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Envision a World without Nuclear Weapons

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Kings Bay Protestors Sentencing Date Set

April 11, 2020 By Bob Kinsey

After a six-month wait, Judge Lisa Godbey Wood has set two dates at the end of May for sentencing the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 defendants who were found guilty on Oct. 24, 2019 for their nonviolent symbolic disarmament action at Kings Bay Naval Base.
On May 28th, Carmen Trotta of the NYC- St. Joseph House Catholic Worker, Mark Colville of the New Haven, Amistad Catholic Worker, and Clare Grady of the Ithaca Catholic Worker will be sentenced in the Southern District Federal Court of Brunswick, Georgia.
On May 29th, Fr. Steve Kelly, S.J. held for the last 2 years in GA county jails (and who would welcome notes from us on US Post Office postcards); Martha Hennessy of the NYC Mary House Catholic Worker, a granddaughter of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement; Elizabeth (Liz) McAlister of Baltimore’s Jonah House and the widow of Phil Berrigan, and Patrick O’Neill of the Garner, N.C. Catholic Worker; will also be sentenced by the same court.
We will inform you of how sentencing may take place in the time of COVID-19 as we hear further details from the court. The arrival of the virus has brought delays to the whole process. These dates are all we know at this time. There is a possibility that they may be sentenced by video conferencing with the judge, but as of today, we don’t know. Supporters may not be allowed in the courtroom.
There are a number of petitions circulating calling for the release of vulnerable prisoners in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic causing widespread death in all prisons and jails. Here’s one you might support. Faithful America Petition, or join the RAPP Campaign,Release Aging Persons in Prison.
On March 23, the Tribune & Georgian announced the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Camden County. That same day, the U.S. Navy announced that it had awarded a contract for up to $592.3 million to prepare the Kings Bay Naval Base for the new generation of Trident nuclear submarines. The plan to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal is projected to cost as much as $2 trillion. Meanwhile, we are failing to keep people healthy and safe during the COVID-19 crisis. Clearly, our priorities have to change.
This April 4th was the second anniversary of the KBP7 action at the largest US nuclear submarine base in the world which houses has one-quarter of the US deployed nuclear weapons.. They chose to act on April 4th to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination to lift up his message to end the evil of the triplets, racism, poverty, and militarism, underlining that the triplets must always be eradicated together.
We recommend that you watch the specially prepared video from supporters if you didn’t see it earlier:
Video of Kings Bay Plowshares Second Anniversary Celebration

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Disarmament Quotes

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

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

Kenneth Bainbridge Deputy Director

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

"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

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

“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

[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

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

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

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

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

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 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

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.

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

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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