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Bombs Bursting and Nuclear Bombs on Hair Trigger

July 5, 2018 By Bob Kinsey

Peace Train for July 6, 2018

By JUDITH MOHLING

“O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watch’d were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” . . . . .
BUT, WAIT! are we singing happily, even proudly about bombs when nuclear weapons remain a constant threat on our fragile planet and the hands of the Doomsday Clock are set at two and one half minutes before midnight?

The Pentagon has a “Life Extension Program” (begun by the Obama administration) to spend a trillion dollars over the next 30 years modernizing the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Alice Slater of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation calls it, “the Pentagon’s Life EXTINCTION program because it brings the world closer to nuclear war which would be the end of life ultimately for our planet as we know it.

Is this a way to maintain the “military industrial complex,” and the billions of dollars of profits made by corporations like, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, GenCorp Aerojet, Huntington Ingalls, and Lockheed Martin?

“Given the process and the profits, the weapons contractors have a vested interest in ensuring that the American public has a heightened sense of danger and insecurity (even as they themselves have become a leading source of such danger and insecurity). Recently, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) produced a striking report, “Don’t Bank on the Bomb,” documenting the major corporate contractors and their investors who will reap those mega-profits from the coming nuclear weapons upgrades,” from “The Nation” magazine.

Remember that it isn’t the Pentagon that has the responsibility for development, production and maintenance of nuclear weapons, it is the Department of Energy, (DOE) and the weapons labs: Los Alamos National Lab and Sandia National Lab in New Mexico and Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California.

And, speaking of “Doomsday,” Pentagon whistle-blower, Daniel Ellsberg has a remarkable new book, “The Doomsday Machine—Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.”

And, come watch an unforgettable movie, “Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” at the Trident Coffee Shop and Bookstore on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Wednesday evening, July 25 at 8:00 PM.

Filed Under: Events, Uncategorized

About Bob Kinsey

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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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