Operation Northwoods is a prime example of why we need to raise critical questions before going to war. Written seven months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, this formerly top secret proposal by the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested ways to build public support for an American invasion of Cuba, including: “A ‘Remember the Maine’ incident [...]
The first three installments in this series drew on irrefutable evidence – formerly classified top secret documents and a recording of a presidential phone call – to show that we need to critically question government claims before going to war. Those posts showed that the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, which became the legal basis for [...]
In August of 1964 Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving President Johnson a blank check to escalate the war in Vietnam. Two alleged acts of North Vietnamese unprovoked aggression were the basis for that resolution. But, as detailed in Part 1 of this series, in reality their first attack was in response to covert American [...]
The first and second Gulf of Tonkin incidents, on August 2 and August 4, 1964, provided the legal basis for the Viet Nam war, yet neither was the “unprovoked aggression” that the Johnson administration portrayed them to be. The first post in this series had an audio clip from a phone conversation in which President Johnson clearly [...]
There’s an old saying: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” But what should the saying be when the American public is fooled repeatedly, at a cost of millions of lives?
Even though the Cold War is supposed to have ended, the US and Russia still test each other’s air defenses. How much risk is there in such actions? More than one might think.
I am a professor at Stanford University, best known for my invention of public key cryptography — the technology that protects your credit card. But, for almost 30 years, my primary interest has been how fallible human beings can survive possessing nuclear weapons, where even one mistake could be catastrophic. I’ve created a series of [...]