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Envision a World without Nuclear Weapons

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KBP7 On Nuclear Disarmament

October 28, 2021 By Bob Kinsey

ON NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT
OCTOBER 2021

Current world events reveal the nuclear threat to the planet to be growing ever larger.

We applaud Archbishop Gallagher, Vatican Secretary for Relations with States, in his recent address to the United Nations General Assembly High-Level Plenary session.
Commemorating and promoting the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons on September 26th, Archbishop Gallagher noted that the global observance of this day “is an occasion to impress on the world, and particularly the leaders of nuclear-weapon states, humanity’s insistent demand for the elimination of nuclear weapons”. He pointed out that nuclear deterrence is a fallacy and that the money spent on these weapons is desperately needed for social betterment and the elimination of hunger.

We in the Kings Bay Plowshares sound the alarm, that US nuclear policy,continues to move in the opposite direction from disarmament. Our government spends $100,000 per minute in upgrading our nuclear arsenal. With the new trilateral military partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, AUKUS, the US has agreed to help Australia build a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines. China has denounced the deal, saying the countries are “severely damaging regional peace and stability, intensifying an arms race, and damaging international nuclear non-proliferation efforts.”

We call on fellow US Catholics to join the global efforts for nuclear disarmament by encouraging our country to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and by divesting from nuclear weapons.
Since the 4th century Christians have used St. Augustine’s Just War criteria as a means to legitimize war as morally acceptable.
The modern introduction of indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction to warfare has rendered all war-making morally untenable.
In fact, the prospect of the use of indiscriminate weapons violates all elements of the Just War criteria, especially the condition that calls for the protection of noncombatants, which is impossible in today’s world in which the human experiment itself is under threat of nuclear doom.

The U.S. Navy conducted a test launch of two Trident submarine-based missiles September 17 off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Florida. (https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/Article/2780845/uss-wyoming-successfully-tests-trident-ii-d5le-missiles/)

The show of force came five weeks after the August 11 Air Force test launch of one of its long-range, missiles known as Minuteman III from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, in California. (https://www.airforcemag.com/air-force-global-strike-command-successfully-test-launches-icbm/)

On August 9th, the 76th anniversary of the United States bombing of the Japanese city of Nagasaki, Representative Adam Smith, Chairman of the House Armed Services committee, expressed in a letter to President Biden addressing nuclear deterrence as opposed to domination; “This requires your national security leadership to ensure the nuclear deterrent is safe, secure, reliable, affordable…” US government and Washington DC interests continue to speak in terms of nuclear deterrence as if it is safe and affordable, obscuring the true motive of domination.

Robert Dodge also commemorates the International Day for Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons on September 26th at the UN General Assembly; “Citizens around the world are calling on their governments to ratify the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty. In the United States, a national grassroots campaign called “Back from the Brink” is garnering a groundswell of public support as it seeks the abolition of nuclear weapons and fundamental change in U.S. nuclear policy.”

In the last twenty years we have waged a so-called “war on terror” that has caused 4.5 million casualties by some estimates, and cost 8 to 20 trillion dollars. The US has 750 bases around the globe in 80 countries and colonies. We have turned to permanent warfare rather than any kind of diplomatic peace making. The sordid arms deal race is based on debt and yet there seems to be limitless funds for war and little for human and social needs. Six hundred and thirty four billion dollars are now allocated for expanding the US nuclear program through the year 2030.

We continue to make a personalist stance, not waiting for the power brokers of the world to bring change, we take our own personal responsibility seriously, to self-empty in our own moment of history, knowing we are to fulfill God’s love for all of humankind.

Posted in Campaign News

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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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[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

“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

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 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

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

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