Author’s Note: As this year unlike any other grinds to a bleak close, I offer – in the spirit not of prophecy, but satiric thought-experiment – ‘alternate universe’ visions of the near future. And bear with me, dear reader, as I first appear to lose my mind…   “The extremelyRead 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

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

On numerous occasions in recent decades, Canadian governments have apologized for a host of egregious wrongdoings. While such words of contrition are too often unaccompanied by adequate actions, they can help make visible, as Trudeau argued in his 2017 apology, the “hard truths” Canadian society needs to confront. Yet theRead More

Have you seen that video clip of New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez questioning witnesses during a recent hearing by the House Oversight and Reform Committee? The committee was considering strengthening ethics rules for the executive branch of government (i.e. the president) and Ocasio-Cortez used the opportunity to highlight how muchRead More

At 11:02 A.M. on 9 August 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped a single bomb on the Japanese port city of Nagasaki. The bomb, nicknamed ‘Fat Man,’ contained a baseball of plutonium surrounded by 64 packs of high-explosive, timed to compress the warhead to a critical mass. As Susan SouthardRead More

Ban the Bomb If Spectator contributor Sean Howard has raised your awareness (and the hairs on the back of your neck) about nuclear weapons and the need for disarmament, you may well be wondering, “But what can I do?” (Other, of course, than dismantling your own stock of intercontinental ballisticRead 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

“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