RSS

Morton Mintz

Morton Mintz is a former chair of the Fund for Investigative Journalism and a former Washington Post reporter. An earlier version of this article appeared on TomPaine.com.

Recent Articles

Bush's Judges Matter to Jane and Joe Sixpack

Morton MintzMay 27, 2005

Last month, a New York Times Magazine cover story took an in-depth and valuable look at judicial radicals. Like Janice Rogers Brown and other court nominees George W. Bush and Bill Frist are trying to ram through the Senate, these professors and think-tankers pass themselves off as conservatives. Yet they are leading what the writer called an "increasingly active" movement that seeks deregulation "in a manner not seen since before Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal." It's a movement that even Supreme Court Justice Antonin A. Scalia couldn't abide.

Hair-Raising Hair Triggers

Morton MintzDec 05, 2002

Thousands of ready-to-fire U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons are susceptible to unauthorized launches by terrorists, who might either capture a missile or electronically hack into a missile launch-control system. This reality has gotten nearly zero attention in the press. And it gets worse. Cyber-terrorists might also succeed in fooling early-warning systems, inducing a false attack warning that increases the risk of a mistaken retaliatory launch. Although terrorism has dramatically intensified these perils, there has been no progress on nuclear "de-alerting" -- reducing the operational readiness of nuclear forces -- since the September 11 attacks.

Two Minutes to Launch

Morton MintzDec 19, 2001

The bitter disputes over national missile defense (NMD) have obscured a related but dramatically more urgent issue of national security: the 4,800 nuclear warheads--weapons with a combined destructive power nearly 100,000 times greater than the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima--currently on "hair-trigger" alert.