: When I lived in Washington many years ago, I found myself doing a lot of research on military affairs and contributing articles to various journals,...

I was working at the Institute for Policy Studies doing research on American foreign policy, militarization and the arms trade.

Oh, absolutely not. Nation is America's oldest political magazine, and it mainly covers domestic affairs, domestic politics, usually from a critical...

That's very recent. But this is a magazine that has a hundred year history, and he's just the latest of many distinguished people to come on ownership.

Oh, I would say there certainly is. There's one that tends to be suspicious of Washington, of American elites that are seen as governing the country,...

I would say it's definitely on the left end of the spectrum of political analysis, but within that there's a lot of differences. On the issue of intervention,...

I started writing that when the fall of the Berlin Wall began. I could see American strategists sort of groping for a new raison d'ˆtre for American...

I work out of my office in Hampshire College, which is in Amherst, Massachusetts. But I come to Washington as frequently as I can to keep up with events,...

We were fishing for a way to describe this. This is a process that really began before Iraq invaded Kuwait. Afterwards the term "outlaw" began to be...

Rogue has been applied to different kinds of problem states in the past few years, but now it's being used to describe states that, for the most part,...

No. Of course there's no official listing of rogue states. This is a manufactured term. But I think in Washington it's understood to include North Korea...

They'll get a few things out of it. One thing, I think, is a better understanding of what we're paying $270 billion a year for on our military budget....

Proliferation refers to the spread of weapons of mass destruction, which, in turn, means nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. So countries that,...

General Colin Powell, I think, is the man more than anyone else in the defense establishment who understood very early that the end of the Cold War...

I think he's an extremely intelligent and thoughtful person. I think better than, for instance, the secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, he understood...

There is a Pentagon history in process, a history of what's called a base force, which is what Colin Powell called his proposed post Cold War military,...

It's a Joint Chiefs of Staff publication through their history branch offered for sale from the U.S. Government Printing Office. I doubt many scholars...

Listed in the Government Monthly circular of publications, which I check along with other documents to keep up with literature in the field.

I would have suspected that was the case from their public presentations but not that it was as intense a dispute as comes out of this document.

Between the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was November of 1989 and April or May of 1990. Now this was a crucial period for the U.S. because the Warsaw...

Well, in the end, Colin Powell won. We know that because August 2, ironically, the day that Iraq invaded Kuwait, President Bush scheduled a speech in...

Exactly. That is the one. It was scheduled long before there was any indication that anything was going to happen in Kuwait. The speech was written...

I have not worked in politics. I've certainly worked to support various candidates at different times.

I have to say I live in Massachusetts and I'm a supporter of Ted Kennedy, who just assisted in his reelection locally campaigning for him. As a home...

New York City. Grew up in New York City. Went to high school and college at Columbia University in New York, so I'm a New York boy.

Art history and architecture as an undergraduate.

I was going to study architecture, and I went to graduate school in the field, got an M.A. in architectural history from Columbia and taught for a while...

Yes, in political scienc from the Union Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio. It's a consortial school supported by other colleges and universities for adult...

I actually worked for a consortium, a very interesting program. It's a consortium of five schools. Hampshire College, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Amherst...

No, we have two of the five sisters.

I have Mount Holyoke and Smith out of the sisters. Then Hampshire and Amherst College, which are coed, and University of Massachusetts. So we're really...

The five colleges, which are all close to each other, have created a consortial program called the Five College Consortium to sponsor joint programs...

I get very bright, very disciplined students who are interested in international affairs and also interested in peace and security types of issues....

He's still alive.

He's retired. He's a retired trade union organizer. He was based in New York City but worked for many years out of an office in Chicago, working for...

Well, we include both of our names.

I tried to hint in my dedication to the continuity in views that I hope would be passed on. My father was a trade union organizer and a supporter of...

He'll be 7 in a week.

She also has a Ph.D. in ethnic studies, and she works with an organization known as Communitas, which does training and consulting with non-profit organizations...

The place I worry about most -- although right now things are looking a little better -- is North Korea. I worry about North Korea because, at this...

What's the worst thing that could happen to this country today, given its state of readiness, or lack of readiness, depending on what you think?

Even if the United States were not directly involved, the consequences would spill over in our border, or likewise in Europe if Algeria were to disintegrate...

They're referring to the 19th century European colonial view that the white Christian races of Europe had a civilizing mission to take care of the less...

During the Vietnam War period, like others of my generation.

I was a college student.

I was active in the peace movement to end the conflict. I was at Columbia University, and I became particularly interested in the roles universities...

What I would do in particular, I would begin with the issue of strategy, and I think Colin Powell was absolutely right that that's the beginning point...

It's declining from just under 2 million or so down to about 1.4 million.

I think that that's still probably too many people to keep in uniform, but it's not only a question of numbers. It's how are they organized. The current...

Oh, about 20,000, give or take.

A carrier battle group. I don't know how many people. It's about 10 to15 ships, and the aircraft carrier itself has about 6,000 people on board. So...

I think that a lot of what's happening now is being moved by industry's particular needs to maintain certain kinds of production lines going that, in...

I really do believe that is the institutional interests of the military, like any big organization, facing the prospects of downsizing and reduction,...

I'd want to see what his policies really are. I think Colin Powell is a very thoughtful, intelligent man, and I think he's been really cagey about what...

I'm critical of Les Aspin because he came in promising to take a fresh look at defense policy -- that's what he promised -- and he coins this term of...

I think William Perry is a very thoughtful person, a good manager. I don't think he has the same kind of strategic depth and interests that Les Aspin...

Bill Clinton I also fault, because he, too, said when he was elected that he would take a fresh look at defense policy, and I think he's just abandoned...

I write every three to six months. I write for other publications as well.

They expect me to be writing something that's critical of government policy, because that's what you would turn to the Nation for is a critical look....

I personally believe that you can't work in this field unless you're familiar with and understand what people in the military are saying. I subscribe...

I think that press coverage of the military is good on kind of the big-ticket procurement issues. When there's debate over a weapons system and it costs...

I don't always know what they're most interested in, but students are interested a lot in the emerging world, how the world is changing. The Cold War,...

I would define their politics as skeptical of anything that comes from government leaders, whether the leaders are left, right or something else, from...

I think it comes partly from a way in which -- especially in the Reagan era when these young people were growing up -- a tendency to look down on the...

I hoped that policy makers would read it. I don't know how successful we'll be at that, but I certainly hope that they would. I certainly hope that...

I think that there are a couple of reasons why. One of them is that the process in which these decisions were made were so far removed from public consciousness...

That I was going to come to. The second thing that happened was the Persian Gulf War broke out and so consumed people's attention that the debate promised...

We spend more on our military than the rest of the world spends combined on their military. So we have the most well-endowed military in the world....

The things I think are most needed are multilateral, multinational peacekeeping and peace enforcement operation and humanitarian aid and rescue. The...

I don't think it's the role of this country to do it by itself. Let me make that very clear. We should only do it as part of multinational UN or NATO...

I have no problem of American soldiers being under the command of a U.N. officer if the United States has a role in the Security Council of choosing...

Those are the countries that were the declared nuclear powers and had tested nuclear weapons when the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was signed in...

The three de facto nuclear powers today are India, Pakistan and Israel. All of those countries are believed to have functioning nuclear weapons that...

They hint at it. They don't actually say it.

They have not signed the treaty.

They themselves are not violating, but if American companies or European companies or Russian companies sell equipment to those countries that's used...

We don't right now. We're not supplying Pakistan with aid. It's the one country that has been penalized under the nuclear nonproliferation act to be...

Other countries have pursued nuclear weapons at one time or another -- most important, South Africa, which admits to having produced seven nuclear bombs....

Does the NPT have a sunset?

You talked about your days at Columbia and protesting the Vietnam War. In your opinion, is there a legacy as a result of the Vietnam War in this country?

Have you ever served in the military?

How long have you been at Hampshire College?

When was the college formed?

You mentioned the others being Amherst and Smith?

Do they own Hampshire?

What's unusual?

Do you have any pass-fail at all?

What are most of the degrees in? What do they study?

From your experience are there any drawbacks to this kind of a school?

Where is it located?

And how many students do you have?

The author is Michael Klare, Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws. Thank you.