• 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

Peace Train Aims at Purpose of Colorado Nukes

February 8, 2018 By Bob Kinsey

By JUDITH MOHLING

“Betcha didn’t know,
Right here in Colorado,
49 nuclear missiles,
Are ready to go!” Colorado Coalition for the Prevention of Nuclear War sidewalk chant.

With all the Trump administration and Kim Jong-un talk today about nuclear warfare, it’s appropriate to keep in mind that U.S. defense policy has long made Colorado and its neighbors potential targets for Russian nuclear weapons.
The “hundreds of nuclear missiles” stored across the Interior West “are not meant to be launched, ever,” as Tom Collina explained for “Defense One.” Instead, the deployment was meant to force Russia to spend hundreds of its own weapons obliterating the regions’ far-flung silos, Collina argues.
“Their main purpose is to ‘absorb’ a nuclear attack from Russia, acting as a giant ‘nuclear sponge,’” he wrote. And the nation’s new secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, according to Tom Collina, agrees.
This idea likely does not apply in a confrontation with a smaller power, such as North Korea, but it’s newly relevant today as the U.S. considers the future of its intercontinental ballistic missile program.
Five hundred nuclear Minute Man III Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) are located in Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, North Dakota and Montana, according to “Nuclear Heartland.” Colorado has 49, each armed with one nuclear warhead ready to go.

Air Force officers, underground in bunkers, 24/7, must be “upstanding, well-trained, drug-free,” waiting for word to turn the keys and fire the missiles, that can be aimed within minutes at Russia or wherever. The Russians have their equivalent. This was relevant in the long ago past of the Cold War, and it is becoming relevant again. and the missileers are probably bored, depressed, probably not drug-free, and sick of their thankless jobs doing nothing.

So, and let this sink in, these missileers bear the unfathomable responsibilities of weapons that could certainly bring life as we know it to a halt filled with nuclear fallout and a deep shadow over the earth blotting out the sun from burning debris, creating “nuclear winter,” according to Joseph Cirincione, in an abstract from the Global Catastrophic Risks Conference.

“It would be impossible for many forms of life to survive the extreme rapidity and degree of changes in temperature and precipitation, combined with drastic increases in UV light massive radioactive fallout and massive releases of toxins and industrial chemicals.

Join us to say, ‘Absolutely not.’

Share this:

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

Related

Filed Under: Perspective

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

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

[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

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

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

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

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.

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

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

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 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 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

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

“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

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

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

Copyright © 2022 The Colorado Coalition


A Website by Arielle Elak Design