War

(Informed Comment) – MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) is truly mad. At the height of the Cold War some military analysts and planners maintained that parity in weapons that would destroy civilization prevented either side from resort to those weapons. Parity, however, is a slippery concept, especially in an environment where science and engineering are continually […]

(Informed Comment) – Earlier this year the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset its famous doomsday clock to 2 minutes to midnight. Though the journal’s concerns about nuclear war and/or climate catastrophe were well taken, they received little media attention beyond some discussion of the perils of pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal. And […]

(Tomdispatch.com) – Last month, the National Nuclear Security Administration (formerly the Atomic Energy Commission) announced that the first of a new generation of strategic nuclear weapons had rolled off the assembly line at its Pantex nuclear weapons plant in the panhandle of Texas. That warhead, the W76-2, is designed to be fitted to a submarine-launched […]

( Tomdispatch.com) – Landing at Nagasaki Airport last November, I joined a line of Japanese men, women, and children waiting to disembark from our plane. Most were likely returning home on this holiday weekend or arriving to visit family and friends. I wondered how many of them remembered or thought about the nuclear annihilation of […]