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

I did not weep, I turned to stone inside…Dante, Inferno   I rarely cry, but on the evening of 8 December 1987, glued to radio coverage of the signing of a nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Soviet Union, I wept with a relief I had neverRead More

Grandstanding Okay, so on Tuesday, as I was burrowing through the documents I’d received from the feds relating to the 2012 sale of the Royal Cape Breton Yacht Club, I thought I might try to follow the CBRM Council meeting about the library at the same time. (You know howRead More

In 2003, Peace Quest Cape Breton launched a modest campaign for a ‘Pentagon Vacation’: a two-week (336-hour) reduction in the US Defense Department’s annual budget of $379 million (all figures in US dollars)– a saving, calculating 14 days at a Pentagon Hour (PH) rate of $42 million/hour, of around $14Read More

What better way to begin 2019 than by looking back at 2018 with CBRM Mayor Cecil Clarke? Clarke appeared on CBC radio’s Information Morning Cape Breton on January 3 to reflect on the year just passed and the Spectator listened with interest. In particular, it listened to the discussion ofRead More

On 27 July 1953, the Korean War Armistice was signed, suspending hostilities (after 4 million deaths, mostly civilian, in three years) “until a final peaceful settlement” was “achieved at a political conference” to be convened “within three months.” Sure enough, less than 90 days later, a treaty was concluded: theRead...

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

As I write this column, I am struggling to make ethical sense of current events. How can politicians like Donald Trump shamelessly tell lie after lie, and still have a significant number of people willing to support them? How can men who make or act in sensitive and enlightened filmsRead...

“The road to hell,” the saying goes, is “paved with good intentions.” If a path to peace in Korea, however long and winding, emerges from the currently scheduled June 12 Singapore summit between President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un, it will have been paved by the best and worstRead More

Immigration is never an easy political discussion, but I believe that the Canadian government was moving in the right direction with its announcement in November 2017 that it was working to accept economic immigrants, families seeking reunification with relatives already in residence and refugees fleeing war and/or persecution in otherRead...