"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."
-John F. Kennedy, September 25, 1961
"APOCALYSE NEVER: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World" by Dr. Tad Daley, not only envisions but offers us the ways to seize JFK's dream; and the fierce urgency of current events could be our final call for action to abolish all things nuclear:
Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the September 11, 2001
attacks on the United States, who has been held at Guantanamo since 2006, told
interrogators that al-Qaeda will detonate a nuclear device if Osama bin Laden
were captured or killed, according to classified files released by the
WikiLeaks website. [1]
Ten days after the earthquake in Japan triggered the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, extended the license of a virtual twin of Fukushima; a 40-year-old Vermont nuclear reactor for another two decades. The license renewal was granted even though the reactor's cooling tower had literally fallen down, and the plant had repeatedly leaked radioactive fluid. [2]
Eileen Fleming and Tad Daley, photo by Sue Thompson
Dr. Daley does not offer us a Utopian fantasy, but a concrete call to political
action because, "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. 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. When governments develop nuclear
weapons they are violating the basic rights of their citizens, the basic right
not to live under constant threat of annihilation." -Mordechai Vanunu,
1987 from Ashkelon Prison.
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
Nuclear
weapons are not just morally indefensible but 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 between 5,000 to 12,000; but even one is more than enough to destroy Creation as we now know it.
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