Rai, Milan

Rai, Milan

Milan Rai

1 February 2019Comment

Milan Rai recaps the history of US nuclear threats against North Korea

President Truman signs a proclamation initiating US involvement in the Korean War. Photo: US National Archives

As we head towards another inconclusive summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and US president Donald Trump, here is some inconvenient background that is unlikely to feature in mainstream coverage of the meeting. We recommend you take the time to forget each of these facts. The media already has.

Why is Korea divided?

Korea was a united nation-state…

1 December 2018News

Britain finally calls for ceasefire (but British arms sales continue)

After fleeing Hodeidah, Ameen Hamanah and his family now live in Aden, renting a house with financial support from UNHCR. Photo: UNOCHA/Matteo Minasi

Extremely late in the day, in mid-November, Britain finally put forward a draft UN resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in and around the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah, and setting out a possible peace process. This was over two weeks after the US started calling for a ceasefire in Yemen.

As Labour shadow foreign…

1 December 2018Comment

In the years ahead, British activists are going to have to become better at building cross-class, multi-racial movements for change.

GarciaLopezLuisGaspar [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

As I write, Britain is in the middle of the most extraordinary political uncertainty as it tries to leave the European Union (EU). As we pointed out before the referendum, Brexit…

1 October 2018News

Famine risk from British-backed attack on Yemeni port

This summer, Abdullah, 13, Abdulaziz, 12, and Maria, 5, fled from Saudi airstrikes on their neighbourhood in the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah. Their mother and father, who didn’t wish to publish their own names, are destitute and searching for work in Sana’a, 90 miles from the coast. Photo: Becky Bakr Abdulla/Norwegian Relief Council.

‘This war risks killing an entire generation of Yemen’s children’, said Carolyn Miles, the president of Save the Children, on 18 September. As she spoke,…

1 October 2018Comment

A review-editorial of three important new books on campaigning

Matthew Bolton, How to Resist: Turn Protest to Power, Bloomsbury, 2017, 178pp, £9.99
George Lakey, How We Win: A Guide to Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigning, Melville House, December 2018, 224pp, £tba
Jonathan Matthew Smucker, Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals, AK Press, 2017, 284pp, £14

All three of these books contain inspiring stories of effective, successful campaigning. All three present challenging ideas that deserve chewing over. And all three have…

1 August 2018Comment

The peace movement should welcome the cancellation of the "provocative" US war games in and around South Korea, argues Milan Rai

Threat Tactics Report - North Korea vs the United States (2018), U.S. Army TRADOC

The US-North Korea nuclear summit in Singapore on 12 June was met with a wave of criticism and ‘disappointment’ from Western commentators, including from sections of the peace movement.

On the day, there was criticism from Beatrice Fihn, director of ICAN, which won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for its role in securing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Fihn tweeted: ‘We support…

1 August 2018Feature

Milan Rai reviews the evidence

At the

In July 1945, US president Harry S Truman had two powerful options his advisors believed could end the Pacific war – apart from a bloody US land invasion of Japan, or the use of nuclear weapons.

One was a Russian declaration of war. The other was to allow the Japanese emperor to keep his throne, despite his war crimes.

Truman refused to try either of these options before using the atom bomb.

Russia

On 8 July, the top-level US-UK…

1 August 2018Review

Profile Books, 2017; 512pp; £25

Sir Rodric Braithwaite was foreign policy adviser to prime minister John Major and chair of his joint intelligence committee. A history of the nuclear arms race from such an insider is bound to be a polished piece of mainstream propaganda.

For example, while he concedes that US president Richard Nixon did issue nuclear threats (over Vietnam in 1969, and during the 1973 Egypt-Israel war, both mentioned on p333 of the book), Braithwaite sees these as the two exceptions…

1 June 2018Comment

Is the US president opening Pandora's box?

US president Donald Trump has taken steps towards war with China and Iran, even as he seeks peace with North Korea. But things may not be quite what they seem.

At the beginning of May, the Trump administration declared trade war on China.

The US gave China a punishing list of economic demands, including a reduction in the US-China trade imbalance by $200bn by June 2020. (This would require the Chinese government to effectively take over the economy, when the US has been…

1 June 2018News

Trump's Korea summit is heading for disaster, argues Milan Rai

US national security advisor John Bolton, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, US president Donald Trump and US vice-president Mike Pence (left to right) on 2 May 2018. Photo: US State Department

We can expect a lot of twists and turns over the next month, before the unexpected 12 June summit in Singapore between US president Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. There is a reasonable way forward that experts agree gives a solid chance for building towards some kind of…

1 June 2018News

One person barred and a second ejected from Liverpool event

Brian Bamford outside the Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair, 7 April. Photo: PN

On 7 April, the organisers of the Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair excluded two people from the gathering, which was taking place in the huge Black-E community arts centre near the city centre.

Brian Bamford, a member of the Northern Anarchist Network, was told in advance that he would not be allowed in, and was stopped at the door. Another man (whose name is not known) was taken from a workshop by…

1 June 2018Review

Penguin Press, 2017; 800pp; £10.99

Do you want to base your views about aggression, violence, war and peace on the available biological/psychological evidence? Do you have the stamina for 700 very challenging pages? Yes and yes? Here’s the book for you.

Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst looks at first sight like just another popular psychology book. I expected brain scans, hormones and genes, and there is a lot about those topics.

What I didn’t expect was a…

1 April 2018News

Break down in hasty Trump-Kim summit could 'take us closer to war' warns George W Bush's North adviser on North Korea

Should the US be talking to North Korea? Definitely. Is a hasty Trump-Kim summit a good idea? Almost certainly not. Still there are ways to make this process more modest, safer and more constructive. Bizarrely, the summit, rather than being the date by which a detailed deal must be agreed, may be more usefully thought of as a confidence-building gesture and as a way of agreeing the final goals of a nuclear-free zone around Korea.

North Korea has been signalling its willingness to…

1 April 2018Feature

Milan Rai reviews Daniel Ellsberg's new book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

Daniel Ellsberg points to uncanny truths in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964), including the fact that Russia does have an automated ‘Doomsday Machine’ system (called ‘Perimeter’) that will trigger nuclear war if a single nuclear bomb goes off in Moscow. The US nuclear force will launch in the event of a nuclear detonation in Washington DC. Photo: public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Daniel Ellsberg is famous as the Pentagon analyst who leaked thousands of pages of top secret…

1 April 2018Feature

An internal manual for infiltrating activist groups, written by disgraced undercover police officer Andy Coles, has been made public by the Undercover Policing Inquiry

Andy Coles

On 19 March, the Undercover Policing Inquiry (led until July 2017 by Christopher Pitchford) posted the previously-secret Special Demonstration Squad Tradecraft Manual on its website (see accompanying article for extracts). The Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) was a section of Special Branch, the British political police, devoted to undercover operations, which existed between 1968 and 2008.…