“Nuclear weapons are like a rifle hanging on the wall in a play. We did not write the play, we are not staging it and we do not know what the author intends. Anyone could take the rifle from the wall at any time.” — Mikhail Gorbachev, What Is atRead 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

  Editor’s Note: Spectator contributor Sean Howard begins the New Year with a two-part consideration of the actual legacy — both domestic and global — of the 41st President of the United States, George Herbert Walker Bush. This month, in Part 2, Howard considers Bush’s foreign policy failures. (Read Part I)  Read 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

Author’s Note: This article is dedicated to the memory of Celia Lorway (1944-2017), a member of Peace Quest Cape Breton and for many years a dedicated, articulate champion of human health, social justice, nuclear disarmament, and a world free of the scourge of war. At UN Headquarters in August 2002,Read More

Joe Ward, author of The Councillors’ Pledge, is running for Councillor in District 7. That’s right, the guy who wrote the councilor rule book and coerced incumbent and wannabe councilors to play by his rules has entered the political game. Is that fair? Isn’t that like the developer of PokémonRead 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