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

One U.S. Senator and Zero Representatives Say They’ll Vote No Unless Military Spending Reduced

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, July 25, 2023

In recent years, and again this year, to my knowledge, only a single member of either house of the U.S. Congress has said publicly, prior to voting No on a military spending bill, that he or she planned to vote No because the spending was too high. The same individual has done this more than once, and nobody else has done it at all. That individual is Senator Bernie Sanders. He says he will vote no on read more

Facing Factsenheimer

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, July 22, 2023

I’m rolling down the President Biden “Expressway” in Scranton PA (speed limit 35) listening to Kai Bird’s and Martin Sherwin’s bio of Oppenheimer, and it strikes me that the subject’s decision not to poison every man, woman, and child in Germany, purely because he couldn’t figure out how to do it, probably didn’t make it into the movie. (Tell me if I’m wrong.)

I will be extremely pleasantly surprised if anyone comes out of the movie read more

From Scranton to Ukraine, All Is Not As It Seems

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, July 22, 2023

Remarks in Scranton, Pennsylvania, July 22, 2023

There is something that we need to tell a great many of our friends and neighbors. It is that we have been misled. All is not as it seems.

Here we are outside what appears to be a factory where U.S. government dollars create jobs, boost the economy, and fund activities that support the important needs of the U.S. public and the people of the world. Not a bit of those appearances is real.

When government 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