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Keywords: Weapons

  • AUSTRALIA

    When safetyism leads

    • Julie Szego
    • 07 June 2024

    In response to campus protests, universities erred on the side of free speech when every other day, the prevailing ethos is one of ‘safetyism’, namely suppressing speech or inquiry if an identity group frames it as ‘harmful’ to them. Universities should strive to be uncomfortable and ‘unsafe’ for all, with no identity immune from robust scrutiny.

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  • ECONOMICS

    War is bad economics but very good business

    • David James
    • 09 May 2024

    There is money to be made in war, especially from making weapons, and what we are witnessing at the moment in Ukraine and the Middle East is simply the latest episode in a story that goes back centuries.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    When missiles threaten our ethics

    • Tony Smith
    • 30 January 2024
    1 Comment

      This rush to the missile age is part of a broader escalation of the arms race in previously peaceful regions, distancing countries like Australia and New Zealand from their roles as honest brokers in a nuclear-free Pacific.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Disarming truth

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 26 October 2023
    3 Comments

    Amid escalating conflict between Israel and Hamas, the focus should turn to the mounting stockpile of advanced arms. In our bid to secure a world worth living through weapons, we may annihilate it. Disarmament may seem utopian, but the real madness lies in an unchecked arms race.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A disarming day

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 23 September 2021
    15 Comments

    Unlike December 25, September 26 is a World Day that passes by in silence. It calls for the Elimination of all Nuclear Weapons. Nuclear power is too mysterious to understand, too horrific to dwell on, and too far away to take responsibility for. It and its destructive power are unthinkable. And yet it continues to press on us, most recently in the announcement that Australia will build nuclear-powered submarines.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Commemorating the Bombing of Tokyo

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 12 March 2020
    9 Comments

    In March we commemorate the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Tokyo in which over 300 planes stacked with incendiary weapons followed each other at regular intervals for three hours and killed an estimated 100,000 people — as many as those killed by either of the nuclear weapons in Japan.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stop bombarding us with military metaphors

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 26 February 2020
    22 Comments

    One of the most popular, and largely counterproductive, metaphors in public conversation is the military one. It suggests that the project commended is a war in which there is an enemy, a campaign to be begun, forces to be mobilised, a public whose support is to be won, and weapons to be used. They commit us to do whatever it takes to win the war.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The scorching of Timor-Leste

    • Tammy Pemper
    • 23 August 2019
    3 Comments

    I stood to continue on foot around the UN compound. I kept walking, ignoring the screaming, the shooting, the panic. Timorese looked to us. I needed to give them hope. I took motivation from them. More than that, I wanted to stay on my feet. I required time to respond and do what I could when the end came.

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  • RELIGION

    Hiroshima and Transfiguration

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 13 August 2019
    23 Comments

    One event, recalling the revelation of Jesus' relationship to God, is a feast of light; the other, recalling man's inhumanity to man, speaks of darkness. Both are pointers to possible human futures: one of glory and the other of annihilation. The history of nuclear weapons and recent developments present this choice more starkly.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Remember Hiroshima as US nixes treaties

    • Tony Smith
    • 06 August 2019
    7 Comments

    The timing of the USA's announcement that it is withdrawing from treaties limiting the nuclear arms race came just a few days before the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. The anniversary remains important because it serves as a reminder that nuclear weapons have been used and that they could be used again.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Reckoning is due after Afghanistan endgame

    • Jeff Sparrow
    • 31 January 2019
    18 Comments

    John Howard promised to 'stay the course' in Afghanistan. So too did Tony Abbott, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. So complete was the political consensus that parliament didn't even debate the Afghan intervention until nine years after it began. Now that there's no longer a course on which to stay, we're due some accountability.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Trump, turtles and the new nuclear threat

    • Justin Glyn
    • 24 October 2018
    5 Comments

    While nuclear weapon stockpiles have reduced massively since the 1980s, the major arms controls treaties have been gradually eroded. At the same time, and even more dangerously, the world has seen a repudiation of the diplomacy which limited the numbers of nuclear weapons and which has prevented their accidental use.

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