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Envision a World without Nuclear Weapons

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“That’s Not A Pleasant sight to come on!”

October 25, 2019 By Bob Kinsey

by Bob Kinsey

The prosecutor of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 summed up,

“They said they came in peace, , but they couldn’t spread their message without wrecking stuff. He noted the base has an area off-site designated for protests, but forcing employees to come to work where the sidewalk has been painted with messages of love and peace— “that’s not a pleasant sight to come upon.”

The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 compared their “wrecking stuff” to Jesus overturning the trading tables in the Temple. To Jesus those tables were “not a pleasant sight” because they symbolically and actually undermined the message of God’s free Grace–not for sale or profit. How do weapons of mass destruction–used in spite of the laws of war against targeting civilians–and threatening now the whole of life on our planet, a channeling of our wealth to their production and deployment become a “pleasant site” –and participation in their existence (jobs, national “security”) something the law should protect?

We need to look at how this transformation — whereby employees working on weapons of mass destruction — must not be made to feel unpleasant — is illegal. For it is those weapons that they create and deploy that are illegal in international law and fly in the face of the teachings of all religions. How can any rational person state with a straight face that the US is a Christian country with its Constitution and laws grounded in God’s, when this is so, –when juries can rule it so, when its citizens can feel pleasant working on nuclear weapons and paying for them instead of working and spending to address climate change, environmental pollution, hunger and poverty?

Look back!
In 1945 former President Herbert Hoover said, “The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.”
David Lawrence, conservative owner and editor of the US News and World Report, said in 1945, “Military necessity will be our constant cry in answer to criticism, but it will never erase from our minds the simple truth that we, of all civilized nations, though hesitating to use poison gas, did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children.”
In March 1946 the Commission on the Relation of the Church to the War in the Light of the Christian Faith, Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America said, “”The surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible…Both Bombings, moreover, must be judged to have been unnecessary for the winning of the war…As the power that first used the atomic bomb under these circumstances, we have sinned grievously against the laws of God and against the people of Japan.”
And in 1982 George Kennen, a life long US diplomat, said, “The readiness to use nuclear weapons against other human beings–against people whom we do not know, whom we have never seen, and for whose guilt or innocence it is not for us to establish–and in doing so, to place in jeopardy the natural structure upon which all civilization rests, as though the safety and perceived interests of our own generation are more important than everything that has ever taken place or could take place in civilization: this is nothing less than a presumption, a blasphemy, and indignity–an indignity of monstrous dimensions –offered to God!”

The Plowshares 7 should be given a Freedom medal and not more time in jail–they already spent, unconvicted, over a year in jail. Where was their right to a speedy trial? Just sayin’.

Filed Under: Perspective, 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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