By Lawrence Wittner (Guest Contributor) [Dr. Lawrence Wittner (https://www.lawrenceswittner.com/ ) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).] Decades ago, when I began teaching international history, I used to ask students if they thought it was possible for nations to end their fighting of wars against one another. Their responses varied. But the more pessimistic conclusions were sometimes tempered by the contention that, if the world’s nations faced a common foe, such as an invasion from another planet, this would finally pull them together. I was reminded of this on March […]
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Military secrecy undermines pandemic response
Opinion by Glen Milner, originally published in the Kitsap Sun on April 6, 2020, https://www.kitsapsun.com/story/opinion/columnists/2020/04/06/your-turn-military-secrecy-undermines-pandemic-response/2955559001 In the midst of a pandemic, the Department of Defense continues to keep local communities in the dark about threats to the public. Only now the threat is not a potential risk, but involves the ongoing spread of the coronavirus on military bases and in military communities. On March 27, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper ordered commanders at all DOD installations worldwide to stop publicly announcing new coronavirus cases among their personnel. Defense Department leaders stated that secrecy during the pandemic was necessary because adversaries […]
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Happy (40th) Anniversary Ground Zero Newsletter!
Forty years ago this month, in February 1979, the people of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action published their first newsletter, Ground Zero, Volume 1, Number 1. The inaugural newsletter represented a much different era (technologically) than the one we know today. And yet the spirit behind, and within, it remains much the same. Ground Zero’s Glen Milner puts it in perspective: “Mimeograph machines were a modern technology in the 1970s. Technologies change but a lot of things haven’t.” Ground Zero co-founder Shelley Douglass remembers that the newsletter was “typed on a stencil if I’m remembering correctly” (and I’m pretty […]
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Trump’s Got His New Nuke: And it’s on Trident!
By Leonard Eiger Theses are dark days for the Republic and for the world, and not just because we have an out of control president who believes he can do whatever he chooses and is accountable to no one, but because that same president has a new nuclear weapon at his disposal, and it is a nuclear weapon that he just might use one day. Here’s the story. In a gift to the Grinch, the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) went from being opposed by every House Republican in July (2019) to being overwhelming approved by both Republicans and […]
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Put civilization at the top of our agenda!
Editor’s Note: This post is a letter to the editor written by Ground Zero’s Mary Gleysteen, It was published in the Kitsap Sun on January 27, 2020. We invite you to write letters to the editor of your local newspapers. Click here to learn more about the Doomsday Clock. Check out our Take Action page to learn more about the new “low-yield” W76-2 Trident warhead. ******** The Sun just ran an article about the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moving the Doomsday Clock to 100 Seconds to Midnight. This represents the closest we have come to destroying civilization with dangerous technologies of our own making since the clock’s […]
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