This August 6th and 9th mark the 67th anniversaries of the most brutal acts of terrorism upon innocent people: America’s atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“We live in a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We have solved the mystery of the atom and forgotten the lessons of the Sermon on The Mount. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about dying than we know about living.”- General Omar Nelson Bradley, 1948.
In 1995, from Ashkelon Prison, Israel’s Nuclear Whistle Blower Mordechai Vanunu noted: “Hollywood doesn’t know you – you are not a Jewish Holocaust.” [1]
In his 2012 budget, President Obama included $54 billion in federal loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors and $7.6 billion for nuclear weapons research and production, but “Any nation that year after year continues to raise the Defense budget while cutting social programs to the neediest is a nation approaching spiritual death.” – Rev. MLK
A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 – by Isao Hashimoto:
Nuclear weapons are not just morally indefensible they are politically unsustainable.
America is one of the five nuclear powers that signed the NPT and thus is obligated to abolish its nuclear weapons-but the USA has been in violation ever since the day America signed the NPT!
The NPT/Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, was created in 1968, and maintains that nuclear weapons proliferation can only be curtailed if nuclear countries move toward disarmament and the five nuclear powers that signed the NPT must abolish their nuclear weapons.
In 1966, at the height of the Cold War, the US nuclear arsenal was estimated at over 32,000 warheads. Current estimates range from 5,000 to 12,000; but even one is more than enough to destroy Creation as we now know it.
IF THAT DAY we call 9/11 taught us anything, it should be that America’s nuclear arsenal cannot defeat ‘terrorism’ or provide security from the actions of a few violent mad men who target and murder innocent people. American money is imprinted with “IN GOD WE TRUST” but yet the U.S. maintains a nuclear arsenal of nearly 2,000 on hair-trigger alert ever since the end of the Cold War. The Orwellian named Life Extension Program will extend the life of every one of America’s weapons of mass destruction for three decades or more as well as undermine sound national security by introducing major changes to existing nuclear weapons stockpile that had been extensively tested.
Obama’s budget requests have included significant investments in maintaining and modernizing America’s nuclear weapons through the life-extension programs (LEPs). Including the costs from FY2011, this administration asked for $6.3 billion through FY2016 to refurbish the warheads in the stockpile and additional LEPs are planned after 2016 (see Stockpile Stewardship Management Plan).
On April 5, 2009, Mr. Nuclear Free World President Obama stood on the world stage amongst thousands of flag-waving Czechs and spoke of good humor, home town Chicago, the will of the people over tanks and guns, old conflicts, revolution, moral leadership as the most powerful weapon, iron curtains that fell and the state of 21st century nuclear weapons:
“We are here today because enough people ignored the voices who told them that the world could not change. We’re here today because of the courage of those who stood up and took risks to say that freedom is a right for all people, no matter what side of a wall they live on, and no matter what they look like. We are here today because the simple and principled pursuit of liberty and opportunity shamed those who relied on the power of tanks and arms to put down the will of a people.
“Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked -– that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.
“As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act…It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, Yes, We Can!
“There is violence and injustice in our world that must be confronted. We must confront it by standing together as free nations, as free people. I know that a call to arms can stir the souls of men and women more than a call to lay them down. But that is why the voices for peace and progress must be raised together.
“Let us honor our past by reaching for a better future. Let us bridge our divisions, build upon our hopes, and accept our responsibility to leave this world more prosperous and more peaceful than we found it. Together we can do it.
“Words must mean something [and] violence and injustice must be confronted by standing together as free nations, as free people…Human destiny will be what we make of it.”
The deepest Christian thinker of the 20th century, Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, poet, social critic and mystic who listened to Bob Dylan LP’s in his hermitage cell wrote: “One of the many casualties of the culture of war is the imagination. People can no longer imagine a world without war or nuclear weapons or violence or poverty. They can’t even imagine it, because the culture has robbed us of our imaginations.”
“It is absolutely necessary to take a serious and articulate a stand on the question of nuclear war, and I mean against nuclear war. The passivity, the apparent indifference, the incoherence of so many Christians on this issue, and worse still the active belligerency of some religious spokesmen is rapidly becoming one of the most frightful scandals in the history of Christendom.”
In 1987, from his windowless tomb sized cell in Ashkelon prison, the Christian convert from Orthodox Judaism and atheism, Israel’s Nuclear Whistle Blower, Mordechai Vanunu, wrote:
“The passive acceptance and complacency with regard to the existence of nuclear weapons anywhere on earth is the disease of society today. This struggle is not only a legitimate one – it is a moral, inescapable struggle.
“No government, not even the most democratic, can force us to live under this threat. No state in the world can offer any kind of security against this menace of a nuclear holocaust, or guarantee to prevent it. Already now there are enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world many times over. This issue should unite us all, because that is our real enemy.
“Any country, which manufactures and stocks nuclear weapons, is first of all endangering its own citizens. This is why the citizens must confront their government and warn it that it has no right to expose them to this danger. Because, in effect, the citizens are being held hostage by their own government, just as if they have been hijacked and deprived of their freedom and threatened.
“Indeed, when governments develop nuclear weapons without the consent of their citizens – and this is true in most cases – they are violating the basic rights of their citizens, the basic right not to live under constant threat of annihilation. Is any government qualified and authorized to produce such weapons.”
The answer has always been NO!
A little history of when America crossed the line in our addiction to violence and vaporized 130,000 people in Hiroshima and another 70,000 people, three days later in Nagasaki:
At 5:30 AM on July 16, 1945, the nuclear age began, when the first nuclear bomb was exploded by the American federal government at the Trinity Test Site, at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Plutonium and other toxic and radioactive chemicals were dispersed for hundreds of miles and some areas are still contaminated.
The bomb exploded over the New Mexico desert, vaporizing a tower and turning the asphalt to green sand. Seconds later a huge blast of heat scorched the desert. No one could see the radiation generated by the explosion, but they all knew it was there. A half a mile away, the steel container called “Jumbo,” weighing over 200 tons was knocked over as the orange and yellow fireball stretched up and spread into a second column, that rose and flattened into a mushroom cloud; imprinting upon the human consciousness a symbol of violent power and destruction. The father of the atomic bomb, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer chose to name this harrowing happening the “Trinity” test.
“Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love. From it a quotation: ‘As West and East, In all flat Maps—and I am one—are one, So death doth touch the Resurrection.’ That still does not make a Trinity, but in another, better known devotional poem Donne opens, ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God.'”
“Batter my Heart” continues:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labour to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.”
In the moment that followed the atomic inferno, Oppenheimer recalled this sentence from the Bhagvad Gita:
“Now I have become death, the destroyer of the worlds.”
When Oppenheimer was asked for his thoughts regarding Sen. Robert Kennedy’s efforts to urge President Lyndon Johnson to initiate talks to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, he responded: “It’s 20 years too late. It should have been done the day after Trinity.” Indeed; but it was not and it led to Little Boy, the uranium bomb, that was dropped on innocent civilians in Hiroshima on August 6, with the encore being the plutonium weapon of mass destruction, Fat Man, which followed on the innocents of Nagasaki on August 9.
Today’s UN-Holy “Trinity” is a triune of radiological horrors: nuclear bombs, nuclear reactors, and conventional Uranium Weapons (such as Depleted Uranium or DU) that are used in military testing, training, and military combat.
“The deliberate use of manmade ionizing radiation is an assault upon people, the environment, and all living things. Since the first Plutonium and Uranium nuclear bomb was exploded in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, the contamination of the United States and the rest of the world [continues].
“Those responsible for seven decades of both domestic and international radiological assault are our own government agencies: the Departments of Energy and Defense, and the NRC (some say it stands for the Nuclear Radiating Committee) along with a multitude of corporations involved in various aspects of manufacturing munitions of both nuclear and ‘conventional’ weapons varieties. Used in military combat, these radioactive munitions have been contaminating the Middle East and other nations wherever they are fired and tested.
“Beyond military weapons applications, energy firms that use nuclear reactors to generate the electricity that powers America’s TV sets are similarly polluting our air, water, and soil with these DNA-wrecking poisons…[and] there are efforts underway to enrich even More Uranium as well as plans to build More weapons facilities and fund bailouts using taxpayers’ money to build More experimental nuclear reactors with unsafe designs like the Westinghouse AP-1000 and AREVA’s European Pressurised Reactor (EPR).
“While Nuclear-Everything is being pushed on America as a ‘clean’ energy alternative sanctified under the guise of reduced carbon emissions, consider if you will just a few effects of ionizing radiation: decreasing fertility rates, miscarriages, genetic mutations, increasing rates of cancers, some forms of heart disease, neuromuscular disease, and thyroid disease, diabetes, and other endocrine-related disorders and many other radiation-induced diseases.” [2]
On 8 July 1996, the International Court of Justice issued the statement:
“The destructive power of nuclear weapons cannot be contained in either space or time. They have the potential to destroy all civilization and the entire ecosystem of the planet.”
The ICJ also affirmed the “fundamental, cardinal and intransgressible” rule that “States must never make civilians the object of attack and must consequently never use weapons that are incapable of distinguishing between civilians and military targets.”
States have obligations.
People have rights!
Anti-nuclear civil resistance is the right of every citizen of the world, for the nuclear threat attacks every core concept of human rights and “calls for urgent and universal action for its prevention. If it is a basic human right to be free of threat or violence, if the right to life is a basic human right, if the protection of children and future generations is a basic human duty, international law must unhesitatingly recognize that the right to non violent resistance activities for the prevention of such an international crime is basic to human dignity.” [3]
On 17 April 2010, Iran hosted a conference in Tehran on nuclear disarmament with sixty countries represented-but no one from America was there!
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued this statement at the conference affirming that nuclear weaponry was “haram” meaning prohibited under Islam and he also blew the doors off Israel’s and America’s nuclear deceptions:
“If America’s claims of fighting the proliferation of nuclear weapons were not false, would the Zionist regime be able to turn the occupied Palestinian lands into an arsenal where a huge number of nuclear weapons are stored while refusing to respect international regulations in this regard, especially the NPT?
“There is only one government that has committed a nuclear crime so far. Only the government of the United States of America has attacked the oppressed people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs in an unfair and inhumane war using or even threatening to use such weapons is a serious violation of the most basic rules of philanthropy and is a clear manifestation of war crimes.
“The greatest violators of the NPT are the powers who have reneged on their obligation to dispose of nuclear weapons mentioned in Article 6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. These powers have even surpassed other countries with respect to promoting nuclear weapons in the world. By providing the Zionist regime with nuclear weapons and supporting its policies, these powers play a direct role in promoting nuclear weapons which is against the obligations they have undertaken according to Article 1 of the NPT.
“We believe that besides nuclear weapons, other types of weapons of mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons also pose a serious threat to humanity. The Iranian nation, which is itself a victim of chemical weapons, feels more than any other nation the danger that is caused by the production and stockpiling of such weapons and is prepared to make use of all its facilities to counter such threats. We consider the use of such weapons as haram (religiously forbidden) and believe that it is everyone’s duty to make efforts to secure humanity against this great disaster.” [4]
On 2 October 2009, The Washington Times reported that Obama agreed to keep Israel’s nukes ‘secret’ and reaffirmed a 4-decade-old understanding that has allowed Israel to keep a nuclear arsenal without opening it to international inspections.” [5]
Three officials spoke on the condition that they not be named because they were discussing private conversations, but all said Obama pledged to maintain the agreement when he first hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House in May 2009.
Under the understanding, the U.S. has not pressured Israel to disclose its nuclear weapons or to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would require Israel to give up its estimated several hundred nuclear bombs.
That nuclear deception was reached at a summit between President Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir on 25 September 1969.
Author Avner Cohen, reported that the accord amounted to “the United States passively accepting Israel’s nuclear weapons status as long as Israel does not unveil publicly its capability or test a weapon.”
During my 2005 interviews with Mordechai Vanunu he told me:
“Did you know that President Kennedy tried to stop Israel from building atomic weapons? In 1963, he forced Prime Minister Ben Guirion to admit the Dimona was not a textile plant, as the sign outside proclaimed, but a nuclear plant. The Prime Minister said, ‘The nuclear reactor is only for peace.’
“Kennedy insisted on an open internal inspection. He wrote letters demanding that Ben Guirion open up the Dimona for inspection. The French were responsible for the actual building of the Dimona. The Germans gave the money; they were feeling guilty for the Holocaust, and tried to pay their way out. Everything inside was written in French, when I was there, almost twenty years ago. Back then, the Dimona descended seven floors underground.
“In 1955, Perez and Guirion met with the French to agree they would get a nuclear reactor if they fought against Egypt to control the Sinai and Suez Canal. That was the war of 1956. Eisenhower demanded that Israel leave the Sinai, but the reactor plant deal continued on.
“When Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to ’69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of the Dimona from them. Nixon stopped the inspections and agreed to ignore the situation. As a result, Israel increased production. In 1986, there were over two hundred bombs. Today, they may have enough plutonium for ten bombs a year.” [6]
In 2007, the Nixon library declassified a 19 July 1969, memo from Henry Kissinger, the then national security adviser stating: “While we might ideally like to halt actual Israeli possession, what we really want at a minimum may be just to keep Israeli possession from becoming an established international fact.”
The “established international facts” were exposed in 1986, when Mordechai Vanunu told the truth and provided the photographic proof of Israel’s seven story underground WMD Facility that can be viewed on his You Tube Channel:
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy warned US:
“Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”
Also in the 1960’s the comic strip Pogo nailed US: “We have seen the enemy and he is US!”
Shortly thereafter George Harrison blew the lid off:
Brainwashed by our leaders
Brainwashed in the open
And brainwashed behind the scenes
Brainwashed by Dow Jones
Nasdaq and secure loans
Brainwashed us from Brussels
Brainwashed us in Bonn
Brainwashed us in Washington
Westminster in London
Brainwashed by the military
Brainwashed under duress
Brainwashed by the media
You’re brainwashed by the press
Brainwashed to the bone
God God God
A voice cries in the wilderness
Someone turned out the spiritual light
God God God
Nothing’s worse than ignorance
Down on Bullshit Avenue
God God God
If we can only stop the rot
God God God
Wish that you’d brainwash us too
Namah Parvarti Pataye Hare Hare
Shiva Shiva Shankara Mahadeva/Salutations to the Goddess and to the husband Lord Shiva
Thomas Merton also challenged so called Christian when he wrote words that mean EVERYTHING to this struggling Christian Anarchist Buddhist with a dose of dervish:
“The duty of the Christian at this time is to do the one task God has imposed upon us in this world today. The task is to work for the total abolition of war. There can be no question that unless war is abolished; the world will remain constantly in a state of madness. The church [meaning all Christians] must lead the way on the road to the abolition of war. Peace is to be preached and nonviolence is to be explained and practiced.”
I pray May God Bless Everyone and Have Mercy on the USA!
Notes:
1. http://vanunu.com/poems/mvpoemhiroshima.html
2. http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=114934
3. Judge Weeramantry, “The Trident and International Law, Scotland’s Obligations” Feb. 3, 2009.
4. http://www.juancole.com/2010/04/khamenei-us-only-nuclear-criminal-for-hiroshima.html
5. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/02/president-obama-has-reaffirmed-a-4-decade-old-secr/
6. BEYOND NUCLEAR: Mordechai Vanunu’s FREEDOM of SPEECH Trial and My Life as a Muckraker: 2005-2010
By Eileen Fleming
01 August, 2012
@Countercurrents.org
Eileen Fleming, Citizen of CONSCIENCE for House of Representatives 2012. Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org Staff Member of Salem-news.com , A Feature Correspondent for Arabisto.com and Columnist for Veteranstoday.com. Producer “30 Minutes with Vanunu” and “13 Minutes with Vanunu” Author of “Keep Hope Alive” and “Memoirs of a Nice Irish American ‘Girl’s’ Life in Occupied Territory” and BEYOND NUCLEAR: Mordechai Vanunu’s FREEDOM of SPEECH Trial and My Life as a Muckraker: 2005-2010
http://www.youtube.com/user/eileenfleming