The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set its Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight on Tuesday — the closest the metaphoric clock has ever been to the apocalyptic hour. Originally conceived as a symbolic measure of humanity’s proximity to global nuclear destruction in 1947, the Bulletin officially began including climate change in its calculations in […]
By Jake Johnson Yes, Donald Trump is president. And yes, he has access to the nuclear codes—a fact that has become all too vivid in recent weeks. But many allowed themselves to forget, if only for a brief moment, about the man in the White House on Thursday to hone their attention on what is […]
By Bunny McDiarmid Looking back, one of the key moments that was to define both my professional and personal path was the moment I stepped onto the small atoll of Rongelap, in the Pacific Ocean. It was May 17, 1985 and I was 24 years old. At first glance, it appeared as if I had […]
By Susan Southard Wednesday is the 72nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. At 11:02 a.m. Aug. 9, 1945, a five-ton plutonium bomb exploded a third of a mile above the city. Its blast winds tore through the city at two and a half times the speed of a Category 5 hurricane. Two-year-old Masao […]
By Yuko Yoneda It started with just 12 of them. With a bold mission, this group of activists set sail to Amchitka island off Alaska to protest the detonation of an underground U.S. nuclear test. It was September 1971, and though the mission was initially unsuccessful, it was the beginning of what became Greenpeace, and […]
By Tim Radford Four U.S. scientists have just introduced one more good reason not to launch a nuclear war. It would not simply guarantee the mutual destruction of the participants. It would also precipitate catastrophic climate change. And, they argue in the journal Environment Magazine, even a single nuclear missile strike could darken the skies, […]
In this Democracy Now! special, we spend the hour with the world-renowned linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky. In a public conversation we had in April, we talked about climate change, nuclear weapons, North Korea, Iran, the war in Syria and the Trump administration’s threat to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and his new book, […]
Twice in seven days the U.S. shot nuclear-capable long-range missiles toward the Marshall Islands, but the same government refused in March to join negotiations for a new treaty banning nuclear weapons. Tests conducted April 26 and May 3 from Vandenberg Air Force Base northwest of Lompoc, California, launched modernized Minuteman-3 ballistic missiles, and the U.S. […]
The following is an transcript of a recent public interview at the University of Arizona with linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky by Dr. David N. Gibbs. David Gibbs: The main issue on everyone’s minds is the inauguration of Donald Trump as president. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has emphasized the extreme danger that […]