Last October, in anticipation of a change of presidential administration in the United States, I interviewed Matt Korda of the Federation of American Scientists on the prospects for a progressive reformation of American foreign and defense policy . Korda expressed what I would characterize as ‘qualified pessimism’ about the potentialRead More

The Known World how can something known become unknown in so little time Mi’kmaw poet Shalan Joudry   Which is in worse shape, the form or content of Canadian federal democracy? The shape it takes is doubly deformed, for while all ‘first-past-the-post’ systems are unfair, guaranteed to deliver only disproportionateRead More

Souls pass through torrent and the whole situation is intolerable. David Jones, In Parenthesis   The Welsh author David Jones (1895-1974) titled his experimental Great War memoir In Parenthesis for three reasons: “because I have written it in a kind of space between – I don’t know between quite what;”Read More

I could not understand why our surroundings had changed so greatly in one instant. I thought it might have been something which had nothing to do with the war, the collapse of the earth which it was said would take place at the end of the world, and which IRead More

Bikini, which was once inhabited by a hundred Marshallese, which once belonged to the Germans, and then the Japanese, now belongs to an unknown future along with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. David Bradley, No Place to Hide Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No: thisRead More

It’s Stockholm, 14 December, 1992, and Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev has begun to address over 50 of his counterparts at a summit meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), an institution widely considered instrumental in helping end the Cold War. Just two years afterRead More

“There was no shortage of resources to avoid the tragedy of a Famine. … Instead, the government pursued the objective of economic, social and agrarian reform as a long-term aim, although the price paid for this ultimately elusive goal was privation, disease, emigration, mortality and an enduring legacy of disenchantment.”–Read More

Wen Mr Clevver wuz Big Man…they had evere thing clevver. — Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker    Last month, I explored the potential political impact of a newly-commissioned study by the American National Academies of Sciences on the environmental effects of nuclear war. This month, I turn to a recently-concluded study intoRead More

“We now send greetings and thanks to our eldest Brother, the Sun. Each day without fail he travels the sky from east to west, bringing the light of a new day. He is the source of all the fires of life…” — From Greetings to the Natural World, the ThanksgivingRead More

As previewed in last month’s column, on January 22, the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) – popularly known as ‘The Ban Treaty’ – became international law. Hailed by UN Secretary General António Guterres as “a major step toward a world free of nuclear weapons,” itRead More