A blog about a criminal enterprise
Although 81 years have passed since the atomic bombing of Japan in August 1945, the rulers of major nations continue their reckless march toward a nuclear holocaust.
The nine nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea), possessing some 12,100 nuclear warheads, are all busily upgrading
As Americans and people of other former colonies recognize, there’s a great deal to be said for national independence.
But, at times, we might also wonder: is it sufficient?
Until recently in human history, imperialism was widespread. In 1939, Britain’s Empire and Commonwealth alone had direct or de facto political and economic control of 25 percent of the world’s population and 30 percent of its land mass.
On January 27, 2026, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of their famous “Doomsday Clock” to 85 seconds to midnight―the closest setting, since the appearance of the clock in 1946, to nuclear annihilation.
This grim appraisal has impressive evidence to support it.
The New Start Treaty, the last of the major nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties between the United States and Russia,
Early this year, legislators in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the U.S. Senate introduced resolutions that call upon the U.S. government to lead a global effort to halt and reverse the nuclear arms race. Co-sponsored by 36 members of the House and 5 members of the Senate, H. Res. 317 and S. Res. 323 urge
Ever since the atomic bombings of Japanese cities in August 1945, the world has been living on borrowed time.
The indications, then and since, that the development of nuclear weapons did not bode well for human survival, were clear enough. The two small atomic bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed between 110,000 and 210,000 people and wounded many others, almost all of them civilians.
In recent years, Donald Trump has frequently billed himself as a bringer of peace. During 2023 and 2024, as he campaigned for re-election, he declared at least 53 times that he would end the Ukraine War within 24 hours of taking office or even before that. Referring to peace for Ukraine before a gathering in Council Bluffs, Iowa in July 2023, he insisted: “I’ll get that done within 24 hours. Everyone says, ‘Oh, no, you can’t.’ Absolutely, I can. Absolutely I can.”
Trump
Although the statement that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun” was made by Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong, it’s an idea that, in one form or another, has motivated a great many people, from the members of teenage street gangs to the statesmen of major nations.
The rising spiral of world military spending provides a striking example of how highly national governments value armed forces. In 2024, the
Amid growing international chaos, it should come as no surprise that nuclear dangers are increasing.
The latest indication is a rising interest among U.S. allies in enhancing their nuclear weapons capability. For many decades, remarkably few of them had been willing to build nuclear weapons―a result of popular
Will the world ever be free of the menace of nuclear annihilation?
There was a promising start along these lines during the late twentieth century, when―pressed by a popular upsurge against nuclear weapons―the nations of the world adopted a succession of nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements. Starting with the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, these agreements helped curb the nuclear arms race and prevent nuclear war.
But the tide gradually turned during the final years of the twentieth
Recently, the opinion polls indicate that Donald Trump – a convicted criminal, a pathological liar, and the latest in a long string of rightwing demagogues – is likelier than not to be elected President of the United States.
I was born and raised during World War II, a time when fascist armies seemed on the verge of conquering the world, and perhaps this accounts for my feeling of alarm at the current revival of rightwing extremism in the United States and elsewhere. This alarm seems justified