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Are You Investing in Nukes?

July 25, 2019 By Bob Kinsey

July 26, 2019

Judith Mohling

Are You Investing in Nukes?

Building nuclear weapons is a hugely lucrative industry.   Nuclear weapons are produced by corporations—Boeing, Bechtel, Lockheed Martin, Honeywell, for example. They rake in enormous profits and are financed by our big financial institutions. Bank of America is one of the top ten US financial institutions that invest in the top 18 weapons producing companies.
An activist friend of mine who had chosen to have a Working Assets credit card said recently that he looked in his wallet and, “was unpleasantly surprised to find that he had nuclear weapons” in his wallet. His carefully chosen credit card actually was issued by Bank of America.
There is an international organization, its name is “Don’t Bank On The Bomb.” They point out that in total, the top ten US financial institutions invested $748 billion over the last two years in US companies that are building nuclear weapons. Plus, add in our income taxes!
The National Priorities Project says the average American in 2018 paid about $14,400 in federal income taxes (about $3,500 went to the military). From that $3,500, $1,700 was given to military contractors and $695 went to the troops. The NPP reports: “The average tax bill for military contractors, $1,734, is more than the average for Medicare ($1,639), veterans’ benefits ($848) or food stamps/SNAP ($326), and way, way more than the average taxpayer contributed to K-12 education ($101), the EPA ($37.50) or public housing ($9.79).”
We are spending all of that money through our banks and our taxes to build and maintain weapons that could bring about the end of human life on earth and that are now illegal according to the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This treaty bans the most dangerous weapons of mass destruction and places them as all other WMD’s, including biological weapons, chemical weapons, landmines and cluster munitions. Once fifty nations have ratified the treaty, it becomes international law outlawing nuclear weapons and making countries that maintain them outlaw nations in breach of international law and outside of the international norm. Twenty seven nations have both signed and ratified the treaty. Unfortunately, the United States is leading the pack of outlaw nations with our “Trump Nuclear Doctrine” and a new arms race guaranteeing that all of the other nuclear nations will continue to follow suit.
Every dollar spent is a dollar taken from our children and the world’s children. When you consider the increasingly critical needs of our dear planet from climate change you can see that we need to change course. It is up to the people to insist on it. Please go to your bank and ask them about their policies. Look at the small print on the back of your credit cards.
Susi Snyder has written, “We made Don’t Bank on the Bomb because everyone can do something about the nuclear weapons threat.” It will take all of us acting together and it needs to be soon.

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Disarmament Quotes

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

"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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Kenneth Bainbridge Deputy Director

[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

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

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

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

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

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

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

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