Free Republic

Fake protests throughout the world and threats of nuclear war -- in 2022 we witness a violent echo of 1983's Kremlin-orchestrated frauds. I'll address the nuke threat first. On Feb. 27 Russian President Vladimir Putin played drama king and put Russian nuclear forces on high alert. His war in Ukraine already failing, Vlad added nuclear pucker factor. Translation into emotional propaganda: world beware, or I'll start Armageddon. In 1983 the Russians worked a "reserve psychology" propaganda trope using nukes. See, the U.S. was the threat to launch a nuclear war in Europe, even though the Kremlin had physically created the...

John Bolton, President Donald Trump's famously hawkish national security adviser, could not have been enthusiastic when his boss crossed into North Korean territory last weekend to make a bit of history with the leader of the Pyongyang regime, Kim Jong Un. For years, Bolton has warned against conciliatory gestures or negotiations with North Korea. Two months before he took his current job, Bolton argued in an op-ed for a preemptive strike on North Korea based on what he called an "imminent" threat. Now Trump's latest diplomatic gambit with North Korea has raised fresh questions about the influence of his national...

Most students at Columbia do not have first hand knowledge of war. Military violence has been a vicarious experience, channeled into our minds through television, film, and print. The more sensitive among us struggle to extrapolate experiences of war from our everyday experience, discussing the latest mortality statistics from Guatemala, sensitizing ourselves to our parents' wartime memories, or incorporating into our framework of reality as depicted by a Maller[?] or a Coppola. But the taste of war -- the sounds and chill, the dead bodies -- are remote and far removed. We know that wars have occurred, will occur, are...

This column was co-authored by Bob MorrisonSen. John Kerry has a long and dubious record in foreign policy. In the 1970's, he testified against his fellow Vietnam War veterans before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He charged that they were violating the Geneva Conventions every day in Vietnam. Some POWs were outraged at Kerry's disloyal statements. They said they had been tortured by their Communist captors trying to force them to make such untrue statements. Worse, Kerry went to Paris in 1971. There, he met with North Vietnamese Communists. We need to see all his notes from those meetings....

For help understanding the foreign policy headlines of the past few days, let's return, briefly, to the spring of 1983, when Barack Obama was a student at Columbia University. What were the burning international issues of that time? Well, first was the "nuclear freeze" movement, which was prompting mass demonstrations around the world by people worried about the standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States. Obama published an article about it in a campus magazine in which he invoked the vision of "a nuclear free world." The Middle East, meanwhile, was still reeling from the 1982 Israeli invasion...

Ted Kennedy's KGB Correspondence By Kevin Mooney on 6.22.10 @ 6:08AM Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's self-serving, secret correspondence with Soviet agents during the height of the Cold War included proposals for collaborative efforts designed to undermine official U.S. policy set by Democratic and Republican administrations, KGB documents show. With the media now reporting on the late senator's just released Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) file, now is an opportune time for a more expansive investigation into Kennedy's KGB contacts. The agency took a keen interest in a 1961 "fact-finding" trip the Massachusetts Democrat took to Mexico and other parts of...

Who knew? The nuclear-freeze movement, an enterprise run from the Kremlin during the 1970s and '80s, is alive and well. The Obama administration wants to push the reset button on America's nuclear deterrent, essentially by defining WMDs down. Under George W. Bush and his predecessors, Democratic and Republican, an enemy that launched a biological or chemical attack could face a retaliatory nuclear strike. President Obama would not use nuclear weapons in such an instance unless the attacker had nuclear weapons as well. "Those threats, Mr. Obama argued, could be deterred with 'a series of graded options,' a combination of old...

The Obama administration has placed nuclear disarmament at the top of its foreign-policy agenda. Other possible goals, such as modernizing U.S. nuclear forces for deterrence purposes, are now considered either transitory or subordinate to taking steps toward “nuclear zero.” In itself, banning nuclear weapons is not a new U.S. goal; Ronald Reagan also supported it. But this prioritization is unprecedented. In the past, Republican and Democratic administrations have maintained a balance between the parallel goals of modernizing U.S. nuclear programs for deterrence and pursuing nuclear-arms reductions when feasible. This balancing act can be seen in the Clinton administration’s policy of...

During the campaign, I wrote a piece called "Why Won't Obama Talk About Columbia? — The years he won't discuss may explain the Ayers tie he keeps lying about." So now, nearly six months into the Obama presidency, the mainstream media has finally done a bit of the candidate background reporting it declined to do during the campaign — other than in Wasilla — and whaddya know?  The New York Times unearthed a 1983 article called, "Breaking the War Mentality," that Columbia student Barack Obama wrote for a campus newspaper. The article shows that Obama dreaded American "militarism" and its "military-industrial interests," while effusing enthusiasm...

To these ears, it sounded like a sophomoric line by, well, a sophomore seeking to impress classmates and perhaps his fuzzy-headed teacher. But MSNBC has proclaimed Mario Cuomo's call for a nuclear freeze because "peace is better than war and life is better than death" one of the greatest convention-speech lines ever. In the run-up to this evening's keynote address by former VA Gov. Mark Warner and Hillary's much-anticipated speech, Hardball did a segment on some of the best Dem convention speeches of the past. Now, love it or hate it, it's hard to deny that the late Ann Richards'...

March Calls For 'Nuclear-Free' Future By: Cliff Drought Wednesday August 10 2005 SYRACUSE, NY - Ken Howland reached into his pocket Tuesday and took a picture from his wallet. The black and white image was of a man with a shotgun showing his take from a bird-hunting trip. It was taken in 1942 and the man was his father. "He had become a pretty good shot," recalled Howland, pointing to the number of fowl in the picture. The reason for the quick mastery of marksmanship was simple: "If we hadn't used the bomb, he would have had to go over"...

On Jan. 12, 1984, two weeks after the West German defense ministry announced that the first nine U.S. nuclear-tipped intermediate-range Pershing II ballistic missiles were operable on West German soil, then-Massachusetts Lt. Gov. John Kerry found himself in West Germany's Black Forest on an acid-rain fact-finding mission. Someone had awakened the ambitious Kerry at 3 a.m. to tell him that Paul Tsongas would not run for re-election to the Senate. "The issue of war and peace was on the table again," Mr. Kerry later told the Boston Globe, and he jumped into the race before the end of January.

John Kerry's Fellow TravellersA 5-part series exposing John Kerry's Communist connections.Part 4: Subversion in the Senate: Kerry's Communist ConstituencyBy Fedora *NOTE: The term "fellow traveller" as used in this article series refers to someone who is not a member of the Communist Party (CP) but regularly engages in actions which advance the Party's program. Some apparent fellow travellers may actually be "concealed party members": members of the CP who conceal their membership. Which of these classifications is applicable to the Kerrys is a question this series leaves unresolved. This series does not argue for any direct evidence of Richard or...

Here are few things I would love to see happen during tonight's debate: *As the debate starts, Charlie Gibson, the debate moderator, announces that he's giving up his moderator chair to John O'Neill. *When told that the unemployment rate is too high, Bush sticks it to Kerry that a 5.4% unemployment rate ain't too shabby, especially considering the praise Clinton received for a 5.6% unemployment rate. *John Kerry complains about a "shrinking middle class" and President Bush informs the senator that the reason that class is shrinking is because they're moving into higher brackets, not lower. *Immediately after he offers...

Activist: Fight nuclear power Disarmament advocate talks at IWU, ISU By Michele Steinbacher msteinbacher@pantagraph.com BLOOMINGTON -- Nuclear arsenals still point at the world's cities more than a decade after the Cold War, and atomic power plants like the one in Clinton dot the nation's landscape. That should terrify Americans into action, one of the world's leading advocates for nuclear disarmament told Central Illinois residents Thursday. "Why do you have all these missiles if Russia is now your best friend?" Dr. Helen Caldicott asked a crowd gathered at an Illinois Wesleyan University lecture hall Thursday. Later that night she spoke at...

John Kerry told Democrats gathered in Boston two weeks ago that he defended his country as a young soldier in Vietnam and he would defend it again as president. But as Michael Dukakis' Lieutenant Governor, Kerry authored an executive order that said the state of Massachussetts would refuse to take part in any civil defense efforts in response to a nuclear attack on America. The presidential candidate was an ardent proponent of the nuclear freeze at the time, and viewed Cold War civil defense preparations as an attempt to delude the American people into thinking a nuclear exchange was survivable....

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Christine Iverson202-863-8614 Boston, Mass. – Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory released the following statement today in response to a Boston Herald article that shows Senator John Kerry was against nuclear preparedness programs: “When he was running for Lieutenant Governor in 1982, John Kerry campaigned against planning for state evacuation in the event of a nuclear attack. He actually ran a radio ad saying, ‘Someone has to stand up and say “no” to this madness.’ Kerry contended that nobody could survive a nuclear attack, so planning wasn't worth the effort. “Kerry also justified not being prepared by saying...

<p>The "atomic bomb" of bioterrorism is the smallpox virus, which, if unleashed into a general population, might kill millions around the world in a few years.</p> <p>Should the United States destroy its last remaining supply of smallpox viruses to prevent its possible theft by terrorists? Or should it hang onto them as sources of medical information that might save innumerable lives during a bioterrorist attack?</p>