Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College of New York, is the author of the book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet. Grossman is an associate of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.

Grossman discusses a proposed change in policy by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that would permit nuclear radiation on the grounds that it is safe or even good for us. Submit your comment here:

http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=NRC-2015-0057

Or write to Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001, Attention:Rulemakings and Adjudications Staff. Docket ID. Needed to be noted on any letter is the code NRC-2015-0057.

Some articles by Grossman:

Radiation Is Good for You, and Other Tall Tales of the Nuclear Industry

The Nuclear Cult

Nuclear Rubberstamp Commission

Nuclear Power/Nuclear Weapons

Embracing Nuclear Power Like a Religion

Money is the Real Green Power: The Hoax of Eco-Friendly Nuclear Energy

Nuclear Power Through the Fukushima Perspective

Nuclear Power Can Never Be Made Safe

The Perils of Nuclear-Powered Space Flights

Maria Santelli is Executive Director of the Center on Conscience & War, a 75-year old organization founded to provide technical and community support to conscientious objectors to war. Based in Washington, D.C., Santelli has been working for peace and justice since 1996. She discusses conscientious objection and this week's attack on a hospital in Afghanistan.

Mike Ferner is a candidate for mayor of Toledo, Ohio.

See http://www.mikeferner.com

Mike Ferner grew up in rural Ohio, working on farms much of his youth. After 12 years of Catholic education and a head full of John Wayne movies, he enlisted in the Navy right out of high school in 1969.

During three years as a hospital corpsman he nursed hundreds of wounded soldiers returning from Viet Nam, an experience that radicalized him for life starting with his discharge as a conscientious objector.

Mike has been an independent member of Toledo City Council and a candidate for mayor of his city; an organizer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME); Communications Director for the Farm Labor Organizing Committee and the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy and has served as national president of Veterans For Peace.

Just prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, he lived there for a month with a Voices in the Wilderness delegation, returning in 2004 for another two months as an independent journalist and wrote "Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran For Peace Reports from Iraq" (Prager 2006). His activism includes several arrests for “disturbing the war,” including disrupting a session of Congress.

His current interest is learning how the Populists organized the largest democratic, mass movement in U.S. history and how to apply that to work he’s doing with Move to Amend.

Khury Petersen-Smith is an activist who lives in Boston. He traveled to Gaza in 2009 as part of the Viva Palestina medical relief delegation. He also traveled to Iraq on a peace delegation in 2004. His organizing and writing focus particularly on Black liberation, Palestine solidarity, and U.S. empire. He was an organizer of a new statement of black solidarity with Palestine: www.blackforpalestine.com

Also find him here: http://facebook.com/black4palestine and here: http://twitter.com/black4palestine

James Kilgore discusses his new book, Understanding Mass Incarceration: An Introduction to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time.

On this day in 1785 the King of Prussia Frederick the Great signed the first post-independence treaty with the United States. The Treaty of Amity and Commerce promised peace but also addressed how the two nations were to relate if one or both were at war, or even if they fought each other, including proper treatment of prisoners and civilians — standards that would forbid most of what war consists of today. “And all women & children,” it reads, “scholars of every faculty, cultivators of the earth, artizans, manufacturers and fishermen unarmed and inhabiting unfortified towns, villages or places, & in general all others whose occupations are for the common subsistence & benefit of mankind, shall be allowed to continue their respective employments, & shall not be molested in their persons, nor shall their houses or goods be burnt, or otherwise destroyed, nor their fields wasted by the armed force of the enemy, into whose power, by the events of war, they may happen to fall; but if any thing is necessary to be taken from them for the use of such armed force, the same shall be paid for at a reasonable price.” The treaty was also the first U.S. free trade agreement, although 1,000 pages too short to resemble a modern free-trade agreement. It was not written by or for or about corporations. It included nothing to protect large companies against small ones. It established no corporate tribunals with the power to overturn national laws. It included no prohibitions on national restrictions on business activities.

His books include War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Tolstoy saw a contradiction between opposing murder and accepting war. He framed his concern in terms of Christianity. In his book The Kingdom of God Is Within You, he wrote: "Everyone in our Christian society knows, either by tradition or by revelation or by the voice of conscience, that murder is one of the most fearful crimes a man can commit, as the Gospel tells us, and that the sin of murder cannot be limited to certain persons, that is, murder cannot be a sin for some and not a sin for others. Everyone knows that if murder is a sin, it is always a sin, whoever are the victims murdered, just like the sin of adultery, theft, or any other. At the same time from their childhood up men see that murder is not only permitted, but even sanctioned by the blessing of those whom they are accustomed to regard as their divinely appointed spiritual guides, and see their secular leaders with calm assurance organizing murder, proud to wear murderous arms, and demanding of others in the name of the laws of the country, and even of God, that they should take part in murder. Men see that there is some inconsistency here, but not being able to analyze it, involuntarily assume that this apparent inconsistency is only the result of their ignorance. The very grossness and obviousness of the inconsistency confirms them in this conviction."

He had followed the Irish campaign for home rule in the 1880s which included a rent strike. He had studied the Russian mass strike of 1905. He had drawn inspiration from numerous sources and created a Passive Resistance Association in India in 1906 to resist new discriminatory laws against Indians. Back in his native, British-occupied India in 1920, on this day, Gandhi won approval by the Indian National Congress for a campaign of nonviolent noncooperation with British rule. This meant boycotting schools and courts. It meant making clothes and boycotting foreign cloth. It meant resignations from office, refusal to support the occupation, and civil disobedience. The effort took many years and advanced by stages, with Gandhi calling it off when people used violence, and with Gandhi spending years in prison. The movement advanced new ways of thinking and living. It engaged in the constructive program of creating self-sufficiency. It engaged in the obstructive program of resisting British operations. It engaged in efforts to unite Muslims with Hindus. Resistance to a salt tax took the form of a march to the sea and the illegal manufacture of salt, as well as attempts to enter an existing salt works, which included brave protesters stepping forward to be violently beaten back. By 1930 civil resistance was everywhere in India. Prison became a mark of honor rather than shame. The people of India were transformed. In 1947 India won independence, but only at the cost of splitting Hindu India from Muslim Pakistan.

David Rothauser is a playwrite, filmmaker, teacher, and peace activist. We discuss his new film, Article 9 Comes to America.

That court, located in the Hague, resolved a long and bitter dispute between the United States and Great Britain. The example of two heavily militarized and war-prone nations submitting to the rule of an international body and peacefully settling their dispute was widely seen as an encouraging example for the world, and remains such to this day, despite the outbreak four years later of World War I. Within weeks of the settlement, a number of nations submitted cases for arbitration to the Permanent Court, including a dispute between the United States and Venezuela. The actual settlement of the Newfoundland Fisheries case gave both the United States and Britain some of what they had wanted. It allowed Britain to create reasonable regulations for fishing in the waters of Newfoundland, but gave the power to determine what was reasonable to an impartial authority. Would the United States and Great Britain have gone to war in the absence of this arbitration? Likely not, at least not right away, and not over the question of fishing. But had one or both nations desired war for other reasons, fishing rights might have served as a justification. Less than a century earlier, in 1812, somewhat similar disputes had served to justify a U.S. invasion of Canada in the War of 1812. Just over a century later, in 2015, disputes over trade agreements in Eastern Europe were leading to talk of war from the Russian and U.S. governments.