August 11, 2021 at 1:02 pm
I could not understand why our surroundings had changed so greatly in one instant. I thought it might have been something which had nothing to do with the war, the collapse of the earth which it was said would take place at the end of the world, and which IRead More
August 5, 2020 at 2:49 pm
The New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ recently reported how, in the depths of the Big Apple’s COVID-19 lockdown, musician David Mansfield discovered a rusted hatch in his overgrown backyard. Prizing it open, he descended a ladder to a nuclear fall-out shelter, a claustrophobic capsule – or “David Bowie tinRead More
August 22, 2018 at 9:02 am
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 More
February 21, 2018 at 12:06 pm
This past fall, I boarded a one-way flight to New York City with two outrageously sized suitcases, a backpack and a yoga mat. I had a faint idea about what I would be doing in the Big Apple, but nothing could have prepared me for what lay ahead in theRead More
August 9, 2017 at 12:03 pm
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
March 8, 2017 at 11:40 am
On March 27, over 130 states will meet at UN headquarters in New York to commence negotiations, mandated by the General Assembly last December, on a treaty outlawing nuclear weapons. This country, alas (see my January column, ‘Divided Nations: Canada Ducks Disarmament Challenge’), will be joining most of its NATORead More
August 3, 2016 at 12:02 pm
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