Free Republic

"Matt Bruenig is researcher of poverty and welfare systems at the think tank Demos." By now, it is well established that capitalism is fundamentally built upon threats of force. As libertarian philosophers Robert Nozick and Matt Zwolinski have explained, the only way to turn unowned natural resources (such as land, minerals and other goods) into privately owned property is by violently preventing all others from using them. This one-sided exclusion destroys freedom of movement and cuts many people off from the things that they need to survive.

You may have never heard of Vasili Arkhipov. And yet life as we know it on this planet could have ended if it were not for his crucial intervention during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Born in 1926, Arkhipov saw action as a minesweeper during the Soviet-Japanese war in August 1945. Two years later he graduated from the Caspian Higher Naval School, serving in the Black Sea and Baltic submarine fleets – just in time for the start of the Cold War, which would stay with him for the rest of his service. During the 1950s the Soviets became very...

Atomic weapon tests by the US and USSR cause the tilt of the Earth to shift by 11 degrees dooming all life. Excellent low budget British Sci Fi.

The U.S. came within seconds of launching a nuclear strike on Russia ,unleashing WW3 during the coldest period of the Cold War, according to secret documents revealed by a historian. Washington and Russia came extremely close to a massive nuclear war because of a faulty 46-cent component that caused a computer glitch, according to the documents. The secret documents were revealed and detailed in a book by American author Eric Schlosser titled Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. The documents include over 1,000 accidents with nuclear weapons that occurred due to the negligence...

"The long unmeasured pulse of time moves everything. There is nothing hidden that it cannot bring to light...." --Sophocles Call it a footnote to history. It's 46 pages long, but till now it's been kept under wraps: the testimony of David Greenglass before a grand jury some six decades ago on August 7, 1950. It doesn't contain any surprises. It's been known for some time that his testimony against his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, was false. A frame-up. He admitted it in a newspaper interview before he died, and explained why he'd ratted on her: to save his own skin. She...

Here's what we know: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 for selling U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union after one of the most sensational Cold War-era espionage trials. They were convicted in 1951 owing, largely, to the testimony of David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg's brother. Here's what we don't know: How credible Greenglass' testimony was in court. Greenglass himself spent nearly a decade in prison for his role in the conspiracy. The Army sergeant stole nuclear intelligence from Los Alamos, N.M., and said he passed it on to the Rosenbergs. At the trial, he said Ethel Rosenberg typed...

... "After tens of years of peace, that peaceful period after the Cold War is now over," Defence Minister Tomasz Siemoniak told reporters in Zagan. "Because there are more and more crises erupting around Europe... It's not only the Ukrainian and Russian crisis but also ISIS and a number of different crises in northern Africa," he said, using an acronym to refer to the jihadist Islamic State group.

Rosetta's lander lasted just 60 hours on a comet after it bounced into the dark shadows of a cliff, where its solar panels couldn't power the vehicle. Why didn't it carry a more reliable power source, say a nuclear battery like one that's unfailingly fueled Voyager for decades? It's a simple question with a fascinating answer, one that begins with the Cold War and ends with the future space exploration. When it comes to space travel, plutonium-238 is the perfect fuel: long-lasting and, as I'll explain later, relatively safe. Without it, we have no hope of going much further than...

Ten U.S. Senators and three representatives were the Soviet Union’s favorite members of Congress when the Communist nation was our worst enemy, according to a previously classified Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) report obtained by Judicial Watch. The federal lawmakers had repeated contact with Communist diplomats who “cultivated” relationships with them during the Cold War, the records show. JW obtained the information by using the Mandatory Declassification Review process and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The records are from an FBI operation that monitored Soviet officials and establishments in Washington, D.C. and determine that there is a “continuing interest...

Deadline Hollywood announced that the trailer for the latest collaboration between Steven Spielberg, one of the greatest directors of our time, and Tom Hanks, one of the world’s most popular actors, has been released. The collaboration is a film called “Bridge of Spies,” which relates the career of James Donovan, a lawyer who risked his career to defend Rudolf Able, a captured Soviet spy, in 1957, the height of the Cold War. Later, Donovan would negotiate for the release of captured U2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers, in exchange for Able. Spielberg has, for the most part, shone when...

Big news hit the front page of the New York Times on Saturday, in the form of a long article on China’s efforts to miniaturize its nuclear arsenal. The article, using the annual Pentagon report on Chinese military capabilities as its primary source, noted that the decision to tackle the technical problems associated with miniaturization suggest (but only suggest) a larger shift in nuclear weapons doctrine. As the Times article notes, China has long had the latent capacity to MIRV its nuclear missiles, a step that the United States, the Soviet Union, France, and the United Kingdom took long ago....

Post-Cold War honeymoon is long over. It was a geopolitical honeymoon that the West should have never taken in the first place After the Cold War ended, much promise was held out that the world would rapidly democratize—particularly states with notoriously poor human rights records such as China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba. Alas, these were utopian dreams. We were told that transferring large amounts of wealth and technology to authoritarian regimes would make them richer and free—only the former took place. We educated their leaders, often at our taxpayers’ expense, with the promise that these Western educated leaders would usher...

Post-Cold War honeymoon is long over. It was a geopolitical honeymoon that the West should have never taken in the first place After the Cold War ended, much promise was held out that the world would rapidly democratize—particularly states with notoriously poor human rights records such as China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba. Alas, these were utopian dreams. We were told that transferring large amounts of wealth and technology to authoritarian regimes would make them richer and free—only the former took place. We educated their leaders, often at our taxpayers’ expense, with the promise that these Western educated leaders would usher...

In 1955 the United States military conducted a large training exercise that covered a substantial portion of Louisiana. Named Operation Sagebrush, the focus of the exercise was to evaluate the effectiveness of military operations in a nuclear environment. The exercise lasted for 15 days with 85,000 troops

When Corporal Charles McMahon was killed in a rocket attack by North Vietnamese troops, his home town of Woburn, Massachusetts felt the aftershocks. He was 21-years-old, had been deployed for less than two weeks, and was killed just one day before the Fall of Saigon ended the Vietnam war. Massachusetts had already lost 1,330 service members to the war, including the first killed-in-action casualty, Air Force TSgt. Richard Fitzgibbon Jr. of Stoneham. His son, Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Richard Fitzgibbon III, was killed in action nine years later, making them the sole father and son service member casualties in Vietnam....

It was at the vanguard of aviation technology in the 1950s, and it's still going strong today: meet the B-52 Stratofortress.The B-52 heavy bomber continues to show that old doesn't have to mean outdated, even in an era of rapid technological change. Just the opposite: through good maintenance and occasional updates, vintage tech can hold its own against flashier but more expensive, and more finicky, next-generation (and next-next-next-generation, even) designs. The very first flight of a Boeing B-52 took place 60 years ago this weekend.

The jungles of Viet Nam were the reality for over 54,000 deaths of America’s soldiers, but the Nam war also may be the epitome of stupidity for politicians who turned a US victory into an agonizing defeat! An important book appearing on bookshelves of an American legion post details just what went wrong and it was written by the son of John H. Richardson, Sr., the senior CIA station chief in Saigon. Much maligned after news stories popped up in homeland newspapers, written by real fly-by reporters, the Saigon headquarters of the CIA chief became the boiling point for palace...

We conservatives have countless beefs with Chris Matthews. But in contrast with the younger generation of liberals inhabiting MSNBC, the American left at large—and the Oval Office—Matthews is more of an old-school Cold Warrior, and, dare I say it, a patriot. And so it was that on this evening's Hardball, Matthews flatly declared "I hate" the Castro regime. How many other denizens of the left—from Rachel Maddow to Barack Obama—can you imagine saying the same? Matthews thus aligns himself more closely with Ronald "Evil Empire" Reagan than with Barack Obama, who just today was hailed by Tom Friedman for being...

Exploding A Nuclear Bomb In The Sky Creates An Interesting Phenomenon In 1962, during the depths of the Cold War, the U.S. military exploded a nuclear weapon high above an atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Dubbed Operation Starfish, this exercise was part of a larger project to evaluate the impacts of nuclear explosions in space. The missile, launched from Johnson Island, 900 miles from Hawaii, was armed with a 1.4 megaton warhead, programmed to explode at 240 miles above the earth. It detonated as expected. What was not entirely expected was the magnitude of the resulting electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The...

Maj. Andrei Durnovtsev, a Soviet air force pilot and commander of a Tu-95 Bear bomber, holds a dubious honor in the history of the Cold War. Durnovtsev flew the aircraft that dropped the most powerful nuclear bomb ever. It had an explosive force of 50 megatons, or more than 3,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima weapon. Over the years, historians identified many names for the test bomb.