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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Veterans for Peace say, “President Biden: STOP Arming Israel… It’s the LAW!”
Editor’s Note: The following news release from Veterans for Peace describes its letter to President Biden reminding him of his responsibility under both international (treaty) and domestic law that requires the termination of all military aid. Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action endorses VFP’s position as stated in its letter to President Biden, and we urge other organizations and all people of conscience to stand with VFP in this matter. by Veterans For Peace | Winter 2024 Edition of Peace & Planet News In a letter to President Biden and top members of his administration, Veterans For Peace cited existing […]
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We Need an Alternative to Nuclear- Armed Nationalism
If “war made the state and the state made war,” then the state, as currently perceived, at least by those besotted with military power, is the problem. By Robert C. Koehler An enormous flash, a mushroom cloud, multi-thousands of human beings dead. We win! Nuclear weapons won’t go away, the cynics—the souls in despair—tell us. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. You can’t, as Gen. James E. Cartwright, former head of U.S. Strategic Command, once put it, “un-invent nuclear weapons.” So apparently we’re stuck with them until the “big oops” happens and humanity becomes extinct. Until then: […]
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