A Peculiar Calm
We fight about almost everything in this contentious country of ours. Issues large and small, everything from silly memes to matters of life and death. It’s a dispute-filled, angry existence. The discord is most obvious in the deadlock over politics. But the contest over cultural values is, if anything, even fiercer. It’s gotten so bad that columnists regularly offer up advice on how to navigate family events without arguments and shouting. There are just so many subjects we don’t agree on.
Which is what makes nuclear weapons so curious. It is the one oasis of calm in our bedlam of noise and argument. Other issues incite TV screens crammed with experts shouting over one another. Not nuclear weapons. It is the one area where we seem to be in full agreement. That’s odd, isn’t it?
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Railing Against Myths
So, I recently read Sheldon M. Stern's The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths Versus Reality. The blurb on the back said it "exposes the misconceptions, half-truths, and outright lies . . ." about the crisis. As a student of the missile crisis, I thought it would have new and interesting things to say. I was disappointed.
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I publish an article in Inkstick
Nuclear weapons are certain to go away because human beings improve all our technology over time. There are no exceptions. So if we know nuclear weapons will eventually be displaced, doesn’t it make sense to discuss that eventuality?
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Millennials and Nuclear War
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) conducted a survey recently and the results, I think will shock you.
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A Whole World Out There
The article’s headline read “Belgium debates phase-out of US nuclear weapons on its soil.”
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Sober Mornings--Killing the Quds Commander
Yesterday the United States used an unmanned drone to kill the commander of the Quds forces of the Iranian military in his car near the airport in Baghdad. Gen. Qassem Soleimani had been instrumental in building up Iranian alliances with various militia forces in the Middle East . . .
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Lunch with Song Min-Soon
“South Korea is talking about building its own nuclear weapons. The man who published the opinion piece raising this idea is a Mr. Song. I had lunch with Song Min-Soon in Washington some years ago.”
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Statement in Support of the Kings Bay Seven
“Raising questions about policies that risk our nation’s survival is not rude or impolitic or unpatriotic, it is a civic responsibility, a basic duty of every citizen.”
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Helsinki
A friend of mine texted me breathlessly when the president of the United States said, in an interview, that when he met with President Putin of Russia, they might discuss doing away with nuclear weapons altogether. It is typical of our president to dangle the thing we want before our eyes and pretend to consider doing it.
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US/North Korean Summit
There is a good deal of excitement in the nuclear weapons space about the possibility of a summit between North Korea's Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald J. Trump.
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