Dr. Strangelove Rolls Over in His Grave

I don't know exactly what this symbolizes--the press of more apparently urgent issues, news glut and overload, the dangerous comfort level we've developed with the prospects of nuclear war, probably all of these--but some quite remarkable news passed pretty much unnoticed last week.

It was reported, in the Times of London and elsewhere, that "President Obama will convene the most ambitious arms reduction talks with Russia for a generation, aiming to slash each country’s stockpile of nuclear weapons by 80 per cent."

Maybe you have to have lived through the sixties and the eighties to know how amazing this is. Or to be amazed that we're talking about only 1,000 nuclear weapons each, still more than enough to destroy the world in an eyeblink. What a species.