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On Trumps “Big Button” and reality

January 5, 2018 By The Colorado Coalition

By JUDITH MOHLING

President Trump, January 2, Twitter: “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works! “

President Trump doesn’t really have a “Nuclear Button” on his desk. According to Esquire.com, “If the president were to order a strike, he would identify himself to military officials at the Pentagon with codes unique to him. He would then transmit the launch order to the Pentagon and Strategic Command.” The U.S. has roughly 6,800 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert status. Presumably, the next step would be to deploy them. (God forbid.)

Hair-trigger means nuclear missiles may be launched within 15 minutes–either from land, air or sea. For example, thousands of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear warheads are on hair-trigger alert.

Forty-nine of these missiles are sitting nearby on the windswept plains of north-eastern Colorado. There are 400 more scattered over Nebraska, Wyoming, North Dakota and Montana.

Each missile has one nuclear bomb, with a blast capacity equivalent to 12 to 18 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb. The orders to launch would come from the president and go down through the chain of command to the crews ready to turn their keys.
A 2002 study by the Federation of American Scientists showed that if just 300 Russian warheads (North Korea may have 60) got through to targets in the United States, 75 million to 100 million people would die from the blast and heat effects in the first half hour. In addition, the public health system, the communications network, the electric grid, the banking system, the food distribution system — all would be gone. In the months after such an attack, the vast majority of Americans not killed in the initial attack would die from starvation, radiation sickness, epidemic disease, or exposure to the elements. A corresponding U.S. attack would create the same devastation in Russia or the Korean Peninsula.

This is insane. We need to abolish all nuclear weapons. Start by getting Colorado’s weapons off hair-trigger alert and passing Senator Markey/Representative Lieu’s bill to limit the President’s first strike capabilities; only Congress could authorize a strike.

Filed Under: Perspective

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Disarmament Quotes

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

Kenneth BainbridgeDeputy Director Manhatten Project

“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 McAlisterKings 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 EisenhowerUS President 1953-1961

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

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 ButlerFormer Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

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