Samuel Thompson – Slugger O'Toole

How Ukraine outsmarted Russia with garage tech and changed the face of war..

Samuel Thompson on June 3, 2025, 5:20 pm

| Readers 5458

When NASA first sent men into space in the 1960s, it faced the problem of how to write in zero gravity and spent millions of dollars designing a pen that would work in space. The Soviets got around the same problem by using pencils. The story may not be true but it illustrates that a cheap technology can produce similar results to an expensive one. On Sunday past, the Russia/Ukraine war took a dramatic turn when the Ukrainian intelligence services …

Who won the Second World War anyway?

Samuel Thompson on May 6, 2025, 10:13 am

| Readers 2103

By the time you read this the annual Russian victory parade may have taken place in Moscow. It is now eighty years since the end of the Second World War in Europe and its remembrance perhaps says as much about the present as the past. The three principal victors, the USSR and it successor state, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom have tended to talk up their own contributions which inevitably undermines that of others. President Trump, never …

There May be Trouble Ahead…

Samuel Thompson on January 10, 2025, 7:00 am

| Readers 2046

a room filled with lots of desks and chairs

Younger readers won’t remember this but thirty years ago (yes, older readers, doesn’t time fly!) Allied Dunbar ran a TV ad where a middle-aged man finds a pregnancy test in the bathroom and immediately berates his teenage daughter about being careful only to find out it his wife who is pregnant. The ad then breaks into the 1930s Irving Berlin song, ‘There May be Trouble ahead’. If the re-election of Donald Trump is a surprise political baby, then the role …

From Maskey to O’Neill: The Evolution of Sinn Féin and Remembrance in Northern Ireland…

Samuel Thompson on November 12, 2024, 4:23 pm

| Readers 3787

red flower paper on board

Back in 2002, I knew a former RAF man. He had served as a navigator on a Mosquito fighter/bomber in the Far East during the Second World War. He was a proud member of the RAF aircrew association and, like many veterans of that war, dutifully attended the remembrance service at the cenotaph in Belfast every year. What made the 2002 service different from the ones before it, was that Belfast’s first republican Lord Mayor, Alex Maskey, laid a wreath. …

Britain’s Kristallnacht…

Samuel Thompson on August 7, 2024, 7:59 am

| Readers 6782

One of the most enduring mysteries of the Holocaust is how did one of the most cultured societies in Europe debase itself through the mass murder of Jews and others to the tune of around eleven million people? For decades we have looked back on the Second World War with a sense of moral superiority, the Germans were depraved, evil, while we were the good guys who helped defeat the killers, bring them to justice and expose their crimes to …

Today is the 80th anniversary of D-Day….

Samuel Thompson on June 6, 2024, 6:39 am

| Readers 3306

This year’s D-Day commemoration will probably be the last big anniversary with veterans in attendance as even the youngest of them are almost a century old. As the saying goes, these old soldiers will shortly fade away. Thanks to saturation press coverage, almost every one has heard of D-Day but only people with an interest in military history actually understand what it was, how and why it happened and its significance. I have to confess a personal interest in the …

The Bombing of Gaza. Worse than the Blitz?

Samuel Thompson on January 2, 2024, 7:05 pm

| Readers 4935

I find there are only so many photos and clips of dead and shredded children one can take. The material coming out of the Middle East since October 7th has been heart rendering and anyone with an iota of empathy could not fail to be deeply affected by it. The pictures speak for themselves and for the purposes of this article I do not need to describe the suffering, it is self-apparent. Those who have read some of my previous …

Your 2024 Old Thompson’s Almanac…

Samuel Thompson on January 1, 2024, 7:00 am

| Readers 2385

man in gold and brown robe holding black and silver dslr camera

The twenties have been disappointing, haven’t they? So far, we’ve had a global pandemic, murderous wars and a lurch towards irreversible climate change. Our luck has to change, hasn’t it? After consulting my crystal ball and the entrails of various animals, here’s my satirical look ahead to 2024. January – In the United States Donald Trump surprisingly loses the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary to his hard-line challenger from Mississippi, Congressman I. Love-Gunns. Love-Gunns is running in a platform …

Today is the 19th anniversary of the Indian Ocean Tsunami…

Samuel Thompson on December 26, 2023, 7:00 am

| Readers 1829

Around 230,000 souls met their maker that day, no one knows for sure, making 26th December 2004 one of the deadliest days in human history. I had hoped to publish an account I made a few days after the event when the memory was still fresh, but unfortunately the document is lost in some hidden recess of my hard drive. Still, it was the type of day one does not forget and it remains perhaps, the defining experience of my …

Algeria and Northern Ireland: Does History Repeat Itself or Does it Merely Rhyme?

Samuel Thompson on August 23, 2023, 7:00 am

| Readers 5261

white and brown concrete building near green trees during daytime

A few months ago, I was asked to review Rewriting the Troubles: War and Propaganda Ireland and Algeria by Patrick Anderson for another website. The book is well researched and certainly worth a read. It concentrates on how the conflicts in Algeria and Northern Ireland were reported on, primarily by the British press, but also made a wider comparison. Superficially, there are many similarities between the Algerian War of Independence fought against France 1954-62 and the IRA struggle against Britain …

A history we can agree on?

Samuel Thompson on February 18, 2023, 7:00 am

| Readers 1775

Slavery is a tough subject. I recently delivered a ten-week Open Learning course on Atlantic slavery at Queen’s University Belfast and at times found myself close to tears by the sheer inhumanity and sadism of the thing. Unfortunately, the lure of a making easy money brings out the very worst in people. In the 17th and early 18th centuries, the well-off in virtually every port in Great Britain and Ireland invested in slaving ships, the murderous .com or crypto of …

How realistic is the doomsday scenario?

Samuel Thompson on December 30, 2022, 2:00 pm

| Readers 6885

Back in the bad old days a mitigation presented for loyalists convicted of unlawfully possessing firearms was that the guns were stored for a ‘Doomsday scenario’, the doomsday in question being a United Ireland. Nationalists should consider that for a moment. For many Unionists, a united Ireland spells the end of life as they know it, an unknown, full of dread. As a child at the start of the Troubles I can remember such fears being voiced and although one …

What next for the Ukraine War?

Samuel Thompson on December 17, 2022, 5:51 pm

| Readers 1907

If Vietnam was the first TV war, Ukraine must surely be the first Social Media one. Anyone with a passing interest in international affairs will have seen the war porn; clips of tanks bursting into flames, drones dropping bomblets on armoured vehicles, artillery strikes and even snipers snuffing out lives. Rather than a dearth of information we have too much and it is difficult to separate facts from misinformation or truth from propaganda. What is clear, there is no sign …

Apocalypse Now? The Ukraine crisis and should we be worried?

Samuel Thompson on January 27, 2022, 8:00 am

| Readers 2656

kiev, ukraine, city

On 22nd October 1962 President John F Kennedy took to live television to warn the American public that Soviet nuclear missiles had been discovered on Cuba, a mere ninety miles from the Florida coast. The American military, including the Strategic Air Command with its B-52 bombers armed with nuclear weapons, was put on full alert. For the next six days, the world held its breath as the Americans affected ostentatious preparations for an invasion of Cuba and the US Navy …

For the sake of future generations, we simply cannot go on like this…

Samuel Thompson on April 8, 2021, 6:59 pm

| Readers 29950

I remember back in 1984 being on holiday on a Greek island and wasting an evening drinking largely on my own while a friend who hailed from the loyalist part of the Donegall Road, spent hours trying to convince a friendly English couple that he was British not Irish. After around two hours of the best persuasive arguments he could muster, the woman said, ‘But you’re Irish!’ I learned a couple of lessons that evening, one was not to waste …

Why Can’t Britain get Over the War?

Samuel Thompson on March 21, 2021, 7:58 am

| Readers 5932

We are living in tumultuous times, patiently enduring the greatest global crisis most of us will ever live through. We’ve had fear, depression and apathy but I never thought I’d see almost 2,000 die of a new virus in a single day in the UK, with barely an eyebrow raised. We clapped for the brave nurses and doctors; hundreds of whom have been taken by the very virus they fought. Then, on 20th September last year, came a Spitfire tribute. …

The Toxic Legacy of Donald Trump…

Samuel Thompson on January 20, 2021, 2:26 pm

| Readers 2297

‘There is nothing normal about this president, not in the way he came to power, not in his willingness to dismiss inconvenient facts, to fabricate ‘statistics’, repeat fictional terrorist massacres, nor in his hatred of a free press, his contempt for America’s allies (except Israel), his defence of racist and Nazi groups and disregard of minority rights. Nor, dare I say it, will there be anything normal about his inevitable demise.’[1] I wrote that for Slugger in December 2017 and …

The controversy over the use of nuclear weapons has never gone away…

Samuel Thompson on August 14, 2020, 11:38 am

| Readers 1539

Although the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the Second World to an abrupt end, the controversy over the use of nuclear weapons has never gone away. We are far less credible of the justification of military necessity and a desire to save lives than people in 1945 were, and while we know more about what happened than contemporaries did, the context in which the events occurred is less familiar. It is difficult to overstate that the fighting in …

The enduring tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki…

Samuel Thompson on August 9, 2020, 7:30 am

| Readers 1327

As the 75th anniversary of VJ Day and the end of the Second World War approaches, the world inevitably turns its attention to the enduring tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is often forgotten that World War II was a nuclear war, albeit a one-sided one, and the controversy over the use of nuclear weapons has never gone away. This piece is a slightly modified excerpt from The Lesser Evil, my book on the Second World War. It explains how …

We Always Kill Our Heroes – The legacy of Winston Churchill…

Samuel Thompson on June 11, 2020, 8:31 am

| Readers 3673

There is a whiff of revolution in the air. As I write these words the White House is under virtual siege and a statue of a long dead slave master has been unceremoniously dumped into a river. In London, the cenotaph and a statue of Churchill have been defaced. It is easy to dismiss such actions as mindless vandalism but they were calculated to gain attention by striking at Britain’s very idea of itself and by extension, many British people’s …