an online transcript of the 1997 speech quoted above, but I did find a talk from December 2005 which resonates in interesting ways with the John Rapley essay in the new Foreign Affairs.

The Shadow of the Bomb

Think America's debates about Social Security are troublesome for the future? Consider yourself lucky.

Over the next generation, it seems entirely likely — indeed, all but inevitable — that a large fraction of humanity, peopling countries within the grouping often termed emerging market economies, will find themselves coping with the phenomenon of population aging on income levels far lower than those yet witnessed in any society with comparable degrees of graying. For such countries, the social and economic consequences of aging could be harsh — and the options for mitigating the adverse effects of population aging may be fairly limited. In some of these countries, population aging could potentially emerge as a factor appreciably constraining long-term growth and development.

As we will detail in the next few pages, rapid and pronounced population aging represents a highly uneven, largely unappreciated, and as yet almost entirely undiscounted long-term risk for the world’s emerging markets.

Think about the fact that US prosperity is now substantially linked to Chinese investment. Project forward 30 years. Now put yourself in China's shoes: do you care for the elderly, and let America crash? Or do you let the state fail in order to prop up the US? Can you imagine the US pressuring China to block local expenditures for universal health care?

Did you read the Niall Ferguson piece?

Growing Old the Hard Way: China, Russia, India

I AM BY nature and upbringing a pessimist. As a boy in Glasgow, I was encouraged to expect the worst, on the principle that by doing so you'll never be disappointed and sometimes you may even be pleasantly surprised.

This is not the American way. Optimism is in the DNA of the USA.

Nowhere is the sunny side sunnier than in Miami. I went there last week and was dazzled. The place is more than booming.

Yet, if history is any guide, our present golden age of globalization is unlikely to endure. It could be ended by a geopolitical crisis. Or it could be ended by a gradual domestic backlash.

Should Americans — and especially Miamians — be less optimistic? Conventional wisdom has it that they should. Economists want them to save more. Environmentalists want them to consume less.

Well, be careful what you wish for.

Don't forget about everyone else.

The sunshine state | Niall Ferguson

If you read "The Desert One Debacle", you may be interested in Mark Bowden's new book, about which Publishers Weekly said:

He puts you there, in the Persian desert with Delta Force and its commander, the charismatic and mercurial Col. Charlie Beckwith. All in all, Guests of the Ayatollah is a monumental piece of reportage, deserving a wide readership.

Guests of the Ayatollah : The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam

Skeptics scoff at the mad rush by stars to come up with exotic baby names as another means for the attention-hungry to grab headlines. But psychologists and others who have worked with high-profile performers say that the naming of children can function as a window into a psyche. Perhaps subconsciously, they say, stars seize the opportunity of parenthood to express their obsessions, ambitions and inner quirks in a way that is, for a change, unscripted and not stage-managed by publicists.

Why Stars Name Babies Moxie, Moses and Apple

YOU just paid $153 at StubHub.com for a ticket to the July 3 Madonna concert at Madison Square Garden, more than double what it would have cost you at the box office.

Did you get taken?

No, say many economists.

The Price of Admission in a Material World

Each country has its talents; Italy has a talent for beauty. This attribute is not easily measurable: no online graphic can illustrate it. Still, it is palpable, and an architect's cultural work in an ancient Afghan town seemed to me part of a particular Italian disposition.

The modern world does not like such particularities. The rapid movement across borders of capital, goods, labor, technologies and ideas — the thing we call globalization — is a process of accelerated convergence. It brings many welcome things, among them opportunity and cheap goods; it also stirs unease because its stamp is sameness and its pre-eminent criterion efficiency.

This unease has been evident in Europe of late. French youth, invoking revolution in the cause of stability, spent weeks in the street to protest and ultimately overturn a law that would have given them jobs at the price of losing existing guarantees against the abrupt termination of employment.

The proposal smacked too much of "precariousness" for the French. That is to say, it smacked too much of the market, of capitalism, of globalization, for it is in the nature of all these things to be changeable, dynamic and ultimately precarious. They opted, in short, for security over risk, a choice many Americans find puzzling.

Vive La Dolce Vita

VERIZON had a pretty bad year in 2005, but its chief executive did fine. Although Verizon's earnings dropped by more than 5 percent and its stock fell by more than a quarter, he received a 48 percent increase in salary and compensation. This handsome payout was based on the recommendation of an independent consulting firm that relied on Verizon (and the chief executive's good will) for much of its revenue. When asked about this conflict of interest, the consulting firm explained that it had "strict policies in place to ensure the independence and objectivity of all our consultants."

Please stop laughing.

I'm O.K., You're Biased

Industrialization is spreading everywhere, but at varying rates of rapidity and with disparate consequences. As in the past, societies are developing in widely different directions.

To understand today's globalization requires that one renounce the idea that the poor are stunted or exploited by globalization. The poor of the world are not so much exploited as neglected and forgotten. At the same time the press and television are drenching them with images of the riches they lack. For the poor, globalization is not an accomplished fact but a condition that remains to be achieved. The irony of the current phase of globalization is that it universalizes the demand for a better life without providing the means to satisfy it.

The Global Delusion

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