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The Ultimate AK-47

April 27, 2018 By Bob Kinsey

Peace Train April 27, 2018
By JUDITH MOHLING
Walking along Broadway in Boulder last Saturday I passed excited people and families, some with guns, flags unfurling in the breeze, signs like “Don’t Tread on Me,” and “Keep Calm & Carry a .45.” It was a gun-rights rally. An hour earlier on the corner had been a Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center anti-war demonstration with peace activists and their signs opposing war and violence. Plus, the March for our Lives movement is challenging the violent status quo in the United States, and changing deeply rooted and prejudicial thinking. Mind boggling.
I was reminded of Toni Morrison, “Forcing a nation to use force is easy when the citizenry is rife with discontent, experiencing feelings of a powerlessness that can be easily soothed by violence.”
This weekend we are celebrating the year-long effort by peace activists 40 years ago to stop plutonium pit production for nuclear weapons at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant eight miles south of Boulder—lengthy, passionate peace activism versus perhaps the ultimate AK-47’s—nuclear weapons. They camped in order to make a round-the-clock demonstration and blocked trains from leaving or entering the complex.
“The Rocky Flats Truth Force was a grass-roots non-violent, anti-nuclear group formed during protests at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant. Demonstrations and railroad track blockages at the Rocky Flats Plant in 1978 resulted in multiple arrests of the protesters. The Rocky Flats Plant was a US nuclear weapons complex which operated from 1952 until 1992, creating considerable radioactive contamination.” Wikipedia
It is also the fortieth anniversary of KGNU Radio, an independent, noncommercial, community radio station “for Boulder, Denver and beyond.” And, we’re celebrating the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, born to carry on the spirit of non-violent resistance.
There is the opening tonight of Facing Rocky Flats at the Boulder Public Library. It is a group exhibit preceding the planned public opening of Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge using art and oral history to explore the past, present, and future of the contentious site.
A day of panel presentations follows on Saturday at Unity Spiritual Center, Folsom and Valmont, with three food trucks gathering at noon, capped off by a live Skype interactive talk with Dan Ellsberg in the evening. Look for films at the library and attend a Joanna Macy influenced workshop Sunday at Naropa. RMPJC.org

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Disarmament Quotes

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

"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 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

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

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

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.

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

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

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

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

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

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

Kenneth Bainbridge Deputy Director

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

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

[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

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