New Clear Vision


constructive commentary for the chronically farsighted


Risking Peace

January 17, 2013 By: NCVeditor Category: Culture, Economy, Politics, Winslow Myers

Changing Direction Is Worth the Gamble

by Winslow Myers

Because we are the wealthiest nation on the planet, we have the luxury of being proactive in ensuring our future security. But the path to that security looks very different from the way it did even a few years ago.

A primary example of our transformed security context is the realization that there is only one ocean of air surrounding the earth. Unless all nations make a concerted effort to convert to sources of clean energy, global mean temperatures will continue to rise and cause undesirable extremes of weather. Strategic competition between superpowers like Russia, China and the U.S. becomes irrelevant to the larger crisis of fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions from all countries. The violence of storms in our country may be intensified by the environmental policies of another country, and vice-versa. Fossil fuel corporations, more powerful than many national governments, must be pressured from taking more oil or coal out of the ground even though they have the technical means and the capital to do so. While entrenched interests are resistant to such painful change, countries like Germany are providing a model of how it can be done, having relinquished nuclear power and moved successfully toward hybridized alternatives like solar, wind, tidal, and low-head hydro power — indeed, a far more secure mix than a huge vulnerable nuclear reactor or coal-fired, smoke-belching plant. (more…)

Rust in Peace

January 03, 2013 By: NCVeditor Category: Culture, Politics, Winslow Myers

A New Year’s Wish to Rid the World of Nuclear Weapons

by Winslow Myers

A performative contradiction is a statement that contradicts its own assertion.  For example, the unrecorded statement “I am dead” is a performative contradiction in that the speaker is clearly alive while making the claim. There are performative contradictions not only in statements, but also in policies. The mother of them all is found in current nuclear weapons policy on the planet. Nuclear weapons cannot be rationally advanced in argument as an instrument of policy.

Why? Computer models suggest that the detonation of a remarkably small number of nuclear weapons from today’s arsenals — doesn’t matter whose — would raise enough toxic soot and ash into the atmosphere to shut down world agriculture for a decade.  In effect, such a detonation would be a death sentence for us all. All.

No less a pitiless realist than Henry Kissinger has stated that he tried to make foreign policy with these weapons and found it impossible. Henry Kissinger now works for abolition. (more…)

Unity and Human Survival

December 10, 2012 By: NCVeditor Category: Culture, Matt Meyer, Politics

Peaceful Revolution in Asia and Beyond

by Matt Meyer

In hindsight, there may have been no better way to bookend a trip to the 2012 biennial conference of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) than by visiting Beijing and Hiroshima. Two unique and very different cities project to the world the themes which underscore the work of peace studies today: the need for revolutionary action in the face of seemingly impossible odds, and the need for nonviolent resistance against the forces of militarism which still leave us on the brink of global devastation. Though this year’s recent IPRA conference did not quite pay homage to revolutionary nonviolence, it did contain substantial presentations indicating some roads we must follow and still uncharted paths.

My time in China was simple: meet with a few activists, visit Tiananmen Square, and have some moments trekking up the Great Wall. In bustling Beijing, considering the 1.34 billion people who make up China as a whole, it is hard not to think of the enormity of the issues facing the country and its citizens. (more…)

My Fellow Americans

November 26, 2012 By: NCVeditor Category: Ecology, Politics, Winslow Myers

Words for a No-Bull Presidential Inauguration

by Winslow Myers

My fellow citizens, I have just sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, but what does that mean? Our earth has become so small, national economies so interdependent, global ecological problems so transcendent of nationality, that it would be an abdication of my leadership responsibilities to pretend otherwise. A new world has dawned, within which the United States must begin to honestly redefine its interests.

After 60-plus years of believing that we have maintained the peace by means of our overwhelming nuclear strength, we are confronted with a series of paradoxes that cannot be resolved merely by increasing that strength. The very meaning of “strength” has totally changed.  Even a small number of our nuclear weapons, or those of any other nation for that matter, cannot be detonated without raising enough dust and soot into the atmosphere to fatally affect world agriculture for a decade. (more…)

Terrible Weapons

November 20, 2012 By: NCVeditor Category: Peter G. Cohen, Politics

Can Sandy Be a Savior?

by Peter G. Cohen

The current budget crisis of the United States, amplified by the tremendous human and property losses of killer storm Sandy, may be the opportunity that people everywhere have been hoping for: the chance to eliminate the huge, costly and illegal nuclear weapons stockpiles of the United States and Russia.

As of November, 2012, New York, New Jersey and other states are reeling from the overwhelming property damage done by the storm. At this point we cannot even estimate how many billions of dollars will be required to assist the devastated areas in their rebuilding, or the new and unknown infrastructure needed to reduce the damage of such storms in the future. What we do know is that without very substantial help from the already strained federal budget this highly productive area of the U.S. will be unable to rebuild itself for a long time. (more…)

Otherworldy Dreams

October 30, 2012 By: NCVeditor Category: Culture, Ecology, Evaggelos Vallianatos

On Religion and Technology in America

by Evaggelos Vallianatos

Garry Wills, professor of American history and author of Bomb Power, says that the atomic and nuclear bomb remade the country into a National Security State fostering perpetual emergency, secrecy and war.

“Secrecy,” says Wills, “emanated from the Manhattan Project like a giant radiation emission.” Indeed, Wills argues very persuasively that the Manhattan Project turned out to be not merely a “fatal miracle” because it created the “awesome” bomb but also because of the processes it set in place:

“The military-industrial complex, with a poisonous admixture of government and secrecy, had scored a triumph that would show the way to many other governmental activities… The secrecy that had enveloped Los Alamos [building the bomb] would steal quietly across the entire American landscape in the years to come.”

According to Wills, the other inevitable result of the bomb was that it gave the president supreme power. He alone could decide the fate of the world.

(more…)

Nuclear Righteousness

August 13, 2012 By: NCVeditor Category: Culture, Politics, Robert C. Koehler

Can We Find Our Humanity in Conscience and Awareness?

by Robert C. Koehler 

This is American exceptionalism: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”

But you have to say it without the doubt, the regret — the horror — of Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist extraordinaire and director of the Manhattan Project, who famously uttered these words in reference to the Trinity nuclear explosion in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto desert on July 16, 1945.

When you remove Oppenheimer’s moral awareness from the quote, it sounds more like: “Oh, I wouldn’t hesitate if I had the choice. I’d wipe ’em out. You’re gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we’ve never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn’t kill innocent people. . . . That’s their tough luck for being there.” (more…)

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