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Crawling Toward the Light

February 12, 2021 By Bob Kinsey

Judith Mohling
Peace Train Submission for 2/12/2021
Crawling Toward the Light
Setsuko Thurlow was 13 years old when the U.S. suddenly dropped a nuclear bomb on her city of Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. As she regained consciousness in silence and darkness, she found herself pinned by her collapsed school building and could hear faint cries of classmates, “Mother, help me. God, help me.” She heard a man saying, “Don’t give up! Keep pushing! Keep crawling toward the light!” She was ultimately rescued, found her beloved city obliterated with 150,000 of its residents incinerated, vaporized, or carbonized including members of her own family and 351 of her schoolmates. She says that still to this day, radiation continues to kill survivors. She has spent her life trying to warn others of the atrocities perpetrated on Hiroshima.

Meanwhile, the International Campaign for the Abolishment of Nuclear Weapons, ICAN was slowly being born through immense international effort, starting in 2007 with the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and the establishment of ICAN’s first office in Melbourne, Australia. ICAN was able eventually to also create an international office in Geneva. The organization ultimately created the “ Ban Treaty” or TPNW, the Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, through working groups at the United Nations. It is now ratified by more than 50 countries. For years of activism and determination to alert the world’s peoples to the apocalyptic nature of these weapons, ICAN was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2017. It was accepted by Setsuko Thurlow and Executive Director Beatrice Fihn.

LeRoy Moore, one of the founders of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center in Boulder in 1983 after having organized an encirclement of Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, 8 miles south of Boulder, with five other people, has written the following note to Boulder’s City Council members about the responsibilities of all of us to “keep pushing towards the light!”

“On Tuesday, January 22, 2021, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons entered into force. We at the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center urge the Boulder City Council to support this international Treaty and to call on other government entities in Colorado and across the United States to support the Treaty. It urges abolition of nuclear weapons worldwide. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II made the U.S. the only country on Planet Earth to use nuclear weapons against another country. Rather than making more nuclear weapons and threatening their use, all countries must agree together to abolish them. Planning to use such weapons is folly which would end the human race. In the face of violence we must choose nonviolence. Can’t we see, it’s either nonviolence or non-existence?”

A deep bow of gratitude to LeRoy, Setsuko, Beatrice and the thousands of fervent nuclear activists throughout the world. We will all keep pushing towards the light, by bringing the Ban Treaty to all government groups across the country and around the world. Together we can push towards the light of a world free of the scourge of nuclear weapons.

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Disarmament Quotes

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

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

[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 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 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

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

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

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

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

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

"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.

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

“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

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

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