Peace Train November 24, 2017
By Judith Mohling
The country is reeling with the daily blows of a sexual counter-revolution. With accusations of sexual assaults that are finally out in the open and being believed, the careers and reputations of accused men are in jeopardy. Can there be a parallel nuclear/sexual counter-revolution?
Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Love the Bomb) is filled with sexual innuendo. “The erect warheads and the cascading mushroom clouds are perceived to signify male penetration and ejaculation,” according to Dr. Kathleen Sullivan, nuclear academic.
Tony Macklin wrote in Film Comment that “the picture opens with two planes refueling in the sky in great metal coitus as the sound track croons Try A Little Tenderness. The film ends with the mushroom clouds of orgiastic world destruction as the track croons, We’ll Meet Again. The purgation is thorough and devastating.”
Eighty-two percent of women oppose the design and development of new nuclear weapons (61 percent strongly oppose) according to a poll by Lake Sosin Snell & Associates for Abolition 2000. When it comes to actual use of nuclear weapons we are all women being harmed against our will. In the event of a nuclear war, the earth itself would be a woman being penetrated and harmed against her will.
Beyond Nuclear has joined Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Union of Concerned Scientists and other national, regional, and faith-based peace and disarmament organizations including the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center right here in Boulder, asking the United States to make nuclear disarmament the centerpiece of national security policy. In a joint resolution — Back from the Brink: A Call to Prevent Nuclear War — the groups call on the United States to lead a global effort to prevent nuclear war by:
renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first
ending the president’s sole, unchecked authority to launch a nuclear attack
taking US nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert
cancelling the plan to replace its entire arsenal with enhanced weapons;
actively pursuing a verifiable agreement among nuclear armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.
Additionally, the world now has a treaty being signed and ratified at the United Nations by a majority of the world’s nations—with the sad exception of nuclear weapons states—banning nuclear weapons and when 50 nations have ratified the treaty it will be international law. Spread the word.