Yesterday we posted a new analysis of the U.S.-Iraq status of forces agreement on the website of the Council’s sister organization. The takeaway, if you don’t feel like reading the whole thing (it’s kinda long), is that a research and advocacy organiza…

Arms control advocates finally felt like part of the popular group back in 2007 when 4 of the most respected former foreign policy officials made their “global zero” debut with a Wall Street Journal op-ed. It’s kind of like when the book nerd got invited to the cheerleader table – finally someone was accepting them for all they had to offer. And while the “No Nukes!” chant may still draw an image of protesting hippies for the most conservative of minds, in reality, the idea is making its way to the main stage – and with the approval of big-player Democrats and Republicans alike, including a nod from President-elect Obama.

In this recent piece from the Boston Globe, writer Drake Bennet highlights the progress that the “world free of nuclear weapons” movement has made just in the last two years.

The highlight (in my eyes) is below, or click here for the full article.

“Total nuclear disarmament – “getting to zero” in the arms-control argot – has become a mainstream cause. Voices from the heights of the American foreign policy establishment have begun to argue that, in a world of inevitably unruly globalization, increasing interest in nuclear energy, incomplete alliances, ambitious suicide terrorists, and ever-present human fallibility, it will never be enough to improve controls on the world’s nuclear weapons, or to reduce their numbers. We have to commit to eliminating them altogether.

These arguments are being made not by popes and mahatmas and Greens but by former secretaries of state and secretaries of defense, by generals and nuclear scientists, Democrats and Republicans. The leaders of the new no-nuke movement are George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn, four of the most respected figures in American foreign policy circles. Over the past two years, they have, in speeches, at arms-control conferences and, most prominently, in two widely circulated op-ed pieces, lent their authority to an idea that is still seen as fairly radical.

And there is evidence that these arguments are being taken seriously by the people who are going to be making decisions about nuclear policy in the new administration. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama repeatedly committed himself to a nuclear-free future. One of his key foreign policy advisers, Ivo Daalder, coauthored an article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, a leading foreign policy journal, laying out a plan for how to get there.

No one is arguing that this is a goal that will be reached in the next eight years, but there’s a sense that for the first time in a long while, real and significant movement in that direction is possible.”

Again, full article here.

LATEST UPDATE: Coleman’s lead shrinks from about 215 votes to 174 votes. Latest on Huffington Post. ———————– UPDATE: Huffington Post reports that a recent political study shows that if unrecorded ballots are counted, Al Franken is high…

Thanks to all of you who entered our 2008 Elections Contest! Out of over 1,000 entries, we have our winners!

Congratulations to Tyler Wigg-Stevenson (see photo to the left), our first place winner who scored 24 out of 25 possible points for the contest. (Note: we took out the Minnesota Senate race and Ohio’s 15th district race from consideration, as both have still not been called.)

As with a lot of races this year, the results from our contest were close and our top two winners tied for the general questions, but Tyler came out on top after scoring the tiebreakers.

It’s no surprise that Tyler is a supporter of the Council. He’s the director of the Two Futures Project, a Christian-based organization that promotes multilateral nuclear disarmament, and Policy Director at Faithful Security: the National Religious Partnership on the Nuclear Weapons Danger.

When asked what he hopes for with the results from all the election, he said that: “I’m hopeful that with this administration and Congress we can sow the seeds of a forward-looking American security policy for the 21st century, wherein the multilateral global elimination of nuclear weapons is the organizing principle for our national nuclear weapons policy.” Us too Tyler!

Also, we’d like to say congratulations to our second place winner, Richard Faust of Minneapolis, Minnesota AND a handful of people that deserve, at the least, an honorable mention for their savvy politico skills.

Pamela Greenwa, David Staley, George LaRoza, Wendy Binnie and Jill Linzee all scored very close to our first and second place winners. And, Jason Arnold was the only person to guess the exact number of electoral votes that Obama would win by Nov. 15 (you might have even beat CNN experts with that one).

Thanks to all who entered! Here’s to January 20, 2009.

In 2004, both Bush and Kerry called it the gravest threat facing the United States. This year on the campaign trail, President-elect Obama and Sen. McCain voiced their serious concerns on the issue of nuclear terrorism.

Our research Center recently produced a policy brief: “Understanding and Preventing Nuclear Terrorism.”

Here’s a few key excerpts:

Since the creation of the atomic bomb, government officials, scientists, and concerned citizens have been aware that weapons of mass destruction could fall into the hands of dangerous terrorist groups or rogue regimes. The rise of Al Qaeda and the events of September 11, however, brought the threat of nuclear terrorism into a whole new light for the United States. Suddenly, the detonation of a crude nuclear device in a major American metropolitan area no longer seemed like something out of a science fiction movie. Indeed, as President-Elect Barack Obama said during the 2008 presidential campaign, nuclear terrorism is “the gravest danger we face.”

[snip]

It is not the odds but the consequences of such an attack that propel nuclear terrorism to the top of the U.S. national security agenda. A March 2003 report by Harvard University’s Project on Managing the Atom found that if a ten-kiloton nuclear weapon, approximately the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, were detonated at Manhattan’s Grand Central Station in New York, it would instantly kill over 500,000 people, injure hundreds of thousands, and cause over $1 trillion in direct damages.

[snip]

If the United States and countries around the world are serious about preventing a nuclear attack by a terrorist group, efforts to contain the threat at its source need serious attention. According to the Partnership for a Secure America, the biggest problem is the lack of coordination on counter-nuclear terrorism efforts across federal agencies. Congress tried to remedy this shortcoming in 2007 with H.R. 1, the 9/11 Commission Act, which created a White House Coordinator for the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism. Unfortunately, the Bush administration chose to ignore the law and never filled the position. Failures in coordination are similarly reflected at the international level, where bilateral and multilateral engagement to prevent nuclear terrorism is equally fragmented.

Read the full report here.