Author: Winslow Myers

"We have communicated directly, privately and at very high levels to the Kremlin that any use of nuclear weapons will be met with catastrophic consequences for Russia, that the US and our allies will respond decisively, and we have been clear and specific about what that will entail." ~ Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor

Here we are again, possibly as close to a possible nuclear war in which everyone will lose and no one will win as we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis exactly 60 years ago. And still the international community, including dictators and democracies, has not come to its senses around the unacceptable risk of nuclear weapons.

Between then and now, I volunteered for decades with a non-profit called Beyond War. Our mission was educational: to seed into international consciousness that atomic weapons had rendered all war obsolete as a way of resolving international conflict – because any conventional war could potentially go nuclear. Such educational efforts are replicated and extended by millions of organizations around the world that have come to similar conclusions, including really big ones like the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Continue reading “War Is Obsolete”

The corporate-military-political complex that continues to renew the arsenals of the nine nuclear nations represents a colossal failure of imagination. 

Everyone knows that a nuclear war cannot be won, that the weapons are strategically useless, and that they are a catastrophic world-ending accident waiting to happen. 

Everyone knows that the trillions spent on these weapons along with boondoggles like the F-35 Strike Fighter are heartlessly siphoned away from the fight against Covid, acute hunger in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and the climate emergency – let alone decent pay for day-care workers.

Continue reading “January 22: Nuclear Weapons Illegal One Year”

The well-established assumption that North Korea is our most difficult and dangerous foreign policy challenge is worth a little dispassionate examination.

North Korea is not a fun place. If ever a nation had earned the right to be labeled collectively psychotic, it would be the Democratic Republic of North Korea under Kim Jung-un, who apparently just outsourced the bizarre assassination of his own brother. The country possesses neither a viable judiciary nor any kind of religious freedom. Famine has been a cyclical presence. Electrical power is intermittent. In 2015 North Korea ranked 115th in the world in the size of its GDP according to U.N. statistics.

Yet nothing the United States has tried to do, including decades of diplomatic negotiations and the application of severe sanctions, has stopped this isolated conundrum of a country from strutting proudly through the exclusive doors of the nuclear club.

Continue reading “Our Nuclear Folly”