Where Everyone Builds Bombs
April 18, 2018Of course, when anyone asks me what my husband does for a living, I never say, “He builds nuclear weapons.” No one in Richland builds bombs. People here only teach school, fight fires, design containment…
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The High Price of Poetry
April 18, 2018Adolph Hitler was barely one month old when my father, Walter ‘Edward Clark, now still living, was born on 31 May 1889. When he was fifteen, in 1904, Father started to farm on his own in Idaho. Hitler was then a choirboy in Austria, avidly aspiring to become a priest. Only six years earlier, the United States had been engaged in a “splendid little war” on the largest Carribean island — at the enthusiastic urging of William Randolph Hearst and Teddy Roosevelt.
Making Sense of the Senseless: An Irish Education
April 18, 2018NOVEMBER 1982: I’m out of breath. This past month I’ve passed both my written and oral exams and presented my prospectus. Now nothing stands in the way of my trip to Ireland except earning the…
Thoughts of a Mormon Centurion
April 18, 2018I was born and raised in Bremen, a city in northwest Germany, in a I middle-class family. At age fifteen, I became interested in politics, joined a neo-orthodox communistic “cell group” at high school, and…
The Enduring Paradox: Mormon Attitudes Toward War and Peace
April 18, 2018In recent years the subject of war and peace has taken renewed significance for American Latter-day Saints. The announcement by the First Presidency against the basing of the MX missile system in Utah came as…
The Magnitude of the Nuclear Arms Race
April 18, 2018From primitive rocks and clubs to the present nuclear arsenals, the history of warfare is characterized by the dramatic increase in the number of civilians killed in each war and by scale changes in our…
The Ethics of Deterrence
April 18, 2018May a nation threaten what it may never do? May it possess what it may never use: These questions, raised in the Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter, state concisely the ethical dilemma with which Christians in…
Mythology and Nuclear Strategy
April 18, 2018Nearly everyone talks about nuclear weapons and our nation’s nuclear policies and strategies. Yet very few of us understand even the most elementary vocabulary of the subject. Why should terms like “counterforce” and “countervalue,” “first…
The Mormon Church and the Spanish-American War: An End to Selective Pacifism
April 18, 2018The impact of the Spanish-American War on the people of the American West has been overshadowed by its profound effect upon the American nation as a world power. A little-known sidelight to the war is…