William Arkin
| William Arkin | |
|---|---|
| Born |
William Morris Arkin May 15, 1956 New York City |
| Occupation | Political commentator, activist, journalist |
| Website | https://williamaarkin.wordpress.com/ |
William M. Arkin (born May 15, 1956) is an American political commentator, best-selling author, journalist, activist, blogger, and former United States Army soldier. He has previously served as a military affairs analyst for the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and The New York Times.
Arkin was born in New York City in 1956. After attending public school in Manhattan, he briefly attended New York University before dropping out to enlist in the military shortly after his eighteenth birthday.
Arkin served in U.S. Army intelligence from 1974 to 1978, and was stationed in West Berlin. After leaving the Army, he researched nuclear weapons and weapons policy during the Cold War. He co-authored four volumes of the Nuclear Weapons Databook series for the Natural Resources Defense Council, reference books on nuclear weapons. Volume II revealed locations of all U.S. and foreign nuclear bases worldwide and was condemned by the Reagan Administration. The Reagan Administration went as far as to seek to put Arkin in jail for revealing the locations of American (and Soviet) nuclear weapons around the world. His subsequent revelation of “mini-nuke” research efforts by the Pentagon in 1992 led to a 1994 Congressional ban and ultimately a pledge by the U.S. government not to develop new nuclear weapons. His discovery of Top secret U.S. plans to secretly move nuclear weapons to a number of overseas locations involved governments from Bermuda to Iceland to the Philippines.
Arkin led Greenpeace International’s research and action effort on the first Gulf War, being the first American military analyst to visit post-war Iraq in 1991, and the first to write about cluster bombs and about civilian casualties and the cascading effects of the bombing of electrical power.
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