[While nuclear weapons governments and their bomb-making
industries are criminally sleepwalking into what could mean the end of
our planet’s life, many others – scientists, high-level military,
citizens and whole countries – are countering the weapons holders’
political idiocy with principled intelligence. ]
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ENVISIONING A WORLD WITHOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS  
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H Patricia Hynes
January 2, 2023
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_ While nuclear weapons governments and their bomb-making industries
are criminally sleepwalking into what could mean the end of our
planet’s life, many others – scientists, high-level military,
citizens and whole countries – are countering the weapons holders’
political idiocy with principled intelligence. _

, Reuters

 

January 22 marks the second anniversary of the UN Treaty on the
Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, a global lifeboat supported by 70% of
the world’s countries.  Meanwhile, the US Department of Energy’s
2023 budget request for nuclear weapons’ upgrade is more than $21
billion
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close to $8 billion for radioactive and chemical cleanup at nuclear
weapon sites across the country.  Stack this up against the same
department’s 2023 budget for energy efficiency and renewable
energy – $4 billion
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and we see the future: weapons trump wind turbines; war worsens
climate crisis.

Moreover, the government’s budget has no line items for the massive
existential costs of nuclear weapons, three of which are described
here:

-         the dread that world-ending nuclear bombs provoke
in   humans (unless we have become “numb
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that culture of mass death”);

-         the “forever” radioactive contamination that
eludes     cleanup to human and environmental safety standards,
the estimated cost of just one site, Hanford, Washington, being $300
billion to $640 
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and  

-         the theft and poisoning of indigenous peoples’
lands and culture for mining uranium, generating bomb-grade plutonium,
and conducting above ground atomic bomb testing.

Hanford, Washington is the site of the largest plutonium-production
reactors in the world from 1944 to 1987 (including for the bomb
dropped on Nagasaki).  The Hanford land, bordering the Columbia
River, was effectively stolen from four Indigenous tribes and peasant
farmers by the federal government and is now “arguably the most
contaminated place on the planet,” according to Joshua Frank, author
of Atomic Days
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The Hanford plutonium-making site has killed and contaminated fish,
waterfowl and other biological life in the Columbia River and polluted
two hundred square miles of the aquifer beneath.  It contains 177
leaky underground storage tanks holding 53 million gallons of
radioactive and chemically hazardous waste – an atomic wasteland
which may never be remediated.  The worst and very-real scenario for
this site and its workers is a Chernobyl-like explosion
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leaking hydrogen gas.

While nuclear weapons governments and their bomb-making industries are
criminally sleepwalking into what could mean the end of our planet’s
life, many others – scientists, high-level military, citizens and
whole countries – are countering the weapons holders’ political
idiocy with principled intelligence.

–      At their 40th reunion in Los Alamos, New Mexico, 70 of
110 physicists
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worked on the atomic bomb signed a statement supporting nuclear
disarmament.  When have the brightest scientists of their day ever
admitted that their most notable work was a colossal mistake?

–      On February 2, 1998 retired General George Butler,
former Commander of US Strategic Air Command addressed the National
Press Club: "The likely consequences of nuclear weapons have
no…justification. They hold in their sway not just the fate of
nations but the very meaning of civilization."  Sixty other retired
generals and admirals joined him calling for nuclear weapons
abolition.

–      Against immense pressure from nuclear-armed states,
most aggressively the United States, 122 countries agreed in July 2017
to ban nuclear weapons.  At the heart of the United Nations Treaty on
the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) is an explicit ethical goal:
to protect the world’s peoples from the humanitarian catastrophe
that would ensue were nuclear weapons employed.

·     By the end of 2022, 68 countries ratified the Treaty and
23 more are in the process.

·      At least 30 more countries have promised to join the
Treaty.

·     Since 2007, ICAN
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international organization with partners in over one hundred
countries, has mobilized people throughout  the world to convince
their governments to support a ban on nuclear weapons.

–      Mayors for Peace
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cities call for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

The new UN Treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons bolsters the hope that
the United States and the eight other nuclear giants will grow up into
pragmatic, if not ethical adult governments and eliminate forever
their genocidal weapons.  One nation did so: South Africa developed
nuclear weapons capability and then voluntarily dismantled its entire
program in 1989. 

The Road Less Taken

In 1963 President John Kennedy gave at American University’s
commencement what has been deemed the most important speech by a US
president – a speech on peace with the Soviet Union.  But “what
about the Russians?” everyone asked.  Kennedy responded “What
about us [[link removed]]…Our
attitude [toward peace] is as essential as theirs.”  According to
historian Jim Douglass
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strategy of peace penetrated the Soviet government’s defenses far
more effectively than any missile could have done.”  Promoted
across the Soviet Union, Kennedy’s speech and his behind-the-scenes
diplomacy with Khrushchev led toward de-fusing Cold War tension and
planted the seed of a world without nuclear weapons and war.  This
seed awaits germination. 

If the U.S. could once again replace its masculinist power with
creative foreign policy and reach out to Russia and China with the
purpose of dismantling nuclear weapons and ending war, life on Earth
would have a heightened chance.

_[PAT HYNES is a board member of the Traprock Center for Peace and
Justice and active in the Women’s International League for Peace and
Freedom and Nuclear Free Future.  Her recent book, Hope, But Demand
Justice (2022) is available in bookstores.]_

* nuclear weapons
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* anti-nuclear movement
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* United Nations
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