• 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

ICAN Treaty delivered to Peterson AFB

October 10, 2017 By The Colorado Coalition

http://gazette.com/nuns-peacefully-push-for-peace-at-colorado-springs-air-force-base/article/1612879
Two unforeseen blockades didn’t stop two Roman Catholic Dominican nuns from Baltimore from completing their mission to Colorado Springs on Monday.

They delivered to Peterson Air Force Base the new United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

The deed came three days after the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the organization with which the sisters work.

“It was another blessing,” declared Sister Ardeth Platte, 81, after a guard at the west gate accepted a copy of the document that she and Sister Carol Gilbert, 69, offered him.
Related:
Nobel Peace Prize awarded to anti-nuclear campaign group

The handoff went smoothly, even though the first gate to the base off East Platte Avenue was inaccessible and a visitors’ center near the west gate was closed for Columbus Day.

“We would call this direct action,” Platte told 19 students from a Colorado College class on environmental ethics, who watched the elderly sisters fearlessly walk onto the military installation to promote the treaty.

They’ve done the same at military sites in other states. The delivery at Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming – the control site for 150 intercontinental ballistic missiles, including the 49 in Colorado – took much longer, the nuns said.

“We feel what’s going on is systemic crime,” Platte said, as the vast amounts of money spent on nuclear proliferation could be used instead to help the poor.

The pair, who have sounded the battle cry for peace for decades, spent more than a month in New York City over the summer to work on the new treaty, the first legally binding multilateral agreement for nuclear disarmament in 20 years.

The United Nations, with the backing of 122 countries, adopted it July 7 and opened it for signatures and ratification Sept. 20.

The pact – which outlaws nuclear weapons and lays out a plan to eliminate them – would become law 90 days after at least 50 countries ratify it. To date, 53 countries have signed it and three ratified it.

No countries possessing nuclear warheads have supported it.

On Friday came the announcement that the organization with which the sisters work, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, received the Nobel Peace Prize 2017 in recognition of its role in achieving the historic treaty and its work “to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons.”

Colorado College senior Rebecca Glazer, from the San Francisco Bay area, said she respects and admires the sisters, who have been arrested numerous times in Colorado Springs and other cities for nonviolent civil disobedience in calling for nuclear disarmament.

“What they’re doing is powerful and inspiring,” Glazer said. “It’s an incredibly important task to try to stop the proliferation of nuclear arms and send the message that we shouldn’t just be pointing guns at each other but trusting each other to build a peaceful world.”

While in Colorado Springs, Gilbert and Platte also are speaking to classes at Colorado College and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Tuesday, they’ll present a copy of the treaty to Schriever Air Force Base employees.

“We’re looking at a variety of environmental issues and concerns, ranging from local to global, trying to understand different perspectives,” said Colorado College Philosophy Professor Marion Hourdequin, in explaining why her class watched Monday’s action. “It’s an opportunity to gain a richer understanding of the convictions of these Catholic sisters and their ongoing efforts to work for peace and nuclear disarmament.”

Share this:

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

Related

Filed Under: News

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

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

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

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

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

Kenneth Bainbridge Deputy Director

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

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

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.

[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

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

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

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

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

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

“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

"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

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

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

Copyright © 2023 The Colorado Coalition


A Website by Arielle Elak Design