Jonathan Schell: The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (American Empire Project)

Regarding the START Treaty between the U.S. and Russia, Jonathan Schell recently told Democracy Now this: Well, it’s sort of garden-variety, moderate, sensible, minimal arms control. I think of it as arms control maintenance. It does basically two things that have been going on for the last 30 years or 40 years, really since Richard Nixon inaugurated arms control in 1972. And that is, it shaves the arsenals a little bit, a couple of hundred warheads, also reduces the number of delivery vehicles that are allowed. And maybe more important than that, it reintroduces inspections, which have lapsed with the lapse of the START treaty, the old START treaty. So this is what’s been going on for 40 years in arms control, and it pushes it along in a kind of minimal way. It’s a little bit like paying the mortgage on your house. You know, if you pay your mortgage, it’s not a big deal. But if you don’t, the consequences could be pretty dire. And that’s pretty much the way I look at this. [...] The best way to deal with that is to roll back the technology as a whole. And that’s really where Obama’s commitment to move to a world free of nuclear weapons comes in, because the very same steps that you would take to actually eliminate nuclear weapons are the very ones that you would take to keep that technology from spreading into other hands. In other words, you’d get it under control, you would actually liquidate it so it didn’t exist. That would be an important step. And then you—so you’d solve really the two problems with one stroke. See that full transcript here. You can also download the podcast of this Democracy Now show, here. See also: The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.

The December 17, 2010 Charlie Rose Conversation with Stephen Cohen

CHARLIE ROSE: Joseph Stalin’s reign of mass terror on the Soviet Union has been called the "other Holocaust." Millions of men, women, and children perished in his vast web prison and slave labor camps which Solzinitzin called "The Gulag Archipelago." Millions of others though somehow survived and were freed after Stalin’s death in 1953. A new book by an NYU professor and Russian scholar Stephen Cohen tells the stories of these survivors that is called "The Victims’ Return." I’m pleased to have Stephen Cohen back at this table. Welcome. / STEPHEN COHEN: Thank you, happy to be back.

Read the full transcript here. The Moscow Times had this to say about the book:

As historian Stephen Cohen shows with sharp analysis and deep pathos in his new book, “The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin,” the question of what to do with the gulag’s victims, and the legacy of the man who put them there, did not end with their liberation. It has continued to haunt Russia for decades, along with ever-changing interpretations of how the country should address its own past. Memoirs by Solzhenitsyn and other gulag survivors, as well as recent best-selling studies such as Orlando Figes’ “The Whisperers,” have familiarized Western audiences with accounts of the gulag. But Cohen, a professor at Princeton University, is one of the first to focus on survivors’ experiences after their release. “The Victims Return” draws on literary journals, memoirs and interviews with former inmates Cohen befriended in the ’70s to survey individual experiences of post-gulag life. At the same time, it analyzes the political decisions at the top that shaped them.

Read that Moscow Times piece here.

Khodorkovsky's Trial from WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

David Remnick, New Yorker editor and the author of The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, discusses the trial of jailed Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the country's richest man, and talks about the notion of an independent judiciary in Russia.

Download that podcast here.

"'The Gun': How AK-47s Changed The Nature Of War" - from NPR News and the NPR program, All Things Considered

The image is iconic: the stubby barrel, the inverted arc of the banana clip. Osama bin Laden included one in his video after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Saddam Hussein had a pair with him when he was captured. It appears on the flag of Mozambique and Hezbollah. The AK-47 — or versions of it — can be found in every major conflict of the past 50 years. In his new book, The Gun, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter C.J. Chivers traces the history of the lethal firearm. Chivers, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, tells NPR's Audie Cornish the gun is one of the principle weapons of insurgents in Afghanistan, where he's been reporting.

Download the podcast here. Read the full NPR All Things Considered feature story, here. Newsday posted a few pages of the book, here. And The New York Times had this to say about the book, recently:

It is no accident that C. J. Chivers opens “The Gun,” his bold history of the AK-47, not with the loud crack that is the report of the rifle but with the monstrous bang of the first detonation of a Soviet nuclear bomb. As Mr. Chivers’s detailed history then skirts as far back as the United States Civil War and brings us right up to the current conflict in Afghanistan, the message of his prologue is clear: For all that the escalating cold war shaped the last 60 years, no one was ever killed in conflict by a Russian nuke. By contrast untold millions have been wounded and killed by the AK-47 and related weapons, as they have proliferated and mutated from tools of engineering ingenuity, honestly wrought in defense of the socialist motherland, to the firearm of choice for both oppressor and oppressed.

Find that Times piece, here. The Los Angeles Times also plugs the book:

If somebody were to tell you that the long tragedy of human warfare entered a new and deadly phase in the fourth decade of the 20th century, the historically literate mind almost certainly would jump to the invention of the atomic bomb, which ushered in an age of anxiety and the long balance of terror between the United States and the Soviet Union. C.J. Chivers makes a convincing case in "The Gun" that a far more lethal and consequential weapon was devised at about that same time in a sprawling Soviet military design facility — the first Avtomat (Automatic) Kalashnikov assault rifle. "The Gun" is the author's exhaustive history of the rifle's origins, development and astonishing influence on global security. The banana-clipped Kalashnikov is by now a familiar sight to anyone who watches a few minutes of television news footage; it's the weapon clasped to the chests of Kim Jong Il's goose-stepping legions, waved high by Somali pirates, clutched by Africa's wretched child soldiers, leaning up against a mud-washed wall in Osama bin Laden's infamous videos.

You can find the Los Angeles Times mention, here (it's a few paragraphs; nothing meaty). And the New York Post had this to say about The Gun:

In his fascinating book, “The Gun” (Simon & Schuster), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist C.J. Chivers shows how the world was forever altered by the pursuit of automatic weapons and especially the invention of the Kalashnikov — an easy-to-use automatic rifle that allowed any one man to possess the firepower of an army.

Finally, for a little over a year now, Chivers has been maintaining this blog at The New York Times. The blog's central theme is war and small arms. And on that note, there's a pairing that we can do here, though not with another book; a 2005 film starring Nicholas Cage, "Lord of War." The movie's theme is closely aligned with the sentiments in Chivers' book, and it's hard to not think of the movie, while reading the book, and vice versa; mainly because of the weight of the AK-47, the credit and the responsibility that's placed on this sole item. IMDB carries this storyline description:

This film charts the rise and fall of Yuri Orlov, from his early days in the early 1980s in Little Odessa, selling guns to mobsters in his local neighbourhood, through to his ascension through the decade of excess and indulgence into the early 90s, where he forms a business partnership with an African warlord and his psychotic son. The film also charts his relationship through the years with his younger brother, his marriage to a famous model, his relentless pursuit by a determined federal agent and his inner demons that sway between his drive for success and the immorality of what he does.

Find the that IMDB profile here. Wikipedia has this to say, about the film's historical accuracy:

Plot details on the illegal arms market, particularly regarding purchases for Tropical Africa in early 1990s, are closely based on real stories and people originating from the former Soviet Union. The main protagonist's name, Yuri Orlov, corresponds to the last name of Oleg Orlov, a Russian businessman arrested in Ukraine on suspicion of smuggling missiles to Iran. The real Orlov was strangled in Kiev's Lukyanivska Prison in 2007 during the investigation.[7] The character Andre Baptiste, Sr. is partly based on Charles Taylor, the President of Liberia until 2003.[8] The character of Colonel Oliver Southern is evidently hinting of Oliver North, most famous for his involvement in the Iran-Contra Scandal. However, the scenes of direct shipping of weapons from Ukraine's army storages is fictional.[7] Portrayal of the Interpol as an acting security agency is also entirely fictional.

Amnesty International supported and endorsed the film. There's an internet movie firearms database, the IMFDB (sort of like the IMDB, no relation). The site lists all of the firearms, along with the AK-47, that were featured in the film.

How the AK-47 Changed the World from The Takeaway: Early Edition by feedback@thetakeaway.org (Public Radio International and WNYC Radio)

The AK-47 has long been synonymous with armed combat at both large and small scale, and for good reason. The gun has remained the most widely-deployed assault rifle in the world for decades. Compact, efficient and reliable in the field, the gun releases fifteen rounds from its barrel in a single second – allowing users to annihilate their enemies with the single touch of a trigger. Of course, this also means that millions have died at the hands of those who operate AK-47s. The United Nations estimates that four million people died by small arms in the 1990s alone, ninety percent of them civilians. How did the AK-47 become the go-to assault rifle? Who first developed it? And how has the world changed since it was first used? C.J. Chivers explores these questions in his new book, “The Gun: The AK-47 and the Evolution of War.” Chivers is a New York Times senior writer, former Marine Corps officer and Moscow bureau chief.

Listen to the whole show here, or you can download an mp3 copy of it here.

Why E-books Are Such a Big Deal from Books - Culture - The Atlantic by Peter Osnos

So far, it is fair to say that the book is off to an excellent start, poised for success. But here is where the traditional method of publishing books, as it has long functioned, becomes so frustrating. PublicAffairs printed 8,010 copies of the book, and to date has shipped 4,964. The total sales in the first two weeks, according to our tracking report, are 304 copies. Most brick and mortar stores--the major chains and the independents—cannot possibly have more than two or three copies on hand, and these are unlikely to be displayed in any significant way. For all the whining about those numbers, however, the important fact to point out is that The New Nobility is available to anyone with interest in the subject, even if it admittedly is geared to an audience of finite size. Not only that, the consumer can choose from a variety of formats and price points in deciding where and how to make the purchase. The surest way to get the book is from Amazon, where the hardcover is in stock at $17.79 (discounted from the retail price of $26.95) along with a Kindle e-book version at $14.82 and a downloadable audio from Amazon's Audible for $14.96. From Apple's iPad bookstore, you can have the e-book for $12.99. Barnes & Noble has the hardcover for sale, but not the e-book. The likelihood of The New Nobility becoming a bestseller is, let's face it, nil. But instead of being lost in the great mountain of new releases that are unloaded at stores each month and almost immediately returned as excess inventory, the book is, at most, a few clicks away from ownership—and that represents a heartening development for authors and publishers. Even more encouraging is the pace at which the digital marketplace is growing. According to Publishers Weekly, sales of e-books for the first seven months of 2010 are up 191 percent over the past year, and totaled $219.5 million in revenue. In a report last week, IMS Research predicted sales of 15.6 million iPads for 2010, and an astonishing 46 million in 2011. I've done my e-book reading on the iPad since it was released in April, not just because of the quality of the reading experience, but because my wife has taken full possession of the Kindle, on which she maintains a library of fiction that assures she is never without something worth reading.

Read on at the Atlantic, here.