Unless the U.S. Embraces Peace! by Gerry Condon (originally published at Antiwar.com on July 15, 2024) EDITOR’S NOTE: We are republishing this article on the anniversary of the Trinity Test. On July 16, 1945 the United States government detonated the first (experimental) nuclear weapon in the test named Trinity. Less than one month after the Trinity test, the United States dropped two atomic bombs – on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – that killed over 100,000 people in less time than it took to type a few of these words. As many as 220,000 were dead from the effects […]
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Pouring more money into the end of the world, Trident style
Editor’s Comment: Here is one of those Congressional press releases that just reeks of the kind of patriotic fervor that precedes the end of the world… or at least pouring a ton of money into preparations for said omnicidal event (aka: nuclear war; euphemistically phrased “strengthen national security”). As for the numbers, he’s only asking for $115 million for the work that will accommodate the “aging” existing Trident submarines until all of their replacements are built and ready to prowl. Kings Bay is already undergoing a major renovation that will cost over $1 billion to prepare the base for the […]
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Donald Trump’s Reckless Infatuation with Nuclear Weapons
How the nuclear arms race intensified during Trump’s presidency EDITOR’S NOTE: THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN. BY LAWRENCE S. WITTNER Over the last decade and more, nuclear war has grown increasingly likely. Most nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements of the past have been discarded by the nuclear powers or will expire soon. Moreover, there are no nuclear arms control negotiations underway. Instead, all nine nuclear nations (Russia, the United States, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea) have begun a new nuclear arms race, qualitatively improving the 12,121 nuclear weapons in existence or building new, much faster, and deadlier […]
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Transformation or Annihilation?
Editor’s Introduction: Those who continue to keep the dream alive at Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action are grateful for Jim and Shelley Douglass, who were instrumental in co-creating and gently guiding us along the way in this experiment with truth throughout the years. This essay by Jim and Shelley was just published in the July 2024 Ground Zero Newsletter and offers a brief history of Ground Zero and of the Peace Pagoda being built there. Yet far beyond (and embedded deeply within) that history it offers an invitation – a universal invitation to transformation. As Jim wrote in his […]
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Frida Berrigan, How Vulnerable Are We?
June 20, 2024 Introduction by Tom Engelhardt I still remember going to New York’s Museum of Modern Art as a kid and seeing Pablo Picasso’s famed painting Guernica — 11.5 feet tall by 25.5 feet long! — hanging there. It was an eye-catching apparition, his gigantic 1937 protest against the devastating bombing of the town of Guernica by German planes connected to the forces of Spanish fascist leader Francisco Franco. And it was in New York because, for all the obvious reasons, it couldn’t be shown in Spain until after Franco, the only fascist winner in what became World War II, finally died in 1975. A mélange of […]
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