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A Strategic Nightmare Sneaks into Washington’s Political Agenda

Illustration: Liu Rui/GT A simultaneous war with China and Russia is a strategic nightmare that sober American strategists such as Henry Kissinger have been warning the US to avoid at all costs, and it is also a topic that some US media outlets have become more and more fond of talking about in recent years. […]
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The Priesthood of Expertise

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. — Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, 1935 In The Death of Expertise, national security expert Tom Nichols warns that knowledge is under attack by an ill-informed public determined to replace […]
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The Oppenheimer Imperative: Normalising Atomic Terror
The atomic bomb created the conditions of contingent catastrophe, forever placing the world on the precipice of existential doom. But in doing so, it created a philosophy of acceptable cruelty, worthy extinction, legitimate extermination. The scenarios for such programs of existential realisation proved endless. Entire departments, schools of thought, and think tanks were dedicated to […]
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Add Homo sapiens to the Endangered Species List

Preventing extinction of species is a major concern of many countries in the world today. Legislation to accomplish this is usually based on an endangered species list. Such a list should include any animal or plant species that has been deemed likely to go extinct in a few generations. Listing would normally trigger protective actions to […]
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There Are Enough Resources in the World to Fulfill Human Needs, But Not Enough Resources to Satisfy Capitalist Greed

Kurt Nahar (Suriname), Untitled 2369, 2008. On 20 July, the United Nations (UN) released a document called A New Agenda for Peace. In the opening section of the report, UN Secretary-General António Guterres made some remarks that bear close reflection: We are now at an inflection point. The post-Cold War period is over. A transition […]
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The Movie and the Moment

The ground-breaking movie Oppenheimer, despite its unsympathetic protagonist, packs a powerful anti-nuclear punch that makes it hard, if not impossible, to sleep after watching the film. For this reason alone, the movie should be shown on the floor of Congress and in the White House as required viewing by all in DC bent on spending […]
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Trinity’s Shadow
I sit here in the silence of the awakening dawn’s stillness stunned by the realization that I exist. I wonder why. It is my birthday. The first rays of the rising sun bleed crimson over the eastern hills as I imagine my birth. The house and my family sleep. Someday I will die and I […]
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The Flawed Moral Logic of the New York Times on the Flawed Moral Logic of Sending Cluster Munitions to Ukraine

On Monday the New York Times argued in favor of continuing the war and supplying weapons for the war in Ukraine but not cluster bombs: However compelling it may be to use any available weapon to protect one’s homeland, nations in the rules-based international order have increasingly sought to draw a red line against use […]
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Armageddon and the Limits of Evolution
On March 28, 2022, the Biden administration sent to Congress a revised version of its classified National Defense Strategy. The new version removed the longstanding doctrine of “no first use” of nuclear weapons, and opened the door to a nuclear response to a non-nuclear threat. Within months of the new U.S. policy, but without referring […]
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Sea Monsters Threaten the World With Their Tridents
Sometimes you wake up from a dream to realize it is telling you to pay close attention to the depth of its message, especially when it is linked to what you have been thinking about for days. I have just come up from a dream in which I went down to the cellar of the […]