archive

The monumental danger of nuclear weapons

Masahiro Morioka (Waseda): The Trolley Problem and the Dropping of Atomic Bombs. Matthew Bolton (Pace): The Spirit of Lysistrata: Gender, Collective Action and the Nuclear Weapons Ban. The nuclear threat can be contained by diplomacy: These issues are manageable if they are given the right degree of priority. For decades, leaders have used the nuclear threat to consolidate power at home — even when it is bad for national security. Mikhail Gorbachev: My plea to the presidents of Russia and the United States. Julie McDowall reviews Sleepwalking to Armageddon: The Threat of Nuclear Annihilation by Helen Caldicott.

Elisabeth Eaves and Julian Hayda on weighing 75 years of the nuclear age. The 2017 Nobel Peace Prize winner wants to ban nuclear weapons — here’s why the U.S. is opposed. An urgent warning about the monumental danger of nuclear weapons — even if Trump weren’t president: Fred Kaplan reviews The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg (and more). Doomsday pattern: Elisa Gabbert on life in the pre-apocalypse. Want to increase your property values? Try a nuclear war. Matthew Bunn and Nickolas Roth on the effects of a single terrorist nuclear bomb. Millennials need new movies about nuclear war, a ninth-grader says.

From the National Interest, Tom Nichols on 5 ways nuclear armageddon was almost unleashed (or World War III) and on 5 ways a nuclear war could go down (and billions of people would die). What Donald Trump can learn from the two most dangerous weeks in history. These women are the last thing standing between you and nuclear war. How the CIA secretly recruits academics: In order to tempt nuclear scientists from countries such as Iran or North Korea to defect, US spy agencies routinely send agents to academic conferences — or even host their own fake ones. The CDC wants to prepare Americans for a nuclear strike.

“Don’t wait until the bombs are falling”: Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg encourages more like him. The Trump administration’s nuclear policy review loosens constraints on the use of nuclear weapons — we should all be worried. A new Trump administration plan makes nuclear war likelier. Garrett M. Graff on how U.S. nuclear weapons strategy only makes us more vulnerable to catastrophe. The people who would survive nuclear war: How an appendix to an obscure government report helped launch a blockbuster and push back the possibility of atomic war.

From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Kennette Benedict on Doomsday Clockwork; and Lisbeth Gronlund and David Wright on how a nuclear attack order is carried out now and how to limit presidential authority to order the use of nuclear weapons. What even is the Doomsday Clock? It’s two minutes to midnight — what the hell does that even mean?