• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
    • Allies
    • Board of Directors
    • Guiding Principles
    • Member Organizations
    • Mission & History
  • Membership
  • Request a Speaker
  • Volunteer
  • Contact Us
  • Contribute

The Colorado Coalition

Envision a World without Nuclear Weapons

Click Here to Contribute

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Featured
  • Events
  • Take Action
  • News
  • Perspective
  • Subscribe

August 7 reflection on Hiroshima and A Bombs

August 8, 2020 By Bob Kinsey

The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 lift up for us the insanity of the nuclear policies of the United States which are renewing a nuclear arms race- and, how the good angels of our American experiment have been left in the dust over the past 75 years since August 6 1945.

Our Constitution which makes ratified treaties, such as the United Nations charter, the law of the Land. Yet our courts did not and will not admit the necessity (to break the law to prevent a greater harm) defense to be used by nuclear protestors.

The Bill of Rights guarantees speedy trials and reasonable bail but its is approaching 2 years on from the Plowshares action and still the sentencing has not been completed.

The US has withdrawn from a number of treaties that were reducing the threat of nuclear war and now the Atomic Doomsday clock is as closer to midnight that ever. (greater harm)

The US is pouring trillions of dollars into new (more– and so called useable), a new fleet of Columbia class submarine delivery systems, the F-35 joint strike boondoggle, the B-2 bombers, all that can deliver nukes. The low ball figure is $1.7 Trillion. (greater harm)

Congress continues to trust The National Security State, created in 1947, to justify preparations for pre-emptive wars like the war against Iraq to get their non existent weapons of mass destruction. (greater harm)

The myth about this first Atomic attack — that it quickly ended the war with Japan and saving a million lives — continues in our collective consciousness. This, even when we know that it was the Soviet declaration of war on August 8 that convinced the Japanese general staff that the jig was up.

Truth is labelled revisionist history. War is Peace. Death is Life. George Orwell lives. The National “Security” state continues to live in secrecy.

We must ask ourselves what if we and the Soviets had spent the well over 12 trillion dollars of national wealth we jointly committed over the these 75 years instead, on health care, environmental care, fair distributions of wealth, developing non-fossil fuel power, clean water, and universal education for the whole planet?

The paper cranes we fold remind us of the long term negative consequences of our trust in nuclear weapons. Sudoku died of A Bomb initiated leukemia 7 years after her Hiroshima exposure. She was not alone.
Our soldiers and sailors have sickened and died from exposures to fall out from nuclear bomb test in the Pacific and at the Nevada test site.
Our civilians–8 to 15 thousand– have died from fall out, documented by the CDC studies for one radionuclide alone, Cesium 131.
Who knows how many downwinders from other fall out.
And how many nuclear workers building bombs have been damaged and died at US nuclear plants. And all this doesn’t even account for the similar deaths in the Soviet Union, and other countries.

Let this 75 anniversary NOT be used to justify Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings as necessary war ending and life saving. Let it bring Truth to light and so commit our nation to joining the UN Nuclear Ban Treaty, to commit to a no first use policy, and to redirect so called national defense money that is being spent to re-up the nuclear weapons complex. Let’s take a hard look at what we mean by national defense and get busy defending against climate change, against economic injustice, for the whole of the human family. Let’s not elect any Senators, or Presidents, who put their Trust in Nuclear Weapons, in War, in Special OPs, and in keeping our citizens away from the Truth.

WAR IS NOT PEACE Death is not Life, Nukes got to go.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Perspective, Uncategorized

About Bob Kinsey

Primary Sidebar

Receive Instant Updates

Enter your email address to subscribe to The Colorado Coalition and receive notifications of new events and posts by email.

Contact Us

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

“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

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

"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

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.

[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

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

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

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

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

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

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

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 McNamara Former U.S. Secretary of Defense

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

Copyright © 2022 The Colorado Coalition


A Website by Arielle Elak Design