Dear Cindy Piester, In trying to clean up my desk I came across your encouraging letter of December 2007, which I seem to have neglected. I apologize without any good excuse. It just got lost. As for dates, I was on a troopship bound for Japan when the bomb was detonated over Hiroshima. It may have saved my life -- we'll never know. Have been resisting nuclear weapons since the 1950s when I prepared materials for SANE in NYC.
Here's a recent piece. If you like it, perhaps you'' excuse my bad manners.
Stay strong, Peter G Cohen

Is This the Change We Voted For?
By Peter G Cohen

After the wonderful oratory of the Obama campaign most people had reason to expect change. We each interpreted that magic word to mean the change we wanted. Michelle Obama was more specific; she wanted an economy that would make it possible for working people to send their children to college, as her family had done for her . The collapse of the financial sector brought down the whole economy and most dreams have been postponed -- with the exception of the military.

The 2010 budget for military spending is the highest since World War II. While we are mired in an unexplained and very costly effort to create a business-friendly state in Afghanistan, we face an immediate and far greater threat from climate change. The life of planet Earth is already being damaged by global warming and its harsh changes of climate. To preserve a livable world for our children will require vast investments in alternative sources of energy, while we reduce our outpouring of carbon from the burning of fossil fuels. At the same time, we must do all that we can to control the impact of the changes that we cannot control, such as flooding, drought and desertification, intense, destructive storms, and extensive species loss.

In the face of these challenges, here is the military budget request for 2010. Excluding the wars in Cenral Asia, the total budget proposed by the Department of Defense was 533.8 billion. The projected deficit in the next five years is estim