Antiwar.com Blog

During the Cold War there were similar dangerous moments, but John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, as well as Ronald Reagan and Michael Gorbachev, managed to avoid the worst-case scenario. George H.W. Bush talked in 1990 about a “Europe whole and free” and a new “security architecture from Vancouver to Vladivostok,” while Boris Yeltsin, during his 1992 address to the joint chambers of Congress, exclaimed, “God bless America.”

So, what went wrong? Why are we talking about nuclear war again? According to Washington, Putin and his desire to restore the Soviet empire are to blame. Moscow points the finger back at Washington for its vision of a unipolar world order under the U.S. hegemony.

Below is my brief take, which I would be happy to debate with those who see it differently. Perhaps during such exchanges, we could come up with some ideas for avoiding our mutual extinction.

Continue reading “How Bill Clinton Looted Russia and Started NATO Expansion”

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.

Seventy-eight years have now passed since the United States initiated a policy known as “first use” with its atomic attack on Hiroshima. Three days later, on August 9, 1945, it was affirmed with a second detonation over the city of Nagasaki. No nuclear attacks have followed since, although many Americans are probably unaware that this first-strike policy very much remains in effect.

And that’s a problem.

The policy signals that any U.S. president has the authority to order a pre-emptive nuclear strike—not merely in retaliation if and when missiles start flying in our direction. Our warheads could be launched in defense of allies, after the onset of a conventional war involving our troops (think: Iraq, 2003) or in response to a bellicose threat posed by a nuclear (e.g., North Korea) or not-yet-nuclear state (e.g., Iran).

Continue reading “Dangerous ‘First Strike’ Nuclear Policy Adopted in 1945 Still Exists Today”

On COI #466, Kyle Anzalone and Connor Freeman discuss Russia, China and the Middle East.

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Foreign Policy expert John Mearsheimer on the current state of the Ukraine-Russian War.

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Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.

Back in July 1985, when I was editor of the leading antinuclear magazine Nuclear Times, the new issue of the venerable Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists landed on my desk in NYC carrying a startling article by a physicist I’d never heard of, revealing that he had walked away from bomb work at Los Alamos on principle.

His name was Joseph Rotblat and, as it turned out, he was apparently the only scientist who resigned his position in taking a moral stand. I had wondered where he was in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer but now we can view him in another film.

An article today at Literary Hub – which has published two of my Bomb-related pieces since 2020 – reminded me about Rotblat and I’d like to excerpt from it below.

Written by Lauren Carroll Harris, it holds the headline, “Beyond Tortured Genius: Science and Conscience in Two Rediscovered Oppenheimer Films.” One of the films you may know and it has drawn a lot of post-Oppenheimer attention: The Day After Trinity, by Jon Else, a celebrated doc on Oppie and the bomb, produced for PBS around 1980 when I first saw it. So let’s stick to the second, new to me, from 2008, The Strangest Dream, from Canada, which focuses on Rotblat.

Continue reading “The Physicist Who Quit Los Alamos, on Principle”

Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.

As a retired Air Force officer and military historian, I’m familiar with all kinds of euphemisms about killing, e.g. “precision bombing” and “collateral damage.”  Just as it’s easier to kill at a distance, it’s easier to kill when we use words that provide distance from the act.  Words that facilitate detachment. Words that befuddle and confuse our minds.

When writing honestly about war, it’s best to use bullet-hits-the-bone words: atrocity, murder, war crime, slaughter. Rape, pillage, burn are “old” words associated with war, and these words often most fittingly describe war and its likely effects and outcomes.

Continue reading “Talking and Writing Honestly About War”