On 9 April 2007, after a $20 million, two-year restoration project, the Vimy Monument, the centerpiece of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France, was reopened to the public. In an elaborate ceremony also marking the 90th anniversary of the assault on Vimy Ridge, Prime Minister Stephen Harper told aRead More

On March 27, over 130 states will meet at UN headquarters in New York to commence negotiations, mandated by the General Assembly last December, on a treaty outlawing nuclear weapons. This country, alas (see my January column, ‘Divided Nations: Canada Ducks Disarmament Challenge’), will be joining most of its NATORead More

In my October column, “Roads to Hell: Nuclear Waste on the Move,” I reported on legal efforts to block shipments of highly-radioactive liquid waste from the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories in Ontario to the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina, a journey of over 2,000 kilometerss passing the GreatRead More

Dear Mr. Obama, During your momentous visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial last May, the first by a sitting US president, you placed the quest for a nuclear-weapon-free world in the profoundest of contexts: the struggle of humanity to transcend the darkest vices of its own nature. As you leaveRead More

On December 23 – the day after US President-elect Donald Trump tweeted his intent to “greatly strengthen and expand” American “nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes” – the United Nations General Assembly voted to open negotiations next year on a treaty outlawingRead More

On  7 November 2011, to great fanfare, the Verschuren Centre for Sustainability in Energy and the Environment (CSEE) was officially opened at Cape Breton University (CBU). A prominent participant in the ceremony, and key partner in the venture, was Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons manufacturer. Tom Digan, then presidentRead More

As we approach Remembrance Day, at the midpoint of the centenary of the First World War, it is instructive to consider a day in the life of that terrible time: Saturday, November 11, 1916. An online chronology documents the weather on the Western Front—“Rain, trace. 55°-32°, misty day with lowRead More

“It was an awesome spectacle,” the Austrian physicist Otto Frisch wrote in 1979, recalling the world’s first atomic explosion, the ‘Trinity’ test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, 44 years earlier. What most struck him was not the lethal radiance of “what has become so well known as the mushroom cloud” butRead More

Since the end of the Cold War, discussion of nuclear disarmament has been conspicuous by its absence from US politics—and, indeed, from debate and coverage in most countries. While the dangers of nuclear proliferation receive more attention, the intimate link between banning the Bomb and preventing its spread is rarelyRead More

Seventy-one years after the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “the danger of some sort of nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War, and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger.” The warning comes not from a lonely peacenik prophet-of-doom but a chastened member ofRead More