nuclear weapons

By Mark Maslin, UCL | – Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer has revived morbid curiosity in the destructive power of nuclear weapons. There are now an estimated 12,512 nuclear warheads. A war in which even a fraction of these bombs were detonated would create blast waves and fires capable of killing millions of […]

Corporations

The Profiteers of Armageddon: Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex

William D. Hartung

( Tomdispatch.com) – Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you’re undoubtedly aware that award-winning director Christopher Nolan has released a new film about Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb” for leading the group of scientists who created that deadly weapon as part of America’s World […]

Climate Crisis

Beating Warheads into Windmills

H. Patricia Hynes

By H Patricia Hynes and Timmon Wallis | – While we were planning this article, a cascade of crises shattered climate records. July 3-6 set a record for the hottest world average temperatures yet measured. In our state, western Massachusetts was saturated almost daily with heavy humidity and record-setting rain, whose floods devastated $10 million […]

Featured

As long as Nukes are on the Table in Ukraine, We are Skating at the Edge of Global Catastrophe

Peter G. Prontzos

Vancouver (Special to Informed Comment; Featured) – Russian President Vladimir Putin has broached he use of battlefield nuclear weapons in Ukraine, We all hope it is an empty threat, since such an escalation could possibly trigger an all-out global holocaust. However, nothing is certain in war, and there are many scenarios in which nuclear weapons […]

Climate Crisis

The Radiance of a Thousand Suns: Can we dodge Two Torrid Disasters of our own Making?

Tom Engelhardt

( Tomdispatch.com ) – In case you hadn’t noticed — and how could you not? — there have been more than 500 (yes, 500-plus!) wildfires burning across the vast reaches of Canada, an unheard-of number, and more than half of them completely out of (human) control in a record-shattering fire season. That’s been true for […]

National Security State

Are the Best Years of My Country Behind Me? Reflections on a Long-Ago Tour of Los Alamos and the Trinity Atomic Test Site

William J. Astore

( Tomdispatch.com) – I turn 60 this year. My health is generally good, though I have aches and pains from a form of arthritis. I’m not optimistic enough to believe that the best years of my life are ahead of me, nor so pessimistic as to assume that the best years are behind me. But […]

nuclear weapons

90 Seconds to Midnight: The Doomsday Clock and Me

Frida Berrigan

(Tomdispatch.com ) – I’m not a TikTok person. I’m too old. But when I finally ventured onto that popular but much-maligned app, which traffics in short videos and hot takes, I was surprised to find many videos about the Doomsday Clock. It’s nothing like a conventional timepiece, of course. It’s meant to show how close […]

Climate Crisis

Prophecies, Then and Now: My Life at World’s End

Tom Engelhardt

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Indulge me for a moment. This is how “The Prophecy” in my 1962 high school yearbook began. It was written by some of my classmates in the year we graduated from Friends Seminary in New York City. “Being an historian, I am jotting down these notes out of habit, but what I […]

military

On Missing Dr. Strangelove: Or how Americans learned to Stop Worrying and forgot the Bomb

Andrew J. Bacevich

( Tomdispatch.com) – Bosley Crowther, chief film critic for the New York Times, didn’t quite know what to make of Dr. Strangelove at the time of its release in January 1964. Stanley Kubrick’s dark antiwar satire was “beyond any question the most shattering sick joke I’ve ever come across,” he wrote. But if the film […]