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The Rockets’ Red Glare

July 5, 2019 By Bob Kinsey

Peace Train
by Judith Mohling

“and the rockets red glare’
Nuclear war is an increasing threat in our already beleaguered, fragile world. There is a new VW ad featuring an electric van and the words, “Drive like there’s a tomorrow.” That really gave me the shivers. They probably meant something about electric vehicles becoming increasingly necessary, but for a split second I thought they meant that maybe there won’t be a “tomorrow.”
What nuclear activists who have been working to free the world from nuclear weapons for many years really need, is more people in the movement and when youthful activists take up the cause, and develop the passion to solve this threat once and for all it will be a magnet to attract more people of all ages. In fact don’t we all have a moral responsibility to rid the world of nuclear weapons? People the world over are becoming more and more aware of the lethal endgame of these weapons.
However, what we’ve got, according to “The Guardian Weekly,” is a U.S. state department office tasked with negotiating and implementing nuclear disarmament treaties that has lost more than 70% of its staff over the past two years, as the Trump administration moves towards a world without arms control for the first time in nearly half a century. The Office of Strategic Stability and Deterrence Affairs, “normally a repository of expertise and institutional knowledge that does the heavy lifting of arms control, has been whittled down from 14 staffers at the start of the Trump administration to four.”
On the other hand, we also have a very comprehensive nuclear ban treaty. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) is a coalition of non-governmental organizations in one hundred countries promoting adherence to and implementation of the United Nations nuclear weapons ban treaty. This landmark global agreement was adopted in New York on 7 July 2017. Once it is ratified by 50 countries it becomes international law. Currently, 22 countries have ratified the treaty. Unfortunately, no nuclear weapon countries have signed on. Yet. That’s our job! And we need everyone on board.

Filed Under: Perspective, Take Action

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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