https://znetwork.org/category/topic/international-relations/nuclear-war/ Independent Left News, Analysis, Vision and Strategy Wed, 03 Dec 2025 20:25:13 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://znetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/cropped-Z_logo_512-32x32.png https://znetwork.org/category/topic/international-relations/nuclear-war/ 32 32 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/apocalypse-soon-returning-a-final-time-to-cheyenne-mountain/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/apocalypse-soon-returning-a-final-time-to-cheyenne-mountain/#respond Wed, 03 Dec 2025 19:07:00 +0000 It’s been 20 years since I retired from the Air Force and 40 years since I first entered Cheyenne Mountain, America’s nuclear redoubt at the southern end of the Front Range that includes Pikes Peak in Colorado. So it was with some nostalgia that I read a recent memo from General Kenneth Wilsbach, the new [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/apocalypse-soon-returning-a-final-time-to-cheyenne-mountain/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/trump-adds-censorship-to-the-campaign-against-arms-control-and-disarmament/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/trump-adds-censorship-to-the-campaign-against-arms-control-and-disarmament/#respond Sat, 22 Nov 2025 18:56:17 +0000 Donald Trump made it clear in the 2016 presidential debates that he had no understanding of the central issues of the nuclear arms race, particularly the role of the nuclear triad.  When Trump couldn’t answer a question on nuclear verification, he predictably responded that “it would take me an hour and a half to learn [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/trump-adds-censorship-to-the-campaign-against-arms-control-and-disarmament/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/doomed-not-domed/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/doomed-not-domed/#respond Mon, 17 Nov 2025 18:11:32 +0000 Kathryn Bigelow’s new nuclear thriller, A House of Dynamite, has been criticized by some experts for being unrealistic, most notably because it portrays an unlikely scenario in which an adversary chooses to attack the United States with just a single nuclear-armed missile. Such a move would, of course, leave the vast American nuclear arsenal largely intact and so invite a devastating [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/doomed-not-domed/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/missile-defense-fraud-goes-ballistic-needless-unworkable-gold-plated-dangerous-corrupt/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/missile-defense-fraud-goes-ballistic-needless-unworkable-gold-plated-dangerous-corrupt/#respond Fri, 14 Nov 2025 17:09:24 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1291266 The nuclear weapons thriller “A House of Dynamite,” directed by Kathryn Bigelow, depicts the catastrophic failure of U.S. anti-ballistic missiles to shoot down a long-range nuclear-armed missile, fired by unidentified assailants in the eastern Pacific, which is honing in on Chicago. In the film, two “ground-based interceptors” (GBIs) are fired at the terror-inducing missile, but [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/missile-defense-fraud-goes-ballistic-needless-unworkable-gold-plated-dangerous-corrupt/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/natos-nuclear-threats-on-parade/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/natos-nuclear-threats-on-parade/#comments Fri, 17 Oct 2025 18:22:00 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1290086 NATO’s standing threat to attack Russia with nuclear weapons is put on parade every autumn. This year’s thermonuclear dry run—dubbed Steadfast Noon—got started October 13 according to NATO’s press office and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, or SHAPE, in Mons, Belgium. NATO’ euphemism for its yearly doomsday rehearsal is “exercise,” and this year’s dress [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/natos-nuclear-threats-on-parade/feed/ 1 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/a-house-of-dynamites-nuclear-war-crisis-scenario-is-chilling-now-imagine-it-in-real-life/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/a-house-of-dynamites-nuclear-war-crisis-scenario-is-chilling-now-imagine-it-in-real-life/#respond Wed, 15 Oct 2025 18:20:00 +0000 As a peace and disarmament activist for over four decades, I was conflicted about whether to see A House of Dynamite, director Katherine Bigelow’s and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim’s  new fictional film about an all too realistic nuclear crisis. In my free time, I usually seek refuge from concerns over war and peace.  I haven’t read [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/a-house-of-dynamites-nuclear-war-crisis-scenario-is-chilling-now-imagine-it-in-real-life/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/hollywood-rediscovers-the-bomb/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/hollywood-rediscovers-the-bomb/#respond Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:08:40 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1289894 As the nuclear threat once again dominates the headlines, the nuclear blockbuster has returned to screens. Following the success of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite reminds us that the atomic bomb is not mere history. Equal parts political thriller and apocalyptic horror, the film compels viewers to imagine the unimaginable, refusing [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/hollywood-rediscovers-the-bomb/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/albert-einstein-and-the-problem-of-war/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/albert-einstein-and-the-problem-of-war/#respond Fri, 10 Oct 2025 16:30:00 +0000 Although Albert Einstein is best-known as a theoretical physicist, he also spent much of his life grappling with the problem of war. In 1914, shortly after he moved to Berlin to serve as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics, Einstein was horrified by the onset of World War I.  “Europe, in her insanity, [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/albert-einstein-and-the-problem-of-war/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/how-many-minutes-to-midnight-noam-chomsky-on-why-national-security-has-nothing-to-do-with-security/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/how-many-minutes-to-midnight-noam-chomsky-on-why-national-security-has-nothing-to-do-with-security/#respond Mon, 25 Aug 2025 16:08:14 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1287715 Intro by Tom Engelhardt: [Note for TomDispatch readers: Back in 2014, Noam Chomsky — whose voice I miss terribly in this embattled Trumpian world of ours — wrote what still seems to me to be a stunning piece not just on “the most dangerous moment in history,” the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, but how repeatedly [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/how-many-minutes-to-midnight-noam-chomsky-on-why-national-security-has-nothing-to-do-with-security/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-us-bloated-military-budget-is-the-mother-of-fascism/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-us-bloated-military-budget-is-the-mother-of-fascism/#respond Wed, 13 Aug 2025 18:40:53 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1287243 US military spending mocks global norms with such salacious excess that we might imagine our country as being in the throes of a perpetual addictive seizure. Our national binge has been stoked with a chaotic hodgepodge of threats that leave us jonesing for a harder hit – we tremble, in our hallucinatory fears, about China, [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-us-bloated-military-budget-is-the-mother-of-fascism/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/testimony-of-the-hibakusha-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-no-more-nuclear-weapons/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/testimony-of-the-hibakusha-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-no-more-nuclear-weapons/#respond Mon, 11 Aug 2025 16:06:51 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1287169 CONTENT WARNING: This article contains descriptions of nuclear weapons effects, including disturbing accounts of the victims. On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, on August 9, the second was dropped on Nagasaki. Both cities were totally destroyed [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/testimony-of-the-hibakusha-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-no-more-nuclear-weapons/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/80-years-at-the-brink-time-to-change-the-narrative/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/80-years-at-the-brink-time-to-change-the-narrative/#comments Thu, 07 Aug 2025 16:39:28 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1287046 For 80 years, since the atomic bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world has stood at the brink of nuclear war with the potential for catastrophic loss, threatening all of humanity. Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said in the years after the Cuban missile crisis that indeed sheer luck was what prevented nuclear war, [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/80-years-at-the-brink-time-to-change-the-narrative/feed/ 1 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/atomic-bombings-at-80-john-pilger-another-hiroshima-is-coming-unless-we-stop-it-now/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/atomic-bombings-at-80-john-pilger-another-hiroshima-is-coming-unless-we-stop-it-now/#respond Wed, 06 Aug 2025 15:59:00 +0000 The late John Pilger was an Australian-British journalist and filmmaker based in London. Pilger’s more than 60 documentary films can be seen on the web site: www.johnpilger.com. In 2017, the British Library announced a John Pilger Archive of all his written and filmed work. The British Film Institute includes his 1979 film, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/atomic-bombings-at-80-john-pilger-another-hiroshima-is-coming-unless-we-stop-it-now/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-atomic-bombings-did-not-save-lives-or-end-the-war/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-atomic-bombings-did-not-save-lives-or-end-the-war/#comments Tue, 05 Aug 2025 16:01:00 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1286969 This August 6 and 9 are the 80th anniversaries of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 140,000 civilians at Hiroshima[1] was the effect of jolting the city with a 60-million-degree (Celsius) explosion (ten thousand degrees hotter than the surface of the sun)[2]. Richard Rhodes, in The Making of the Atomic [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-atomic-bombings-did-not-save-lives-or-end-the-war/feed/ 1 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/eighty-years-of-nuclear-terror/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/eighty-years-of-nuclear-terror/#comments Sun, 03 Aug 2025 12:41:36 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1286888 Ever since the atomic bombings of Japanese cities in August 1945, the world has been living on borrowed time. The indications, then and since, that the development of nuclear weapons did not bode well for human survival, were clear enough. The two small atomic bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed between 110,000 [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/eighty-years-of-nuclear-terror/feed/ 2 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/80-years-after-trinity/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/80-years-after-trinity/#respond Thu, 17 Jul 2025 15:54:00 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1286332 In recent months, nuclear weapons have reemerged in global headlines. Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan approached the brink of a full-scale war, a confrontation that could have become an extinction-level event, with the potential to claim up to two billion lives worldwide. The instability of a global order structured on nuclear apartheid has also come into sharp [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/80-years-after-trinity/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/oceanic-defence-the-american-military-paradox/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/oceanic-defence-the-american-military-paradox/#respond Tue, 15 Jul 2025 14:45:00 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1286196 In 1949 the U.S. War Department changed its name. Branches of the armed forces were then administered under the new name Department of Defence. This newly defined mandate of defending the United States should have been a relatively easy and inexpensive task. Geography and history render the U.S. the most defensible country in the world. [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/oceanic-defence-the-american-military-paradox/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/trinity-bomb-test-risking-doomsday-they-lit-the-match-anyway/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/trinity-bomb-test-risking-doomsday-they-lit-the-match-anyway/#respond Fri, 04 Jul 2025 16:00:00 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1285799 The U.S. scientists who tested the first atomic bomb, July 16, 1945, took the ultimate gamble of setting the atmosphere on fire and destroying all life on Earth. When Robert Oppenheimer, the civilian head of the program, informed his boss, the Nobel Prize winning physicist Arthur Compton, about the test’s apocalyptic risk, Compton was appalled. According [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/trinity-bomb-test-risking-doomsday-they-lit-the-match-anyway/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/sky-wars-the-bombing-industrial-complex-of-us-terror/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/sky-wars-the-bombing-industrial-complex-of-us-terror/#respond Fri, 27 Jun 2025 18:23:27 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1285540 The bombing of Guernica in 1937 unveiled weapons of mass destruction aimed at civilian populations. While Picasso’s famous painting depicting that event brought cubism and outrage together, Guernica marks a more critical narrative demarcation point – the beginning of current US military culture. Hitler and Mussolini’s targeting of a Basque town in 1937 to assist [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/sky-wars-the-bombing-industrial-complex-of-us-terror/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/its-trumps-war-now/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/its-trumps-war-now/#respond Mon, 23 Jun 2025 13:16:17 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1285351 President Trump announced that the US had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites. Then he messaged that “now is the time for peace.” No, it is time for war. No negotiating, just giving Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu precisely what he wanted–the bunker-busting bombs that the Israeli leader had been dreaming of being used. Trump now [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/its-trumps-war-now/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/how-the-u-s-israel-used-rafael-grossi-to-hijack-the-iaea-and-start-a-war-on-iran/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/how-the-u-s-israel-used-rafael-grossi-to-hijack-the-iaea-and-start-a-war-on-iran/#respond Mon, 23 Jun 2025 12:59:32 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1285344 Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), allowed the IAEA to be used by the United States and Israel—an undeclared nuclear weapons state in long-term violation of IAEA rules—to manufacture a pretext for war on Iran, despite his agency’s own conclusion that Iran had no nuclear weapons program. On June 12th, [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/how-the-u-s-israel-used-rafael-grossi-to-hijack-the-iaea-and-start-a-war-on-iran/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/why-trump-bombed-iran-preserving-us-and-israeli-nuclear-supremacy-in-the-middle-east/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/why-trump-bombed-iran-preserving-us-and-israeli-nuclear-supremacy-in-the-middle-east/#respond Sun, 22 Jun 2025 15:58:00 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1285312 As President Trump ordered the US to attack three major Iranian nuclear sites, a misguided concept of Israel’s national security morphed into an even more twisted view of US national security. Only days ago, President Trump reiterated that Iran will never have nuclear weapons. Yet, according to US intelligence assessments, Iran was up to three years [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/why-trump-bombed-iran-preserving-us-and-israeli-nuclear-supremacy-in-the-middle-east/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/who-has-nukes-the-nuclear-vector-of-the-commencing-israel-iran-war/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/who-has-nukes-the-nuclear-vector-of-the-commencing-israel-iran-war/#respond Sun, 22 Jun 2025 15:57:00 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1285325 Rhetorically asking whether ‘a wider regional war can be avoided’, GeoTrends had noted in September 2024 that ‘the Israeli government’s gaze is fixed on Iran’. The recent Israeli ‘Operation Rising Lion’ against Iran, and Iran’s retaliation, will not be a short exchange of quid-pro-quo strikes. The Wall Street Journal reports that Israel’s offensive is planned [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/who-has-nukes-the-nuclear-vector-of-the-commencing-israel-iran-war/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/nuclear-options/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/nuclear-options/#respond Fri, 20 Jun 2025 15:50:00 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1285236 The expansion of the war from Palestine to Iran, which began on 13 June, signals an Israeli obsession persisting for four decades. As the Trump administration was negotiating in bad faith with Iran over its nuclear programme, the Israeli regime took advantage of an interval to bomb Tehran, assassinating leading scientists, a senior general and other [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/nuclear-options/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/starmer-and-lammy-are-terrified/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/starmer-and-lammy-are-terrified/#respond Thu, 19 Jun 2025 15:52:00 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1285221 Western governments’ abandonment of the very system of international law which they created was embodied in a tweet from the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which sought to justify the illegal Israeli attack on Iran as “Targeted strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities”. The former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Authority, Mohamed ElBaradei, was [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/starmer-and-lammy-are-terrified/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-folly-of-a-war-with-iran/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-folly-of-a-war-with-iran/#respond Mon, 16 Jun 2025 15:16:09 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1285069 The neoconservatives who orchestrated the disastrous wars with Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya — and who were never held accountable for the profligate waste of $8 trillion taxpayer dollars, as well as $69 billion squandered in Ukraine — look set to lure us into yet another military fiasco with Iran. Iran is not Iraq. Iran is not Afghanistan. Iran [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-folly-of-a-war-with-iran/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/is-nuclear-winter-a-climate-issue/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/is-nuclear-winter-a-climate-issue/#respond Mon, 09 Jun 2025 16:36:28 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1284777 Thirty-five years after the start of the nuclear age with the first explosion of an atomic bomb, I visited the expanse of desert known as the Nevada Test Site, an hour’s drive northwest of Las Vegas. A pair of officials from the Department of Energy took me on a tour. They explained that nuclear tests [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/is-nuclear-winter-a-climate-issue/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/activist-diary-7-david-and-goliath-northampton-activists-want-munitions-icon-l3-harris-to-leave-town/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/activist-diary-7-david-and-goliath-northampton-activists-want-munitions-icon-l3-harris-to-leave-town/#respond Mon, 19 May 2025 17:56:42 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1283956 You might survive a nuclear strike, but I won’t. I live on the Sharpie X that some foreign general scratched upon the globe. Maybe all of us not residing in Hiroshima or Nagasaki suffer from an imaginative deficit when it comes to matters of mushroom clouds, slow radiation deaths, and the lucky creatures instantly vaporized. [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/activist-diary-7-david-and-goliath-northampton-activists-want-munitions-icon-l3-harris-to-leave-town/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/how-to-avoid-trade-wars-and-world-war-three/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/how-to-avoid-trade-wars-and-world-war-three/#respond Mon, 28 Apr 2025 15:40:41 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1283056 Not a day goes by without a new shock to Americans and our neighbors around the world from the Trump administration. On April 22nd, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) downgraded its forecasts for global growth in 2025, from 3.3% to 2.8%, and warned that no country will feel the pain more than the United States. [...]]]> https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/how-to-avoid-trade-wars-and-world-war-three/feed/ 0 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/will-trump-return-to-the-iran-us-nuclear-deal/ https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/will-trump-return-to-the-iran-us-nuclear-deal/#respond Fri, 25 Apr 2025 15:49:00 +0000 https://znetwork.org/?post_type=znetarticle&p=1282966 https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/will-trump-return-to-the-iran-us-nuclear-deal/feed/ 0