Pat Birnie, Presente!

April 18, 2020 By Bob Kinsey

From Felice Cohen-Joppa —- Pat Birnie, Presente!
My friend Pat, a long-time and tireless peace and anti-nuclear activist, died on April 16 at age 90.
Pat and Betty Schroeder, her friend and partner in crime (literally and figuratively, with both women arrested occasionally at protests, including with other Raging Grannies at a Military Recruiting Center!), moved to Tucson in 1994. It was with Pat and Betty that Jack and I started monthly peace vigils at Davis Monthan Air Force Base and Raytheon Missile Systems more than 20 years ago, which continue to this day. We did a LOT of organizing and protesting together! Together with others, including Jim and Lucille Burkholder, we spent many months organizing multiple events to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Pat, a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, was a very kind and caring person. When Jack had surgery after breaking his arm in a bicycle accident, she and Betty came over to deliver a big box of groceries and make sure he was okay. Betty died in 2009, and Pat later moved to Maryland to be near her family. She left some very big shoes to fill in the Tucson activist community.
For many years, Pat dedicated herself to working for a nuclear-free future, and I am deeply grateful for her vision, for her persistence and for the way she inspired and invited so many people to join her.

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About Bob Kinsey

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

[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. LeahyChief of Staff to President's Roosevelt and Truman, leader of Combined US-UK Chiefs of Staff during WWII

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 Gandhifrom The Essential Gandhi, Louis Fisher, ed.

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 ButlerFormer Commander in Chief, U.S. Strategic Air Command in 1991-92

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

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

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

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 McNamaraFormer U.S. Secretary of Defense

“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

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

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

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

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

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

"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

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

Kenneth BainbridgeDeputy Director

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