One of the keys to the 2010 Senate elections — aside from little items such as the state of the economy and health care — is which candidates decide to run and which decide to drop out. In early August, for example, in New York, U.S. Rep. Carolyn Ma…

We all know that we need 67 votes to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It’s not an easy fight with Senate Republican leadership out to create multiple “Waterloos” for President Obama. That mentality of political destructiveness hurts the securi…

Today marks the 64th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. 50,000 people gathered in the city to remember the 140,000 killed within months of the attack and to honor thousands of survivors.

Hundreds more events to mark the anniversary happened around the globe, including one in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the location of the Y-12 plant where the “Little Boy” bomb was built. The event’s organizer, Ralph Hutchison, stated that, “The bomb does not make us more secure, it makes us less secure.”

Many others agree.

Today on the Huffington Post, Bill Hartung of the New America Foundation argues that, “it’s long past time that we had a national dialogue about eliminating these weapons of mass terror once and for all.”

He goes on to discuss the cyclical nature of the history of anti-nuclear weapons activism, and the progress each cycle has brought to reducing the threat of nuclear weapons.

“The ban-the-bomb movement of the 1950s set the stage for the prohibition of above-ground nuclear tests. The nuclear freeze campaign of the 1980s helped turn Ronald Reagan from a reckless, loose-talking cowboy who joked that ‘the bombing starts in five minutes’ into a leader in nuclear arms reductions who almost moved to abolish them in his 1986 summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik.”

With 27,000 nuclear weapons around the globe – 95% of them possessed by either Russia or the U.S. – and so many voices calling for “a nuclear weapons free world,” we stand a a crucial turning point in nuclear weapons policy.

After all, advocates calling for the reduction or elimination of nuclear weapons for our security, not despite it, now include:

•    President Obama
•    71% of Americans
•    Bush’s and Obama’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
•    Former Republican Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Democratic Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn
•    Other moderates and conservatives, including Sen. John McCain

With support from such different constituencies around the country, the time could not be more ripe for the most significant progress on nuclear reductions in history.

In the words of our very own Lt. Gen. Robert Gard,

“I like the Sam Nunn analogy. He said [nuclear disarmament is] like a mountain with a cloud over the top. You can’t see the top, you don’t know if you can get there, but you start up the mountain.

The fact of the matter is I could not come up and tell you how we could verify that some nuclear power didn’t squirrel a few of them away. But, there’s a lot we can do to start walking up that mountain, and hopefully try to get there. I am 100% behind enunciating it as a goal, and Obama was NOT irresponsible, he said ‘this will be very difficult, it’s unlikely to happen even in my lifetime,’. But he said ‘that is the goal of the United States.’”

Click here to add your voice.

…And comes back with two American journalists.

Kim Jong-il has granted a “special pardon” to Euna Lee and Laura Ling, the two reporters who were arrested at the North Korea-China border and sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp for “illegal entry” and “hostile acts.” Former President Bill Clinton touched down in North Korea on Tuesday to seek the release of the two journalists, and, after less than a day in the communist country, was able to negotiate their release.

In a June community conference  call, Council for a Livable World Members joined board member Dr. Jim Walsh, a Research Associate in MIT’s Security Studies Program, for a discussion of current events in North Korea and Iran. In a response to a Council member’s question on the capture of the two journalists, Dr. Walsh emphasized the importance of “face” and respect to North Koreans:

“My guess is that once this trial is concluded, Bill Richardson, who the North Koreans know well…he may very well travel to North Korea, and he may very well do what was suggested, and there’s at least a shot that he could come back with those arrested journalists.”

(Click here for the complete summary of the call.)

President Clinton’s successful trip again brings to light the importance of “face” to North Korea.

Although the Obama Administration has made clear that,  “the mission was humanitarian, and had nothing to do with the nuclear dispute between the two countries,”  as Joe Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund identified, Clinton “jumpstart[ed] the successful diplomacy he had done 15 years earlier.”

This kind of private diplomacy has a history of proving fruitful in the past. Bill Richardson twice traveled to the North to bring back detained American citizens, once in 1994 and again in 1996. Earlier in 1994, former President Jimmy Carter visited North Korea to meet with then-ruler Kim Il-sung regarding the country’s nuclear program. Not only did Carter’s efforts lead a breakthrough in U.S. relations with the North, but the trip promoted dialogue between the North and the South and defused tensions at a time when hardliners were debating a military strike against the country amidst a military buildup and discussion of sanctions. Carter’s visit paved the way for U.S. negotiators, among them Robert Gallucci (a recipient of the Council’s 2009 Drinan Award), to negotiate a freeze on North Korea’s nuclear program in the October 1994 Agreed Framework.

Let’s hope for new progress, now that there are signs that the ice is thawing.

Stuart Rothenberg, political analyst extraordinaire, had a column today in Roll Call which pointed to an improved position for Republican candidates in Senate races. For the full piece, see http://www.rollcall.com/issues/55_17/rothenberg/37443-1.html …