Two thirds of the way through Oppenheimer, I asked myself “Why did Christopher Nolan make this picture?” Because, except for a few cheesy nits, which I will most assuredly pick later, what we have gotten, about two hours in, is essentially a pseudo documentary, a laboriously accurate, $100 million reconstruction of the events leading up…
Tag: nuclear weapons
Who won the Cold War? Why, Jimmy Carter, of course!
At least, that’s the way Chris Miller tells it in Chip War The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, his best-selling but not always convincing story of the computer chip and how it “changed the world”. It seems that in 1977, Silicon Valley entrepreneur William Perry was brought in to serve as undersecretary of…
Another $2 trillion down the rathole
“Another $40 billion down the rathole,” Secretary of the Treasury Gordon Humphrey used to sigh, contemplating the Defense Department’s annual budget requests under the Eisenhower administration.1 But that was then. Now we’re up to $2 trillion! Well, on the one hand, that $2 trillion, to update our nuclear deterrent, will be spread out over 25…
Shorter Joe Biden: I cans so be as stupid as Donald Trump! Even stupider!
Politico has the bad news: “Biden goes ‘full steam ahead’ on Trump’s nuclear expansion despite campaign rhetoric”. An article by Lara Seligman, Bryan Bender, and Connor O’Brien quotes Biden as telling the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a speech given just before the close of the Obama administration in January 2017, the following: If…
Fred Kaplan: So sadly so right
I blow hot and cold on old Fred Kaplan, who hangs his hat at Slate, most recently, cold, when Fred waxed hot, announcing that “America’s retreat from the world under Trump has shown why we’re still the indispensable nation”1, vaguely claiming that all the world is crying out for American “leadership” to solve all their…
President Obama calls for the end of nuclear weapons while spending $1 trillion on new ones
Speaking in Japan at the Hiroshima memorial, dedicated to the victims to the first use of atomic weaponry in world history, President Obama called for a “moral revolution” that would ultimately lead to the elimination of such weapons. According to a report filed in the New York Times by Gardiner Harris, the President said “We…
That perfidious Mr. Putin! Oh, wait, we’re doing it too!
The Washington Post, which seems to have it knickers permanently in a knot these days, is up in arms over a nasty little device the Russians have cooked up, an underwater nuclear drone, which might be used to do the following: “Russia appears to be creating a tactical nuclear weapon that could be slipped into…