Beyond Nuclear International
Invest in healthcare not militarization
A statement from the International Peace Bureau
IPB is calling for a dramatic reduction of military spending in favour of healthcare and meeting social needs. Sign their petition to the UN. (Link also provided at the end of this article.)
The world’s oldest peace NGO, the Nobel Prize-winning International Peace Bureau (IPB), has called on G20 world leaders to send a message of peace and solidarity to the world as they address the global health emergency.
This is a time to open a new page in global relations, to put geopolitical tensions to one side, to end proxy wars, for a ceasefire in those many conflicts around the world all of which stand to hamper a global solidarity effort.
We have to lift the shadow of war and military brinkmanship which has blighted global cooperation in recent years and work to ensure that a spirit of peace and solidarity prevails.
Humans are paying a terrible price for the diversion of funds away from health and welfare and into military spending. (Photo: “India, 2013” by Juanlu Sánchez/Creative Commons)
The IPB has long drawn the world’s attention to the increasing velocity of the global arms race.
Our communities are paying a high price for an arms race that has diverted resources from the basic health and welfare needs of the people.
We are all paying a heavy price for failed leadership and misplaced market-driven practices that have weakened our means to address this emergency, which has hit the weakest hardest.
Nuclear disarmament in fraught times
Balancing faith and hope in a time of violence
By Emily Welty
Before the Covid-19 assault, there was saber-rattling of the nuclear kind, and escalating violence around the world. Much of that has sadly not abated. But Emily Welty, traveling the world on her sabbatical, reflects on the hopeful signs, and inspiring people, she has encountered.
Working on nuclear disarmament feels like the intersection of two ventricles of the human heart awash in equal amounts of despair and progress. The whir of panic about the dangers of nuclear weapons and the encouraging movement towards a nuclear-free world both felt accelerated during the first weeks of 2020.
Nuclear saber-rattling and a political assassination that escalates violence both latent and overt between the United States and Iran; the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moving the Doomsday Clock forward to one hundred seconds before midnight; nuclear states showing little introspection or shame about their stockpiles of horrific weaponry.
Nonetheless, rousing symbols of prophetic hope of a more generous, interdependent, trusting, and creative world abound. New York City, one of the largest cities in the world, had a hearing on January 29 to consider divestment from nuclear weapons and reaffirm the city as a nuclear weapon-free zone, joining other major cities taking local action on nuclear disarmament such as Toronto, Los Angeles, and Melbourne.
The majority of millennials support banning nuclear weapons entirely according to the latest poll from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Some days it feels difficult to hold both of these truths in one human heart—the devastating risks and the courageous progress made by ordinary citizens to ameliorate these threats. For religious people, holding these tensions together in our souls and addressing them with our work is fundamental to our identity as people of faith who manage to live amidst suffering while not losing sight of the ultimate expectation that the world is beloved and meant for sublime goodness.
Pope Francis’ visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki embodied the delicacy and skill of addressing both impulses. The pope’s denouncement that the use as well as the possession of nuclear weapons is a “crime not only against the dignity of human beings but against any possible future for our common home” acknowledges the serious moral violation of these weapons.
Released from silence
Atomic veterans struggle to find words as they recall the pain of a past secret
By Linda Pentz Gunter
A new film — The Atomic Soldiers — lets the veterans who witnessed the Hood test in Nevada tell their own stories. But the painful memories sometimes choke their recollections, leaving long and moving silences in place of words. “You don’t send 14,000 troops through ground zero and not call it anything but genocide,” says one.
The Atomic Soldiers, Morgan Knibbe’s profoundly moving 22-minute documentary, opens with silence. The camera focuses on a series of veterans of US atomic testing, and each of them looks back, some directly at the camera, some unable to. Their pain is palpable. When they begin to speak, the emotion in their voices swells.
Although each man was exposed to the radiation blasted from the US atomic tests more than 60 years ago, it’s clear that the experience sears through each of them like it was yesterday.
It is the pain not only of the very real physical suffering, but of their involvement in the tests themselves, which they were forced to keep entirely secret. “I never told anybody. Not my parents, not my brother, not my best friends, not my wife. Nobody,” says Rex L. Montgomery (none of the veterans is captioned during the film but they are identified at the end.)
You can watch the film here:
Lecciones nucleares del coronavirus
No hay lugar para la nuclear en tiempos de pandemia y caos climático
By Linda Pentz Gunter
No hay nada como encerrarte en tu propia casa, junto a tus seres queridos, para centrarte en las crisis que asedian el mundo más allá de tus puertas y ventanas.
Y hablamos de crisis en plural porque, aunque ahora nos centremos en el coronavirus, existe otra, gigante, que se acerca con la promesa de una devastación mucho mayor, y que sin embargo no genera el mismo tiempo de reacción inmediata. Se trata, claro está, del cambio climático.
Pensar en el coronavirus desde mi despacho, tranquilo, sin el ruido del tráfico llegando desde la calle y con el canto de los pájaros como fuente de distracción, me conduce inevitablemente a pensar en la crisis climática, ya que guarda una importante conexión con el covid-19. En ambos casos, necesitamos reconocer el problema; después, nos tienta pensar que se solucionará por sí solo; más adelante, que igual no será tan malo como dicen; al poco, admitimos que la situación es muy preocupante, pero no queremos hacer todo lo necesario para solucionarla; finalmente, nos toca confrontar una crisis que ya es imposible de mitigar.
La negación parece ser uno de los grandes logros humanos. Es por eso que existe la energía nuclear. Será tan barata que no nos cobrarán por ella. Ningún accidente puede ocurrir. Ya solucionaremos la cuestión de los residuos.
Storm surges and sea level rise are an inevitable risk to all coastal properties, but especially nuclear power plants. (Photo: Creative Commons)
Another world is possible
Why Rick Wayman wages for peace
By Mitchell White
Rick Wayman is the new president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, taking over from the now retired David Krieger with whom he worked since 2007. As he wages peace each day, Wayman says, “I have to believe that another world is possible, otherwise, for me, there’s no point in being here.”
Each time Rick Wayman walks into his office, he is reminded about why he wages for peace.
Sitting on the mantle of his Anacapa Street office directly behind his desk are two plants. While at first glance these might just seem to be decorative pieces to create a healthy working environment, these two plants have a deeper meaning.
They are cuttings from a tree that survived “Little Boy,” the uranium gun-type bomb that destroyed nearly five square miles of the city of Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945, leaving some 80,000 people dead and injuring thousands of others.
“I walk into my office every morning and that’s the first thing I see,” Mr. Wayman told the News-Press. “It’s a really wonderful, tangible reminder. Not only that we’re doing this for the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to ensure that there are no other cities that this happens to ever again, but it’s also a symbol of resilience. This tree survived and now it’s all over the world.”
Rick Wayman is the new President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. (Photo: Rafael Maldonado/New-Press)
Mr. Wayman and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation received the plants as part of a program called “Green Legacy Hiroshima.” Seeds or seedlings are disbursed to various places around the world where the message of a world without nuclear weapons would proliferate, serving as a welcome addition in the office of the local nonprofit.
Here’s who I’m cheering for
There’s no race for the cure for climate change
By Linda Pentz Gunter
We are saturated with information about Covid-19, which has killed an estimated 200,000 people worldwide. That’s less than the annual death toll due to climate change. Why doesn’t that get an equivalent emergency response? And shouldn’t we be applauding those like the Amazon guardians, also risking their lives to save us all?
It’s my congressman on the phone again. Or is it my county council rep? Either way, they are calling to invite me to yet another telephone town hall in which I will learn the latest details — updated from the call a few days ago — on how to protect myself from Covid-19, help the less fortunate in my community, respond to the possible reopening of businesses and services, hear about tests and vaccines in the works, and so on.
I am being educated to the hilt everywhere I turn. Almost every news article or broadcast segment is about Covid-19 or something closely related to it. Are we still in a presidential election cycle? I’m not sure. Are we worried about Russian interference in the next election? No, we are worried about whether there will even be a next election.
My elected officials are saturating their constituents with care, advice and resources. Which is all good. Because the novel coronavirus has already killed more than 200,000 of us around the world — an undoubted underestimate — and a number which will only keep climbing for the time being. But a number which, hopefully sometime soon, will also start to diminish.
That won’t be true with climate change which is already killing as many as 250,000 people a year says a 2014 World Health Organization report , but likely far more, according to more recent research.
Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Andy Haines and Kristie Ebi said the WHO number represent, “a conservative estimate, because it does not include deaths from other climate-sensitive health outcomes and does not include morbidity or the effects associated with the disruption of health services from extreme weather and climate events.”
This means that climate change — or, more accurately, the climate pandemic — is already a bigger a threat to human mortality than Covid-19. But my congressmen are not calling me every other day about the climate crisis, with tips on how to live more sustainably and help others to do so as well.
Climate change-caused malnutrition will become an ever growing crisis and cause of deaths in the hundreds of thousands. (Photo: Russell Watkins/Department for International Development)
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