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Announcement :: Civil & Human Rights : Environment : Government Secrecy : International Relations : Nukes : Protest Activity |
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Hiroshima Day Vigil, Friday Aug. 6, noon-1pm at the Alma Mater |
Current rating: 0 |
by via email
(No verified email address) |
05 Aug 2004
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Remembering the past - avoiding a bitter future
Remember Hiroshima
Friday, August 6 from noon to 1pm
at the Alma Mater
Southeast corner, Green and Wright Streets |
Urbana-Champaign Friends Meeting will hold a Hiroshima
Day Vigil this Friday, August 6, noon - 1 PM in front
of the Alma Mater, corner of Wright and Green Streets.
We hope you will join us as we commemorate the day of
August 6, 1945 when the United States dropped an
atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. We also hope to draw
attention to our government's continuing reliance on
nuclear weapons and to urge the U.S. to take a
leadership role in international nuclear disarmament.
You can bring your own sign or use one of the ones we
have prepared. Please come and help us bring
attention to this important issue! |
Related stories on this site:
Hiroshima Story
Summer Days, Presidential Campaigns and Hiroshima
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Remembering Hiroshima at Los Alamos |
by Father John Dear
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
05 Aug 2004
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Nestled in the beautiful desert hills near Santa Fe, New Mexico is the mother of all weapons of mass destruction, the birthplace of the bomb--Los Alamos. Hundreds of us will mark the 59th anniversary of the August 6th atomic bombing of Hiroshima by lining the main road into Los Alamos, holding our peace signs and praying for an end to war and nuclear weapons. It remains important for thousands to protest each November at the “School of the Americas” in Fort Benning, Georgia, as well as to demonstrate at the political conventions. But this is the headquarters of nuclear terrorism, and more and more people need to face it and call for its closing.
The Labs have been closed for several weeks now because of missing computer disks. But in general, business at Los Alamos is booming. The Bush Administration’s proposed 2005 budget is the largest nuclear weapons budget in history, even though the Cold war is over and there’s no other nuclear superpower. Along with New Mexico’s Sandia Labs, Los Alamos is the largest nuclear weapons laboratory in the world. During our vigil, we will demand that those billions be spent instead on schools, jobs, homes, healthcare, medicine for HIV/AIDS, environmental cleanup and food for the starving masses.
The Bush Administration sent 150,000 U.S. soldiers over 10,000 miles into the desert of Iraq to kill some 10,000 Iraqis supposedly to find and dismantle a weapon of mass destruction, and now everyone knows that our government lied to us, that there never were any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that the whole war was an effort by Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld to steal Iraq’s oil for our oil companies, but we will point out to everyone concerned about weapons of mass destruction that we’ve found them. They’re right here in our backyard in Los Alamos! We go to Los Alamos to say: Get rid of them! Abolish every one of them.
We name these weapons of mass destruction as immoral, sinful, evil and demonic, and call for an end to the production, development and maintenance of these weapons of mass destruction. If Los Alamos can’t keep track of a few computer disks, they certainly can’t be trusted with weapons of mass destruction; no one can. These weapons do not make us safer or more secure or protect us. Instead, they make the whole world more dangerous. We need to get rid of every nuclear weapon once and for all.
The nuclear age started here; it needs to end here. We want to end New Mexico’s long, ugly nuclear history, and create a new New Mexico without nuclear weapons, a land of nonviolence. So we will call upon every employee at Los Alamos to quit their job making nuclear weapons and to find alternative, life-giving work.
There is a lot of talk this week about terror alerts, heightened security and Homeland Security guarding Wall Street and New York Banks. But I’d like to tell Homeland Security that we have discovered thousands of people building enormous weapons of mass destruction, in the world’s largest nuclear weapons facility, the envy of every terrorist, and hope that Homeland Security will go there quickly and close it down. That may sound funny or strident, but what is really shocking is how normal and acceptable nuclear terrorism has become. Most people do not think building nuclear weapons is an act of terrorism, but we name it as the ultimate terrorism. As Philip Berrigan said, we hold the world hostage with these weapons.
Most employees at Los Alamos are church-goers, so those of us who are Christian will explain that as followers of the nonviolent Jesus, we are forbidden to support war and commanded to “put down the sword” and “love our enemies.” We can’t serve both the God of peace and the false gods of nuclear weapons. We can’t follow the nonviolent Jesus on one hand, and work at Los Alamos, pay for Los Alamos or support Los Alamos on the other hand.
We go to Los Alamos as people of faith to say that war is not the will of God; war is never blessed by God; war is the ultimate mortal sin; war is never justified; war is immoral; war is demonic; war is evil; war is anti-democratic, anti-human, anti-life and anti-God; war can never end terrorism because war is terrorism; war is not the way to serve humanity or deepen the spiritual life or find God. The God of peace calls us to repent of the sin of war, to beat our swords into plowshares and to live in peace with every human being on the planet. We will uphold the vision of nonviolence from the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and Dorothy Day, that peaceful means are the only way to a peaceful future and the God of peace.
Our country is in massive denial about Hiroshima. We have never dealt with it. Instead we ignore it and pretend it didn’t happen. Tomorrow we will try to look deeply at Hiroshima, to meditate on it, to see it as the ultimate evil, and to recognize that everyone of us has to take responsibility for it, that we can no longer be neutral or silent or quiet about it. As I reflect on Hiroshima, I realize we can no longer just try to be good, with this much evil in our backyard. We have to speak out against this institutionalized evil; otherwise our silence is complicity. We have to break through the culture of nuclear terrorism and the necessary silence that allows it to flourish.
A few days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Gandhi said flatly: “The atom bomb brought an empty victory to the Allied arms. It resulted for the time being in destroying Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see.” Today, we as a people are losing our soul because of our commitment to these weapons of mass destruction.
At Los Alamos, we will remember Hiroshima and pledge to do what we can so that it never happens again, and in the process, regain our soul.
John Dear is a Jesuit priest, peace activist, pastor and author of 20 books on peace and nonviolence, including “The Questions of Jesus” and “Living Peace,” both to be published next month by Doubleday. He lives in the desert of New Mexico, where he coordinates "Pax Christi New Mexico." See: www.johndear.org and www.paxchristinewmexico.org |
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Re: defanging the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty |
by nytimes via gehrig
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
06 Aug 2004
|
Meanwhile, here's how George Bush commemorates Hiroshima day, as described in a NYTimes masthead editorial:
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August 6, 2004
Washington's Gift to Bomb Makers
There is no bigger and more urgent threat to the security of every American than the possibility of nuclear bomb materials falling into the wrong hands. That is why it is astonishing, and frightening, that the Bush administration is now pushing to strip the teeth from a proposed new treaty aimed at expanding the current international bans on the production of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. With talks on the new treaty set to begin later this year, the administration suddenly announced last week that it would insist that no provisions for inspections or verification be included.
This reversal of past American positions - ignoring Ronald Reagan's famous cautionary advice, "Trust, but verify'' - is all the more disturbing because it guts a treaty that could have significantly advanced President Bush's oft-stated goal of "keeping the world's most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the most dangerous regimes.'' After raising the alarm on this terrifying problem, the White House now says Americans and the rest of the world are better off trusting empty, unverified promises.
The agreement, the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, would, for the first time, ban all countries from producing highly enriched uranium or plutonium for nuclear weapons. It would cover the four countries that do not subscribe to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty: North Korea, Pakistan, India and Israel. And it would apply to the five officially recognized nuclear weapons nations, including the United States; they would be allowed to retain and use only their current inventories.
No treaty has ever been or will be foolproof. But a strong fissile materials treaty would help dry up international nuclear-trafficking networks - like the one set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani bomb designer - and make it harder for North Korea to go into the business of exporting plutonium and enriched uranium. But the treaty could not achieve these vitally important goals without credible verification provisions, like on-site inspections.
The Bush administration argues, unpersuasively, that such inspections might interfere with making fuel for American nuclear submarines and might allow foreign inspectors to glimpse secret American nuclear technology. To the extent that these are legitimate concerns, it would be better to try to persuade other nations to grant narrowly tailored exemptions instead of eliminating inspections. Washington also claims that an enforceable treaty would generate a false sense of security and that it would be easier to get other countries to sign an unenforceable one. Those are generic arguments that can be deployed against any enforceable arms control treaty. They ignore the enormous positive trade-offs of a verifiable fissile materials treaty, like strict limits on the material available for making nuclear weapons.
We live in a world where no nation has a monopoly on bomb technology. The most effective remaining way to curb the spread of nuclear weapons to growing numbers of countries and terrorist groups is to impose strict, verifiable international controls on the production of nuclear bomb ingredients. The Bush administration prefers a treaty that endorses nuclear virtue but that then averts its eyes.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times
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