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“Albuquerque Journal” Rebuttal re: Nukes as Deterrent

August 27, 2020 By Bob Kinsey

Don’t Preach Nuclear Arms to Archbishop
“That $2 trillion nuclear weapons modernization will do nothing to protect us against the global pandemic impacting Americans now. Further, the Sandia and Los Alamos labs may actually degrade national security with planned new nuclear weapons designs that can’t be tested because of the global testing moratorium. Or worse yet, this may prompt the U.S. back into testing, throwing more gas on the fire of the new nuclear arms race.”

BY: JAY COGHLAN / NUCLEAR WATCH NEW MEXICO, SANTA FE
Monday, August 24th, 2020 at 12:02am

In response to (the Aug. 13) editorial “Archbishop’s nuclear weapons view needs a homily on reality,” I was one of the speakers at the 75th anniversary commemoration of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, organized by Fr. John Dear, at which Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester eloquently spoke. The editorial declared “neither Wester nor Dear appear to accept the premise there is any deterrent benefit to the nuclear arsenal.”

To the contrary, the Journal perpetuates the delusion that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is just for deterrence, a premise fed to American taxpayers since the beginning of the Cold War. Instead, the U.S. arsenal has always been about nuclear warfighting, starting with the simple fact that we were the first to use it. This continues to this day, as the Pentagon made clear in a 2013 nuclear policy declaration: “The new guidance requires the United States to maintain significant counterforce capabilities against potential adversaries. The new guidance does not rely on a ‘counter-value’ or ‘minimum deterrence’ strategy.”

“Counterforce” is Pentagon jargon for attacking the military assets and leadership of your adversary, in other words nuclear war. Ronald Reagan famously said, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used.” But the U.S. and Russia each have thousands of nuclear weapons, many on hair-trigger alert, to fight a nuclear war instead of just the few hundred needed for deterrence.

Nuclear warfighting capability is why the U.S. is now implementing a $2 trillion “modernization” program enriching the usual fat-cat contractors while robbing resources from the poor, which is one of the Vatican’s main objections. Our own President Eisenhower said “every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed.”

That $2 trillion nuclear weapons modernization will do nothing to protect us against the global pandemic impacting Americans now. Further, the Sandia and Los Alamos labs may actually degrade national security with planned new nuclear weapons designs that can’t be tested because of the global testing moratorium. Or worse yet, this may prompt the U.S. back into testing, throwing more gas on the fire of the new nuclear arms race.

The Journal’s own homily ignores reality, the real harm done to New Mexicans by the nuclear weapons industry, disproportionally impacting people of color – the uncompensated Trinity Test downwinders, sick Diné uranium miners, contaminated nuclear weapons workers and deep groundwater contamination under Los Alamos Laboratory.

The Journal ignores the reality that sheer luck has kept us from nuclear catastrophe. In 1957 an H-bomb was accidentally dropped 4.5 miles south of the Albuquerque airport. If fully armed, it would have destroyed central New Mexico. We were lucky that one of three Soviet submarine officers vetoed using a nuclear torpedo against a U.S destroyer during the Cuban missile crisis. Robert McNamara said, “At the end, we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war.” In 1983, we were lucky to have a Russian officer follow his instincts that a radar blip was not incoming ballistic missiles, again preventing nuclear war. There are many other documented near-misses.

With escalating tensions, the possible end of arms control, new low-yield nukes, stealthy cruise missiles and bombers and future cyber and hypersonic weapons, we are now facing the greatest nuclear risks since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. How long can we count on luck? Being real demands multilaterally, verifiably getting rid of nuclear weapons before they get rid of us.

The U.S. should lead in honoring the mandate to do just that, agreed to long ago in the 1970 NonProliferation Treaty. Embarking upon a $2 trillion nuclear weapons-forever program is the wrong direction. The Albuquerque Journal should be exposing that instead of preaching the delusion of “deterrence” to the Santa Fe archbishop.

Filed Under: News, 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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