Tomgram: William Hartung, Cashing in on a Perpetual Nuclear Arms Race

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Yes, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, would kill staggering numbers of people and be an eerily (if all too grimly) appropriate ending to the war that started with the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and, by August 1945, had resulted in the saturation bombing of 64 Japanese cities.

The scientist who led read more

Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Outlaw Superpower

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

It could be the greatest crime in history and that, believe me, is saying a lot. I’m talking, of course, about the broiling of a planet where heat records are being set globally on an almost daily basis in what’s likely to be the hottest year in possibly — yes! — a million years (long before, that is, human beings even existed).

And the biggest criminals? The ultimate read more

Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Whose War Was That Anyway?

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino was a co-founder of the remarkable Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute. There can be no question that it’s proven an all-too-sadly one-of-a-kind resource in these years. Since 2011, it’s followed this country’s disastrous war on terror in a way no place else has even imagined doing.

It doesn’t matter whether read more

Tomgram: Joshua Frank, Nuking Us All

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

On August 6, 1945, when the mushroom cloud from the first atomic bomb rose over the devastated Japanese city of Hiroshima, who could have imagined the “peaceful atom”? And in the decades that followed who could have imagined just how unpeaceful that second version of atomic power might prove to be? I’m thinking, of course, about, among other disasters, the 1979 almost-meltdown read more