Post by 3bid on Sept 5, 2017 13:40:41 GMT -5
Forgotten History of the War on Korea
By Maria | August 29, 2017 | TUC RADIO
With Utah Phillips, Christine Ahn, and Jeff Blankfort
The extraordinary threat issued by Donald Trump to bring fire and fury on North Korea has been pushed into the background by the events of Charlottesville and the flooding of Houston. But the firing of Steve Bannon brought Korea back into focus. Blankfort and Ahn say that Bannon was not fired for his right- wing nationalism but because he objected to any use of force to resolve Washington’s conflict with North Korea and supported the withdrawal of US troops from South Korea as part of a deal to defuse the current crisis.
The great late folk singer and story teller Utah Phillips said that being drafted and stationed in Korea changed his life. He saw a country that had been utterly devastated – worse than any before or after. He told us how he became an activist at a meeting in the Unitarian Fellowship Hall in Berkeley in May of 2004.
Jeff Blankfort is a veteran, much traveled journalist and photographer. Since 2001, he has hosted Takes on the World, a twice monthly program on international affairs for KZYX public radio for Mendocino County in Northern California.
Blankfort studied history at UCLA in the 1950s, and was one of 14 students out of 14,000, who protested the Korean War. He recently did an in depth research on the origin of the war and invited Christine Ahn to be the guest on his program on August 23, 2017.
Christine Ahn is co-founder of the Korea Policy Institute (KPI), the National Campaign to End the Korean War and a columnist with the Institute for Policy Studies. She has appeared on Al-Jazeera, BBC, CNN, Democracy Now!, NBC’s Today Show, NPR, and The Takeaway.
Thanks to Jeff Blankfort and KZYX for sharing part of the one hour program that can be found unedited on radio4all under Jeff Blankfort.
tucradio.org/audio/forgotten_history_war_on_korea_aug_2017.mp3 [29 MIN]
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Ira Helfand and Alan Robock: Nuclear Blast and Nuclear Winter
By Maria | August 15, 2017 | TUC Radio
Nuclear war will kill the attacker as well as the attacked
Dr. Ira Helfand explains what happens when a nuclear weapon hits the center of an American City. Professor Alan Robock is the leading expert on Nuclear Winter. He says that the firestorm of the burning city raises a cloud of dust into the Stratosphere where it circles and eventually covers the globe for up to a decade. Even a limited nuclear war using less than 1% of the existing weapons will bring darkness and famine to the Northern Hemisphere.
A US president threatening casually “fire, fury and .. power the likes of which this world has never seen before” displays ignorance of nuclear physics as well as Republican politics.
When Ronald Reagan, in the middle of his cold war campaign against the Soviet Union suddenly showed interest in meeting Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to talk about the reduction of nuclear weapons, the world took notice. Later Reagan and Gorbachev made a joint statement. They said: “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
Dr. Ira Helfand was recorded at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston in April 2016. Professor Alan Robock was recorded in February 2015 in New York City. (Prof Robock is excerpted from Archive)
tucradio.org/audio/nuclear_blast_nuclear_winter_helfand_robock_2017.mp3 [29 MIN]