• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
    • Allies
    • Board of Directors
    • Guiding Principles
    • Member Organizations
    • Mission & History
  • Membership
  • Request a Speaker
  • Volunteer
  • Contact Us
  • Contribute

The Colorado Coalition

Envision a World without Nuclear Weapons

Click Here to Contribute

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Featured
  • Events
  • Take Action
  • News
  • Perspective
  • Subscribe

Colorado Springs Remembers Hiroshima and Nagasaki

August 6, 2017 By Bob Kinsey

Remarks by Bob Kinsey at City Hall Colorado Springs August 6

 

 

“Forgetaboutit 72 years Ago. Big deal. The end of World War 2.. Got the Japs to surrender. Truman never lost any sleep over it. They would have used it on us if they got it. It was a Just War in self defense – Remember Pearl Harbor! We just returned the favor. It save a million American servicemen lives to be lost in the invasion of Japan mainland Forgetaboutit. Its so over and done.”

So who is calling us to Remember? the Hibakusha (Atomic Bomb survivors) want us to remember their city’s dead – mostly civilian – and to have their death, and the shame and pain by Hibakusha themselves at least meah something positive to remind us it must never happen again. So the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb museum sends out these poster to educate—to help new generations to remember

The historic Christian theologians want us to remember that a war is only “Just” if more than a just cause exists. It must also be fought with just means — not targeting civilians or doing more damage than prevented. Just so the Federal Council of Churches condemned the bombing immediately afterward. Given our modern day WMD’s it may be that no war can be “Just”. And to remember that we, so far, are the only nation to detonate nuclear weapons in warfare while lying to ourselves about why we did so.

Gar Alperowitz, the historian of the decision to drop the bomb, wants us to remember how the Japanese were seeking surrender terms months before Hiroshima, — that the Pentegon calculated Japan would surrender by the latest November 1945 without any invasion of their mainland. –that the declaration of war on Japan August 1st by the Soviet Union was more a surrender factor than dropping of the bomb on August 9. After all the US Army Airforce had obliterated many Japanese cities in the last year of the war with “conventional” weapons.

Alperowitz says remember that US Secretary of State argued for the use of the bomb to intimidate the Russians to not use their otherwise superior military might to extend hegemony over all of Europe in 1945. And Alperowitz wants us to remember how we sold ourselves multiple fictional rationalizations for having used the bomb and building more.  (including  the supposed million American servicemen’s lives saved)

President Eisenhower wants us to remember the 5-6 Trillion dollars we spent on building nukes and delivery systems over the first 50 years when he said “Every gun that is made, every warship launched every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who are hungry and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.” What if we had spent that money on creating just and prosperous societies world wide? How much safer would we be now?

The International Court of Justice wants us to remember their 1999 advisory opinion that the use –or even threat of use –of nuclear weapons constitutes a crime against humanity.

122 nations who created the Nuclear Ban Treaty want us to remember how our 1970 treaty commitment to non-proliferation involved disarming our own nuclear arsenal. To remember that instead, Congress is commiting another Trillion dollars to “modernize” our nuclear weapons complex to manufacture more bombs and missiles. Let’s remember that it is we who pushed NATO east of Germany towards Russia, in violation of verbal agreements with them not to. We have been baiting the Russian Bear – not the reverse.   And we have instructed NATO countries NOT to endorse this Treaty.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists wants us to remember and to consider that we are 2.5 minutes to Midnight — closer to a possible nuclear war than at any time since 1953. More flash points and more despair of peaceful solutions here and elsewhere. Let us remember the words of Dr. King: “the choice today is between non-violence and non-existence.”

Our planet – non human as well as human inhabitants – want us to consider whether we as individuals and as a nation yet have a soul that respects their survival and participation in the great chain of being. They call us to remember rather than repress the meanings of August 6-9 1945.The weapons we point at our enemies have passed through our own heart on their way. Let us remember our citizen power, and our humanity, and turn away from our selfish, and foolish myths that our nation can have national security even if others are suffering. Let us remember that we produce daily in our nuclear power plants and our nuclear weapons production and our so called depleted uranium or armor piercing ordinance,– that we continue to create High Level Nuclear Waste a poison that will be deadly for up to 250,000 years and haven’t a plan to protect the planet from all this “waste”. Don’t forgetaboutit.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Take Action

About Bob Kinsey

Primary Sidebar

Receive Instant Updates

Enter your email address to subscribe to The Colorado Coalition and receive notifications of new events and posts by email.

Contact Us

Disarmament Quotes

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight Eisenhower US President 1953-1961

We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal ... 

George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, January 4, 2007

[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

5-Star Admiral William D. Leahy Chief of Staff to President's Roosevelt and Truman, leader of Combined US-UK Chiefs of Staff during WWII

So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained for ages. There used to be so-called laws of war, which made it tolerable. Now we know the truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atomic bomb brought an empty victory but it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see... 

Mahatma Gandhi from The Essential Gandhi, Louis Fisher, ed.

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlister Kings Bay Protestor 2019

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford "The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

It is my fervent goal and hope…that we will some day no longer have to rely on nuclear weapons to deter aggression and assure world peace. To that end the United States is now engaged in a serious and sustained effort to negotiate major reductions in levels of offensive nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal of eliminating these weapons from the face of the earth. 

Ronald Reagan, October 20, 1986

There are still thousands of warheads loaded on operational systems and standing on high states of alert on virtually hair-trigger posture. And you have to ask yourself: Why is that? Who is the enemy? What is the threat? 

U.S. General Lee Butler Former Commander in Chief, U.S. Strategic Air Command in 1991-92

Viewing Trinity Test July 16,1945: "Now we are all Sons of Bitches"

Kenneth Bainbridge Deputy Director

Now, understand, this matters to people everywhere. One nuclear weapon exploded in one city -– be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague –- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences might be -– for our global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate survival. 

Former President Barack Obama, April 5, 2009

It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason. 

Mikhail Gorbachev, 1995

Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. We scientists recognise our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of atomic energy and its implication for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope - we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death. 

Albert Einstein, January 22, 1947

We seek the elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. 

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee Butler Former Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

Over the past 15 years, the goal of elimination of nuclear weapons has been so much on the back burner that it will take a true political breakthrough and a major intellectual effort to achieve success in this endeavor.

Mikhail Gorbachev, January 31, 2007

Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not. 

Robert McNamara Former U.S. Secretary of Defense

Copyright © 2023 The Colorado Coalition


A Website by Arielle Elak Design