Premier King My interest in the recent PEI election, I will admit, was largely confined to the referendum on moving from a first-past-the-post electoral system to a mixed-member-proportional (MMP) system, which islanders ultimately chose not to do. The success of the Green Party on election night also piqued my interestRead More

Last November I lamented ‘The Lost Art of Arms Control,‘ the abject failure to build on the platform left by the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, and US President Ronald Reagan, who famously urged Gorbachev to “tear down” the Berlin Wall dividing Europe into nuclear-armed camps. Nearly 30Read More

In every cry of every Man, In every Infant’s cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear William Blake   Was the June 12 Singapore Summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un a breakthrough or a let-down, a successRead More

Occasionally, it takes us a while to accept something that is hard to understand, does not jibe with our script of the world, or plainly, just doesn’t make any damn sense. And I am here to say now, finally, over a month into this springtime of our discontent, that IRead 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

American presidential elections are not won at the base of either party. The dichotomy of the two major American parties has historically rested on a fairly centrist pivot, where roughly 40% of both Republicans and Democrats can be found. This loose crowd in the center, unpinned by party affiliation orRead 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