Arkin, William M.: - William M. Arkin has been working in the field of national security for over 45 years, as a military intelligence analyst, activist, author, journalist, academic and consultant to government. His award-winning reporting has appeared on the front pages of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. As an analyst and reporter for NBC News, Arkin has been one of the few regular on-air military analysts who was not a retired general or admiral, and as such he brought a "civilian" perspective to contemporary military affairs, helping both the public and the government better understand the Kosovo war, 9/11 and terrorism, the attacks on Afghanistan, the Iraq War, Russian interference in the 2016 elections, and the Trump era. He has also been an expert or guest on NBC's Meet the Press and been a repeat guest on CBS News 60 Minutes, 20/20, Dateline and in long-form programs such as Frontline and the History Channel. Arkin served in U.S. Army intelligence from 1974-1978. After that he worked at a variety of non-profit think tanks and advocacy groups dealing with the military and nuclear weapons (the Center for Defense Information, the Institute for Policy Studies, Greenpeace International, Natural Resource Defense Council, Federation of American Scientists). He left Washington for good in 1994, continuing as a consultant to the NRDC and FAS, and doing new work for Human Rights Watch and the National Security Archive. He also became a consultant and adjunct professor for the U.S. Air Force. Though he had written many articles, in 1998, he turned journalism, invited by the Washingtonpost.com to write one of the first online columns. Arkin's unique career started with Army intelligence in Cold War Berlin from 1974-1978 where he conducted both collection and analysis. After he left the Army, he decided to write books and work in the public interest. Since then he has worked as a military adviser to the most influential non-governmental human rights and environmental organizations, equally at ease heading Greenpeace International's response to the first Gulf War in 1991 or being an adjunct professor at the U.S. Air Force's premier strategy school. He is weirdly proud to say that he spent the night in Saddam General Hospital in 1991 after being injured by an unexploded cluster bomb in Iraq and that some of his fondest memories are picking through the rubble of Slobodan Milosevic's Belgrade villa and Taliban leader Mullah Omar's compound outside Kandahar in Afghanistan. He is probably the only person alive who can say that he has written for The Nation magazine, Defense Daily and Marine Corps Gazette. He has been both a columnist and reporter with The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, and has worked for Vice News and Gawker. During the Cold War he was a long-time columnist for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Arkin aslo coauthored (with Robert S. Norris) the "NRDC Nuclear Notebook" since 1987, later joined by Hans Kristensen. And from 1999-2018, Arkin has been an on and off consultant and national security investigator for MSNBC and NBC News. Over the course of his career, Arkin's specialty has been to conceive and implement large-scale and original data projects and public campaigns about the secret world. His 1980's research resulted in the first revelation ever of where all nuclear weapons in the world were located. That work culminated in the publication of the best-selling Nuclear Battlefields: Global Links in the Arms Race (with Richard W. Fieldhouse) (1985). He was one of the conceivers of the ground-breaking Nuclear Weapons Databook series for NRDC, ultimately a five-volume encyclopedia that challenged secrecy during the Reagan years. He conceived of and led the research for the Nuclear free Seas campaign of Greenpeace International, which combined activism and information to eliminate all tactical nuclear weapons from the U.S. Navy. He conceived off and published the first authoritative dictionary of U.S. secret programs in Codenames. And he conceived of and co-wrote Top Secret America for The Washington Post.