William M. Arkin is an online Washington Post columnist, NBC News military analyst, consultant, and author.  He writes the "Early Warning" column for Washingtonpost.com (where he previously wrote the "DOT.MIL" column from 1998-2003).  For the spring 2007 semester, Arkin is National Security and Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Arkin’s work as a military analyst for NBC News has spanned Operation Desert Fox in Iraq in 1998, the 1999 Yugoslav war (Operation Allied Force), the events of September 11, and current operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Arkin previously served as Senior Military Adviser to Human Rights Watch (HRW), the largest international human rights and law organization in the United States.  From 2001-2003, Arkin was a columnist for The Los Angeles Times. From 1985-2002, he wrote the “Last Word” column in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and co-authored the bi-monthly NRDC “Nuclear Notebook,” the standard accounting of the world’s nuclear arsenals.  He also contributed to the yearbook of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) from 1984-2002.  He has been a contributing editor for Laser Report and has written on technical military matters for the trade newsletter Defense Daily.  Arkin has also previously served as a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Strategic Education at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC, and an Adjunct at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, U.S. Air Force, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. 

Arkin served in the U.S. Army as an intelligence analyst in West Berlin from 1974-1978.  After leaving the Army, he wrote a ground breaking book in 1981 on how to do research on military and national security affairs, coauthored the first volume of the Nuclear Weapons Databook series for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the first comprehensive unclassified reference book on nuclear weapons, a book the Reagan administration sought to suppress on secrecy grounds.  He then coauthored a best selling book in 1985 – Nuclear Battlefields – revealing the locations of all U.S. and foreign nuclear bases worldwide.  Again the Reagan Administration condemned the work.

Throughout his career, Arkin’s research and writing resulted in the first public disclosure of numerous military and nuclear weapons programs, plans, and practices.  He was the first to write about the Bush administration’s Nuclear Posture Review after 9/11, and wrote about the original war plan for Operation Iraqi Freedom.  He was first to reveal the extreme religious views of Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, the nation’s top terrorist hunter.  Earlier, his revelation of "mini-nuke" research efforts in 1992 led to the subsequent 1994 Congressional ban.  His New York Times op-ed in 1994 revealing U.S. blinding laser programs led to a Defense Department decision to agree to an international ban on such weapons.  In the early 1980's, Arkin revealed the existence of Presidentially approved U.S. contingency plans for the movement of nuclear weapons to overseas bases during crisis and wartime, a plan which violated the non-nuclear policies of a number of nations and territories (e.g., Bermuda, Iceland, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Spain).  He not only later revealed the extent of the worldwide infrastructure of nuclear warmaking in Nuclear Battlefields, but he subsequently coauthored “Soviet Nuclear Weapons,” the fourth volume of the NRDC Databook series, and another ground-breaking volume that described the Soviet nuclear machine.

Arkin hasn’t just been sitting behind a desk.  He toured Germany to research the presence of nuclear weapons in the 1980’s, research which became the basis for the first authoritative description of the Cold War nuclear legacy of thousands of weapons deployed on West German soil.  He was a member of the first ever private delegation to observe Soviet nuclear warheads as part of the NRDC-Soviet Academy of Sciences “Black Sea” experiment (June 1989), and he was one of the first westerners to visit a Soviet nuclear weapons storage site (June 1991).  Since Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Arkin has also conducted bomb damage assessments on the ground in Iraq, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Eritrea, visiting a total of more than 800 targets that have been the subject of attack.   He is well known as the pioneer in the method of independent fieldwork and research to investigate the effects of weapons and warfare on civilian populations. 

From 1981-1993, Arkin worked at a number of non-governmental think tanks and organizations in Washington, pioneering independent research on U.S. military activities, particularly the methods of empirical and field research.  In the late 1980’s, Arkin conceived Greenpeace International’s “Nuclear Free Seas” campaign.  He authored or co-authored seven research papers in the Neptune Papers monograph series and supervised a staff of researchers who tracked naval nuclear weapons worldwide.  The revelation of routine U.S. carriage of nuclear weapons and the violation of numerous countries ban on nuclear port visits contributed to a Bush administration decision in 1990 to remove tactical nuclear weapons from U.S. ships and submarines. 

Arkin headed Greenpeace International’s war response team in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and co-authored On Impact -- Modern Warfare and the Environment: A Case of the Gulf War, the first comprehensive study of the civilian and environmental effects of the war.  In 1991 (and again in 1993), Arkin visited Iraq to evaluate civilian damage as part of the so-called “Harvard Study Team” (the International Study Team), conducting one of the most methodical on-the-ground bomb damage assessments after the war.  His work in Yugoslavia after Operation Allied Force and in Afghanistan after Operation Enduring Freedom is the standard for understanding the impact of those conflicts.  He served as military advisor to a United Nations fact-finding mission in Israel and Lebanon in 2006.   He is currently working on an empirical monograph for the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, using data from Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, to answer the question “Why Civilians Die.”

Arkin has briefed the findings of his investigations before dozens of government audiences: the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the CIA, various offices on the Air Staff and various senior service schools and war colleges, to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, naval intelligence, the Central Air Forces (CENTAF) staff, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Photographic Interpretation Center, the Joint Warfare Analysis Center (JWAC), and various "Lessons Learned" projects (Operation Enduring Look, the Gulf War Air Power Survey (GWAPS), Center for Naval Analysis).  Arkin has also served as a consultant on Iraq to the office of the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Arkin is author or co-author of several books, and has authored or co-authored over 500 articles and conference papers on military affairs, as well as chapters in more than two dozen edited books.  His articles have appeared in publications as diverse as The Nation and military journals (Airpower Journal, Army, Marine Corps Gazette), as well as academic publications. 

Arkin’s work has additionally been frequently featured on countless NBC-TV programs, on CBS' "60 Minutes," ABC's "20/20," various BBC programs, NPR, CNN, and the History and Discovery Channels.  He has been quoted in countless foreign print and broadcast media.  Arkin has appeared in numerous documentaries, lectured regularly at college campuses, at World Affairs Councils, at the military war colleges, and to local organizations and groups throughout the U.S. and in thirteen foreign countries.  His books have been translated into Chinese, German, Russian, Spanish, and Japanese.  He is listed in Who's Who in America.