- What role did Fritz Haber play in Germany's chemical weapons programme during the First World War?
Nuclear Disarmament and Arms Control
Efforts to limit or eliminate nuclear weapons.
- What was the World Disarmament Conference trying to achieve, and why did it ultimately collapse?
- Why did the Nobel Committee award the Peace Prize to Henderson in the same year his conference failed?
- How did Russell's later peace activism connect to the values the prize recognized in him?
- How quickly did the Soviet Union respond with its own thermonuclear test after Ivy Mike?
- What second Nobel Prize did Pauling win in 1962, and why did it make him unique among laureates?
- What specific argument did the Russell–Einstein Manifesto make about victory in a thermonuclear war?
- When did Albert Einstein sign the manifesto relative to his death, and who else signed alongside him?
- What scientific and political conference did the manifesto lead to two years later?
- Why did Sputnik 1's launch cause such alarm in Washington despite US intelligence tracking Soviet rocketry?
- What roles did Philip Noel-Baker hold across five decades of international diplomacy, from the Paris Peace Conference to the United Nations?
- What was the subject of the 1958 book that helped secure Noel-Baker's Nobel Peace Prize?
- What unusual distinction does Noel-Baker hold as both an Olympic medalist and a Nobel Peace laureate?
- What did Pauling's 1958 petition to the United Nations demand, and how many scientists signed it?
- How did the US government respond to Pauling's anti-nuclear-testing activism, including the FBI and his passport?
- Why is Linus Pauling the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes?
- What role did Eisaku Satō play in keeping Japan out of the nuclear weapons club?
- Why did the pairing of MacBride and Satō strike observers as an unusual kind of balance?
- What did Alva Myrdal's book The Game of Disarmament argue was wrong with how nuclear powers conducted arms-control negotiations?
- What is the Treaty of Tlatelolco, and how did it establish the first nuclear-weapon-free zone in an inhabited region?
- Why did the Nobel committee choose to award the Peace Prize jointly to Myrdal and García Robles that year?
- How did an American and a Soviet cardiologist come to co-found an anti-nuclear organization during the Cold War?
- Why did framing nuclear war as a medical triage problem prove more persuasive than strategic military analysis?
- What made the choice of Yevgeny Chazov as a laureate politically awkward for the Nobel Committee?
- What arguments did Sakharov make in his 1968 essay that led the KGB to revoke his security clearances?
- Why did Joseph Rotblat resign from the Manhattan Project once Germany had surrendered?
- What was the purpose of the Pugwash Conferences during the Cold War?
- Why might scientists who understand a weapon be uniquely positioned to argue against its use?
- What sequence of nuclear tests did India and Pakistan conduct in May 1998?
- How did Vajpayee and Sharif each justify their nuclear tests as contributions to regional stability?
- Why did the Ig Nobel committee describe the tests as 'aggressively peaceful'?
- How did ElBaradei's inspectors' assessments of Iraq's weapons diverge from the case made for the 2003 invasion?
- What other nuclear disputes was the IAEA managing under ElBaradei in the years before the prize?
- What concepts did Schelling introduce in The Strategy of Conflict that shaped nuclear deterrence theory?
- What was the 1994 'gay bomb' proposal from Wright Laboratory intended to do to enemy troops?
- What does the OPCW do under the Chemical Weapons Convention?
- Why did the Nobel Committee award the Peace Prize to the OPCW in the middle of the Syrian civil war?
- How did ICAN's humanitarian argument against nuclear weapons differ from the traditional arms-control approach?
- What did the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons actually commit its signatories to?
- Why have none of the nine nuclear-armed states signed the prohibition treaty?
- Who founded Nihon Hidankyo in 1956, and what was the organization's original purpose?
- What methods did the hibakusha use over seven decades to keep the effects of nuclear weapons from becoming abstract to the public?