The story of Anne Frank is tragic. If not for the words that she wrote in her diary, she would be a digit of history. Her diary is relatable, and the thoughts that collected inside her being during a horrible time in history gives the reader an idea of who she was. She is immortalized because of the little things that she wrote, not because of any great deeds recorded by others. As a victim of tyranny she is remembered as an innocent murdered. She is a story found inside the numbers. Thanks to her diary, we have a human figure to know and mourn, despite the mechanized bureaucratic...
atom bomb
Who Opposed Nuking Japan?
"The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." —Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower "In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ... The Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent. During his recitation of the...
6/26/20 Hans Kristensen on the Bleak Outlook for Nuclear Arms Control
Scott talks to Hans Kristensen about the state of the world’s nuclear weapons arsenals. Immediately after the Cold War, says Kristensen, the U.S. and Russia drastically reduced their nuclear stockpiles, making the world significantly safer. Since then, however, this trend toward disarmament has begun to slow and even to reverse. At the same time, more countries have developed their own nuclear weapons programs. Scott thinks this has more to do with the financial incentives of the military-industrial complex than it does with the possibility for real global hostilities—but that doesn’t...
12/12/18 Ted Snider on Netanyahu’s Secret Past
Ted Snider details Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's intriguing and complex past helping to steal nuclear parts from America, for which he is now being investigated in Israel. Although most of the investigation and press coverage focuses on the associated corruption scandal and not the truly shady history, Snider believes Netanyahu could be in real political trouble. Even if he gets removed from office, neither Snider nor Scott thinks it likely that much will be made of Israel's secret nuclear weapons program, because to do so would be to admit that the United States is giving...
Pearl Harbor, Truth, And Government
Did FDR "do" Pearl Harbor? Is Global Warming "fake"? Big complicated ideas can be easily framed to one side or another through sophistry. But what is "truth"? I have been a "obviously the Roosevelt administration sought a policy of provoking Japan into war, but Bob Stinnett's conspiracy theory that FDR specifically knew about Pearl Harbor ahead of time is full of holes" guy for the past couple of years. I've dipped my head down into this rabbit hole again recently, and have realized something. Evidence - as such - is garbage. Here's what I mean - if you can control evidence, you...
Apple Atomics: Nuclear Survival In A Liberated Age
In debates, particularly with those on the left who share a proclivity for hyperbole, the subject of self-defense soon has the libertarian tasked not only with a defense of firearm ownership, but with defending themselves in their newfound position as proponents of nuclear weaponry in "private" hands. Or to state it less pretentiously: "When an argument over gun control breaks out between a libertarian and a statist of some variety, it is only a matter of time before the libertarian backs himself into a corner where he must defend the right of individuals to own nuclear weapons by...
The Bombs
The Bombs It is perhaps with a degree of historical poetry that on the cusp of an apparent Iranian nuclear deal that Japan should celebrate the 70th anniversary of the destruction of two of its cities at the hands of the United States. The very self-appointed arbitrator that decides, who may and may not possess nuclear technologies in the modern age. It was after all, the United States that despite destroying two cities with such devices considered using more nuclear weapons in its Korean and Vietnam operations against other Asian peoples. It was the United States’ premier...