Tomgram: Michael Klare, War in the Arctic?
When I first met Michael Klare in the late Neolithic age (it was actually the early 1970s), he was already researching the U.S. military in a way no one else was doing. His first book on the subject, War Without End: American Planning for the Next Vietnams, had just been published. The title remains eerily apt, given Washington’s twenty-first-century “forever wars.” Almost 50 years later, he’s still ahead of the curve and his newest book on that military, All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, has only recently come out.
And he hasn’t stopped yet, as you’ll see in today’s piece on a new nuclear flashpoint for the U.S. and Russia: the melting Arctic. It’s the sort of thing that, in another world, would be headline news. Still, his latest piece saddens me for personal reasons. When Klare and I first met, the Cold War with the other superpower of that moment, the Soviet Union, was still in high gear; the Vietnam War had yet to end; and the Cuban Missile Crisis (the one time in my life when I truly felt like “ducking and covering”) was only a decade past. In other words, the possibility of a global conflagration that might end life as we know it on this planet still seemed all too possible. As late as the early 1980s, in the age of Ronald Reagan, I would find myself on the streets of New York City with my family, marching in the company of Hibakusha — survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bombing — and perhaps a million other protestors, part of a global antinuclear movement calling for disarmament and protesting the possibility of an annihilating war. That seemed a moment of fear but also of hope when it came to the nuclear issue.
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