For all who have rightly spoken out about the world being in the throes of man-made global warming — with its dire consequences for every continent — little if any attention is given to the single greatest cause of pollution: Our U.S. military in general, and our over 7,000 nuclear warheads, which is close to 30 times more devastating than Hiroshima’s.
That means that even a limited exchange by two possessor-nations of merely 1% of the approximate worldwide total of 15,000 nuclear warheads would be enough to create a radioactive cloud circumnavigating the planet, hovering over every continent, invisibly raining down lethal particles such as the infamous strontium-90, the same which was unleashed during above ground testing in the 1950s. That testing caused the mothers of the world to protest so vehemently that tests like those were forever banned worldwide!
This planetarywide disruption from which no nation could escape, would result in the slaughter of billions of innocents in the months following. In short time, civilization would never recover from the soil’s permanent poisoning (since no one knows how long its toxicity will last), let alone the staggering medical needs.
According to the Physicians For Social Responsibility, the entire world supply of doctors combined would be unable to administer to the victims of even a single deployment. Their analysis is clearly outlined in their Back From The Brink movement.
Whereas climate-control advocates like Extinction Rebellion speak in terms of decades before the majority of nations feel the unalterable impact, nuclear abolitionists speak in terms of minutes before the chain-reaction progresses unabatedly. Such truth is as blinding as an imagined detonation, but we dare not cower any longer from our responsibility, not only to women and children of other lands, but to our own neighbors and to our very own loved ones.
Another way to see this is to consider that all of the causes which you hold dear and to which you sacrifice much of your lives would all be for naught, unless, along with the other eight possessor-nations (unpredictable North Korea alone adding four to seven a year!), we negotiate with them a verifiable way to abide by the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Presently, over 30 nations’ governments have ratified it. Once 50 is reached, possession of any of these missiles will be judged an international crime.
I see a future when climate-control advocates and nuclear abolitionists wisely will join ranks, insisting that every and all nations collaborate to both drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels, and also end the prospect of omnicide by a permanent nuclear poisoning of the earth.
The stakes are too high to wait for someone else to act. It’s up to us and us alone, assured that, as the Bible says, “with God, all things are possible.”
The Rev. Peter Kakos lives in Northampton.