“War is not the only thing that, to occur, must be waged.” —Judith Lipton and David Barash, Strength Through Peace   It now seems like a bygone age, but it was only on December 15 last year that the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs presented a draft Treaty on ‘SecurityRead More

On April 21, Siegfried Hecker, a world-leading authority on nuclear security and proliferation, told John Mecklin, editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine constituted “a major hinge, a turning point in the nuclear world”: as “big a hinge as when the Soviet Union dissolved.”Read More

I want to escape from my own threshold. Where to? The street is dark And conscience shows up ahead of me, white, Like salt scattered for pavements. Osip Mandelshtam (1891-1938)   On 23 January 2015, 49-year-old Ruslan Kotsaba – journalist and blogger, president of the Ukrainian Pacifist Society and anRead More

Fiddling while the world burns? I don’t know about you, but every time I find myself doing something that does not involve contemplating the darker aspects of the Freedom Convoy or the horrible developments in Ukraine or the increasingly obvious manifestations of climate change, I feel like I’m being aRead More

  Sometimes it seems we are living in different worlds — Vladimir Putin, 23 December 2021 There is another world, and it is this one — French poet Paul Éluard   The curtain was raised on 2022 with the stage set for not one, not two, but three major regional conflicts,Read More

Editor’s Note: I had to read the book, conduct and transcribe an interview and write the story about Maxwell Hartt’s Quietly Shrinking Cities this week, which left me very little time for other reporting but I would like to note a couple of interesting items that popped up in myRead More

At noon local time, September 3, North Korea conducted its sixth nuclear test, an estimated 100-120 kiloton detonation – seven or eight times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima – of what it claimed was a two-stage (fission-fusion) thermonuclear hydrogen warhead small enough to fit in the coneRead More

The Mooch As brushes with celebrity go, it’s not much of one, but I almost interviewed Anthony Scaramucci. At the time, I didn’t much care when my boss decided it would be easier to do the interview herself, but in light of his meteoric political rise and fall —  IRead More

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

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