BALTIMORE NAGASAKI COMMEMORATION
For the 35th year, the
Hiroshima-Nagasaki Commemoration Committee will remember the atomic bombings of
Japan on August 6 & 9, 1945, which killed more than 200,000 people. It
has been 74 years since these awful events occurred. Other organizations
involved in the commemorations will be Homewood Friends Meeting, Chesapeake
Physicians for Social Responsibility, Prevent Nuclear War/Maryland and the
Baltimore Nonviolence Center.
NAGASAKI COMMEMORATION on Friday, August 9, 2019
5
to 6 PM Join the
Friday peace and justice vigil organized by Homewood Friends Meeting, 3107 N.
Charles St., Baltimore 21218.
6:15
PM Savor a
potluck dinner with members of the peace and justice community in the basement
of Homewood Friends Meetinghouse. Bring a dish to share, and consider
reading a poem or performing some music. Remember the work of Dr. Dick Humphrey.
7:15
PM Les
Bayless of the Silver Spring Three will speak on the 50th anniversary of a
remarkable draft board raid. Patrick O’Neill, a member of the Kings Bay
Plowshares, will discuss the current legal situation for the seven Roman
Catholic activists, including Elizabeth McAlister, arrested at a Trident
Submarine Base in Georgia on April 4, 2018. McAlister has been imprisoned since
the arrest. The evening will be dedicated to showing the link between an
earlier time’s draft board raids and today’s anti-nuclear Plowshares movement.
RSVP
at mobuszewski2001 at Comcast dot net or 410-323-1607.
Hiroshima
Unlearned: Time to Tell the Truth About US Relations with Russia and to Ban the
Bomb
Alice Slater
August 6, 2019
Common Dreams
August 6th and 9th mark 74
years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where only one
nuclear bomb dropped on each city caused the deaths of up to 146,000 people in
Hiroshima and 80,000 people in Nagasaki. Today, with the US decision to walk away
from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force (INF) negotiated with the Soviet
Union, we are once again staring into the abyss of one of the most perilous
nuclear challenges since the height of the Cold War.
With its careful verification
and inspections, the INF Treaty eliminated a whole class of missiles that
threatened peace and stability in Europe. Now the US is leaving the
treaty on the grounds that Moscow is developing and deploying a
missile with a range prohibited by the treaty. Russia denies the charges and
accuses the US of violating the treaty. The US rejected repeated Russian
requests to work out the differences in order to preserve the Treaty.
The US withdrawal should be
seen in the context of the historical provocations visited upon the Soviet
Union and now Russia by the United States and the nations under the US nuclear
“umbrella” in NATO and the Pacific. The US has been driving the nuclear arms
race with Russia from the dawn of the nuclear age:
- In 1946 Truman rejected Stalin's offer to
turn the bomb over to the newly formed UN under international supervision,
after which the Russians made their own bomb.
- Reagan rejected Gorbachev's offer to give up Star Wars
as a condition for both countries to eliminate all their nuclear weapons
when the wall came down and Gorbachev released all of Eastern Europe from
Soviet occupation, miraculously, without a shot.
- The US pushed NATO right up to Russia's borders,
despite promises when the wall fell that NATO would not expand it one inch
eastward of a unified Germany.
- Clinton bombed Kosovo, bypassing Russia’s veto in the
UN Security Council and violating the UN treaty we signed never to commit
a war of aggression against another nation unless under imminent threat of
attack.
- Clinton refused Putin's offer to each cut our massive
nuclear arsenals to 1000 bombs each and call all the others to the table
to negotiate for their elimination, provided we stopped developing missile
sites in Romania.
- Bush walked out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty and put the new missile base in Romania with another to open
shortly under Trump in Poland, right in Russia’s backyard.
- Bush and Obama blocked any discussion in 2008 and 2014
on Russian and Chinese proposals for a space weapons ban in the
consensus-bound Committee for Disarmament in Geneva.
- Obama's rejected Putin's offer to negotiate a
treaty to ban cyber war.
- Trump now walked out of the INF Treaty.
- From Clinton through Trump, the US never ratified the
1992 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as Russia has, and has performed more
than 20 underground sub-critical tests on the Western Shoshone’s
sanctified land at the Nevada test site. Since plutonium is blown up
with chemicals that don’t cause a chain reaction, the US claims these
tests don’t violate the treaty.
- Obama, and now Trump, pledged over one trillion dollars
for the next 30 years for two new nuclear bomb factories in Oak Ridge and
Kansas City, as well as new submarines, missiles, airplanes, and warheads!
What has Russia had to say
about these US affronts to international security and negotiated treaties?
Putin at his State of the Nation address in March 2018 said:
I will speak about the newest
systems of Russian strategic weapons that we are creating in response to the
unilateral withdrawal of the United States of America from the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty and the practical deployment of
their missile defence systems both in the US and beyond their national borders.
I would like to make a short
journey into the recent past. Back in 2000, the US announced its withdrawal
from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Russia was categorically against this.
We saw the Soviet-US ABM Treaty signed in 1972 as the cornerstone of the
international security system. Under this treaty, the parties had the right to
deploy ballistic missile defence systems only in one of its regions. Russia
deployed these systems around Moscow, and the US around its Grand Forks
land-based ICBM base. Together with the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the
ABM treaty not only created an atmosphere of trust but also prevented either
party from recklessly using nuclear weapons, which would have endangered humankind,
because the limited number of ballistic missile defence systems made the
potential aggressor vulnerable to a response strike.
We did our best to dissuade
the Americans from withdrawing from the treaty.
All in vain. The US pulled
out of the treaty in 2002. Even after that we tried to develop constructive
dialogue with the Americans. We proposed working together in this area to ease
concerns and maintain the atmosphere of trust. At one point, I thought that a
compromise was possible, but this was not to be. All our proposals, absolutely
all of them, were rejected. And then we said that we would have to improve our
modern strike systems to protect our security.
Despite promises made in the
1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that the five nuclear weapons states--US,
UK, Russia, France, China--would eliminate their nuclear weapons while all the
other nations of the world promised not to get them (except for India,
Pakistan, and Israel, which also acquired nuclear weapons), there are still
nearly 14,000 nuclear bombs on the planet. All but 1,000 of them are in the US
and Russia, while the seven other countries, including North Korea, have about
1000 bombs between them. If the US and Russia can’t settle their
differences and honor their promise in the NPT to eliminate their nuclear
weapons, the whole world will continue to live under what President Kennedy
described as a nuclear Sword of Damocles, threatened with unimaginable
catastrophic humanitarian suffering and destruction.
To prevent a nuclear
catastrophe, in 2016, 122 nations adopted a new Treaty for the Prohibition of
Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). It calls for a ban on nuclear weapons just as the world
had banned chemical and biological weapons. The ban treaty provides a
pathway for nuclear weapons states to join and dismantle their arsenals under
strict and effective verification. The International Campaign to Abolish
Nuclear Weapons, which received the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts, is
working for the treaty to enter into force by enrolling 50 nations to ratify
the treaty. As of today, 70 nations have signed the treaty and 24 have
ratified it, although none of them are nuclear weapons states or the US
alliance states under the nuclear umbrella.
With this new opportunity to
finally ban the bomb and end the nuclear terror, let us tell the truth about
what happened between the US and Russia that brought us to this perilous moment
and put the responsibility where it belongs to open up a path for true peace
and reconciliation so that never again will anyone on our planet ever be
threatened with the terrible consequences of nuclear war.
Here are some actions you can
take to ban the bomb:
- Support the ICAN Cities Appeal to take a stand in
favor of the ban treaty
- Ask your member of Congress to sign the ICAN
Parliamentary Pledge
- Ask the US Presidential Candidates
to pledge support for the Ban Treaty and cut Pentagon
spending
- Support the Don’t Bank on the Bomb
Campaign for nuclear divestment
- Support the Code Pink Divest From the War Machine
Campaign
- Distribute Warheads To Windmills, How to Pay for
the Green New Deal, a new study addressing the need to prevent the two
greatest dangers facing our planet: nuclear annihilation and climate
destruction.
Our work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish
and share widely.
Source URL: https://portside.org/2019-08-06/hiroshima-unlearned-time-tell-truth-about-us-relations-russia-and-ban-bomb
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,
325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email:
mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to
gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and
everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment