On April 21, Siegfried Hecker, a world-leading authority on nuclear security and proliferation, told John Mecklin, editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine constituted “a major hinge, a turning point in the nuclear world”: as “big a hinge as when the Soviet Union dissolved.”Read More

In April 1982, when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, I was a young man of 16: old enough to fight, kill, and die for a British government I was too young to vote for. Forty years on, the UK voting age is still too high (18) and the Army recruitmentRead More

If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war. In a day when vehicles hurtle through outer space and guided ballistic missiles carve highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can claim victory inRead More

I want to escape from my own threshold. Where to? The street is dark And conscience shows up ahead of me, white, Like salt scattered for pavements. Osip Mandelshtam (1891-1938)   On 23 January 2015, 49-year-old Ruslan Kotsaba – journalist and blogger, president of the Ukrainian Pacifist Society and anRead More

The work, my friends, is peace, more than an end of this war – an end to the beginning of all wars, yes, an end, forever, to this impractical, unrealistic settlement of the differences between governments by the mass killing of peoples — Draft of undelivered Jefferson Day speech byRead More

Fiddling while the world burns? I don’t know about you, but every time I find myself doing something that does not involve contemplating the darker aspects of the Freedom Convoy or the horrible developments in Ukraine or the increasingly obvious manifestations of climate change, I feel like I’m being aRead More

  Sometimes it seems we are living in different worlds — Vladimir Putin, 23 December 2021 There is another world, and it is this one — French poet Paul Éluard   The curtain was raised on 2022 with the stage set for not one, not two, but three major regional conflicts,Read More

In late August The New Yorker featured a fascinating, slightly awestruck examination of “the Costa Rica Model” of “health care that understands its community,” by American surgeon and professor of public health Atul Gawande. Gawande, nominated by President Biden to serve as assistant administrator of the US Aid and DevelopmentRead More

We have committed the fatal sin in public policy of becoming cynical and arrogant with respect to decisions affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people. We have trivialized the likelihood that deterrence might fail, thus providing easy moral cover for ignoring the consequences. We have learned to liveRead More

This year, 2021, marks the centenary of the first appearance in Canada and Britain of the red poppy as the official emblem of war remembrance: a single symbol of sacrifice that has dominated the rites and rhythms of November 11, Armistice Day, each year since. The idea of selling artificialRead More