American soldiers have long scrawled messages to the enemy on the bombs they were about to deliver. In the The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes reminds us, for instance, that "Little Boy," the bomb that would inaugurate a new age over Hiroshima, "was...
Here's a memory for you. I was probably five or six and sitting with my father in a movie house off New York's Times Square – one of the slightly seedy theaters of that dawn of the 1950s moment that tended to show double or triple feature B Westerns or war...
Last fall was a great time for official optimism when it came to Iraq. The military "metrics" looked ever better and, as had happened at crucial moments in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007, Bush administration and military statements turned practically peachy with the...
Here are words to pin to the Bush years like a wilting corsage: "We don't know what we paid for." That's a quote from Mary Ugone, the Defense Department's deputy inspector general for auditing, concerning massive Pentagon payments made during the occupation and war in...
The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, with its 225,000 or more deaths in 11 countries, shocked the world; so, in recent weeks, has the devastation wrought by a powerful cyclone (and tidal surge) that hit the Irrawaddy Delta of Myanmar. It resulted in at least 78,000...
Back in the mid-1990s, in my book, The End of Victory Culture, I wrote the following about the adventure films of my childhood (and those of earlier decades): "For the nonwhite, annihilation was built not just into the on-screen Hollywood spectacle but into its...
Note for TomDispatch Readers: Think of this dispatch, in TV terms, as counterprogramming. While much of America sits, couch- and Earth-bound, checking out the latest 24/7 bout of Democratic primary coverage, TomDispatch soars into the heavens on the wings of historian...
The last war won't end, but in the Pentagon they're already arguing about the next one. Let's start with that "last war" and see if we can get things straight. Just over five years ago, American troops entered Baghdad in battle mode, felling the Sunni-dominated...
It's like old times in the Persian Gulf. As of this week, a second aircraft carrier battle task force is being sent in – not long after Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Michael Mullen highlighted planning for "potential military courses of action" against Iran;...
The RAND Corporation was the ur-think tank, the Cold War granddaddy of them all, and it's still with us. In the 1950s, nuclear war-gaming a conflagration for which the usual war games would have been ludicrous, it took the U.S. military into virtuality and science...
