Never one to suffer subtlety gladly, or overpolish the written word, US President Donald J. Trump on January 3 ‘spoke’ to the world by tweet: an American flag, behind which, we soon learned, lay the body of Iranian General Qassam Suleimani (and seven other human beings), assassinated by drone inRead More
![April 23, 2015: NASA and ESA are celebrating the Hubble Space Telescope's silver anniversary of 25 years in space by unveiling some of nature's own fireworks — a giant cluster of about 3,000 stars called Westerlund 2. The cluster resides inside a vibrant stellar breeding ground known as Gum 29, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina. The comparatively young, 2-million-year-old star cluster contains some of our galaxy's hottest, brightest, and most massive stars. The largest stars are unleashing a torrent of ultraviolet light and hurricane-force winds that etch away the enveloping hydrogen gas cloud. This creates a fantasy celestial landscape of pillars, ridges, and valleys. (NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), A. Nota (ESA/STScI), and the Westerlund 2 Science Team [Public domain]](https://capebretonspectator.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Hubble_feature_image-200x150.png)
The law I am signing today provides $738 billion – that’s with a “B”. That’s an all-time record. … That brings our total investment in national defense, since my inauguration, to almost two and a half trillion dollars. And what’s the good of a budget if you don’t have theRead More
Author’s Note: Since September 2018, I have been reporting on the extraordinary story of the Kings Bay Plowshares Seven (KBP7), a group of veteran anti-nuclear Catholic activists currently awaiting sentencing for acts of non-violent ‘symbolic disarmament’ at the Kings Bay Trident submarine base in Georgia, home to America’s East CoastRead More
In the atomic age, who needs the four horsemen of the apocalypse – pestilence, war, famine, and death – when one will do? In mid-October, North Korean ‘Supreme Leader’ Kim Jong-un rode a white horse up a snow-peaked mountain, gazing from the summit with a “mien” so “dignified” – inRead More
It’s not open by much, and it might shut soon, but the diminished return of the Trudeau Liberals has created a ‘window’ to review The Incredible Shrinking Issue of the 2019 election: Canada’s foreign and defense priorities in an age of grave and growing nuclear peril. Though domestic politics naturallyRead More
Editor’s Note: What follows is a press release from Peace Quest Cape Breton, which is headed by the Spectator‘s own Sean Howard. Howard has written in detail about the group here and again here. Peace Quest Cape Breton condemns the unfair trial and unjust conviction of the Kings Bay PlowsharesRead...
First of all, thank you to the candidates who took the time to respond to our questions — Michelle Dockrill, Lois Foster, Jodi McDavid and Kenzie MacNeil. As promised, we extended the deadline to Thursday at 5:00 PM for those candidates who had not yet replied, and here are theRead More
Sean Howard, the Spectator‘s war and peace commentator, asked this question of federal candidates in Cape Breton-Canso and Sydney Victoria: In the 1990s Canada was a leader on international disarmament, receiving plaudits for its role in negotiating the ‘Ottawa Convention’ banning landmines, and earning the nickname ‘the nuclear nag’ forRead More
A more telling or ironic snapshot of endangered Mother Earth in the 21st century could scarcely be imagined: a naval war game by a nuclear-armed alliance delayed by a storm that drew its force from the human-caused warming of the oceans. The hurricane, of course, was Dorian, and the warRead More
To set the tone for their recent article on Twenty-First Century Nuclear Deterrence , four senior American nuclear war-planners approvingly quote from Arms and Influence, Thomas Schelling’s classic 1966 defense of ‘coercive diplomacy’ in the atomic age: The power to hurt – the sheer unacquisitive, unproductive power to destroy thingsRead More
