The Siamese Twins, Nuclear Weapons & Power
Fall 2006

On August 5 of this year, Mid-Missouri Peaceworks held a commemoration to mark the sixty-first anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nearly 150 community members gathered at the Gordon Shelter of Columbia's Stephens Lake Park for the commemoration. This was the 20 th consecutive year Peaceworks members and supporters gathered to honor the memory of lives loss in the atomic bombings that took place in 1945, to demonstrate opposition to current nuclear weapons policies of our government and other governments around the world, and to renew a shared commitment to create a future free of the threat of nuclear annihilation.

“While the Bush administration rattles sabers at Iran and presses North Korea to disarm, they refuse to acknowledge the need to eliminate our own vast nuclear arsenal. Moreover, they pursue a self-defeating agenda of promoting the expansion of commercial nuclear power, including spent fuel reprocessing and new enrichment plants, at home and around the world, never acknowledging the inability to separate so-called ‘peaceful' nukes from the weapons-applicable know-how and access to weapons materials they provide,” said Peaceworks Director Mark Haim. “Our message at this time is simple, nuclear weapons are not making us secure and nuclear power is not the answer to our energy needs. We need to push forward for universal, mutual, verifiable nuclear disarmament. At the same time, we need to pursue efficiency and renewable energy, rather than dangerous, dirty and expensive nuclear energy with all its proliferation and security risks,” Haim said.

Peaceworks and the other groups in the Columbia Peace Coalition also ran a full- page signature ad signed by 1,165 area residents in the Columbia Tribune, Sunday, August 6, the 61 st anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. That statement called for no war with Iran and the elimination of all nuclear threats, including the threat to use bunker buster nukes to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities (Note: Full text of the ad below). The statement points out that according to a National Academy of Sciences report commissioned by the Pentagon, use of a single earth-penetrating nuclear weapon in an urban area could lead to the deaths of more than a million people. An ad supporting nuclear disarmament has run in Columbia every year since 1961. This year's ad has the most signers to date.

Event Details

Peaceworks' Hiroshima commemorations are family-oriented, free events. This year's gathering included speakers, performance art, music, a lantern float, and a potluck picnic. Music was shared by performers Melissa and Lee Nigh, Steve Meyerhardt, Pippa Letsky and the ensemble Caravan. Speakers included Missourians for Safe Energy activist Claire Garden and Peaceworks Director Mark Haim. There was also community created performance art germinated by Victoria Day. The lantern float was held at dark, a little after 9 p.m.

Peaceworks continues the tradition, established in 1987 by its predecessor organization Mid-Missouri Nuclear Freeze, to gather each year to mark this anniversary. Even in the absence of the Cold War era U.S.-Soviet arms race, many people turn out each year to express their hopes and desire for a nuclear-free, peaceful and just future.

“This anniversary is an important time for citizens to question why our country still has many thousands of nuclear weapons, why our government is pushing the militarization of space, why they refuse to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty or make a no-first-use pledge, why they continue to research and design new warheads, why they are again producing new warheads and why real nuclear and conventional weapon disarmament is not even being discussed by our elected leaders,” said Haim.

A Nuclear Threat Closer to Home

While the possibility of war with Iran, including the possible use of nuclear weapons, looms large on the horizon, there is a new threat, closer to home, that Peaceworks members discussed at this year's gathering. For the first time since the completion of the Callaway plant in 1984, a Missouri utility, AmerenUE, is actively considering building a new nuclear plant in our state. Ameren announced in December 2005 that they are exploring this option. The possibility of a new nuclear plant at the Callaway site has sparked local activists to reorganize Missourians for Safe Energy (MSE).

One of the speakers at the gathering was Claire Garden, a member of MSE. “Nuclear power is just too dangerous, too dirty and too expensive,” Garden stated. “We have the technology to create a renewable, clean system of energy, using the money we waste on oil and nuclear subsidies. Or with the money we'd waste if we built all these expensive new reactors. Moreover, we avoid becoming dependent on a Siamese Twin technology that is closely linked to nuclear weapons,” Garden said. Garden and the other Missourians for Safe Energy urged participants at the gathering to keep pressing for the elimination of nuclear weapons globally, and, at the same time, to join with MSE in working to halt the proliferation of atomic power right here in our own backyards.

Full text of the Signature ad follows:

No War with Iran—Eliminate Nuclear Threats

Four years ago the Bush-Cheney administration mobilized a stampede to go to war with Iraq. They told us we faced an imminent threat from a “vast arsenal” of weapons of mass destruction, frightening us with images of mushroom clouds over U.S.

cities. We realize that WMD claims were excuses, if not lies, to justify a war to dominate the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

We've also seen the death and destruction that this war for empire has brought, with more than 100,000 Iraqis and 2,575 U.S. military personnel killed and many thousands more injured. Let's not be fooled again.

Today, our government threatens war on Iran, declaring all options, including the use of nuclear weapons, are “on the table.” It is ironic that our elected officials are considering a first-use nuclear attack on a non-nuclear state on the grounds this nation might, in 5-10 years, acquire nuclear weapons and then might use them.

A nuclear attack would be most tragic. The National Academy of Sciences, in a report sponsored by the Defense Department, estimates that using a single earth-penetrating nuclear weapon of the type under consideration for an attack on Iran could kill more than a million people and expose millions more to increased risks of cancer, leukemia and other serious health problems. This is absolutely unconscionable.

It would also be unacceptable for our nation to use so-called “conventional” weapons, which would kill or injure many thousands of Iranians. Any attack is likely to lead to retaliation that would endanger our domestic population, as well as our troops in the region. It would further polarize Muslims and the West, fuel hatred and terrorism, while condemning future U.S. generations to more violence, war and debt. Attacking Iran would also be very costly and disrupt oil markets, bringing even higher gas prices and economic hardship here and around the world.

As we observe the 61 st anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, on August 6 and 9, respectively, it is essential that we learn from history. We recall with sadness the more than 200,000 people killed in those two bombings. We recognize that nuclear weapons are not legitimate instruments of foreign policy; they are devices so destructive and murderous that their use, production, testing and deployment must be outlawed for all time.

None of us wants to see Iran, or any nation, acquire nuclear weapons. However, to eliminate the nuclear threat, we must take the Non-Proliferation Treaty seriously. This agreement not only requires non-nuclear nations to refrain from seeking these weapons, but also requires weapons states—including the United States—to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

We urge our government to wage no war against Iran; to withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq as soon as possible; to reinvest national resources in meeting real human needs; and to genuinely work toward achieving the mutual, verifiable and universal elimination of all nuclear weapons.

Mid-Missouri Peaceworks
Citizen Action for Peace and the Environment
804-C E. Broadway, Columbia, MO 65201 573/875-0539
http://peaceworks.missouri.org
mail@midmopeaceworks.org

Total Global Nuclear Arsenal 2006 ˜ 27,000 Nuclear Weapons with ˜ 5,000 MT Total Yield
by Steven Starr
Fall 2006

There comes a time in the life of every species when it must change or die. Adaptation means survival, failure to adapt means extinction.

The creation of an enormous stockpile of nuclear weapons has essentially created such a stark choice for human kind. If we cannot find the political will to abolish the global nuclear arsenal, then someday, through miscalculation or madness, these weapons will ultimately be used in war.

And a war employing thousands of strategic nuclear weapons would not only destroy civilization, it would poison the Earth's ecosystems with vast quantities of radioactive poisons which would kill, sicken and deform all surviving forms of life for centuries. Nuclear weapons and nuclear war thus place the continued survival of our species in serious doubt.

Today the U.S. and Russia keep 9,000 operational strategic nuclear weapons deployed and constantly maintained so that they can be rapidly launched at predetermined targets. These weapons have a combined firepower of 3076 Megatons, which is more than 1000 times greater than the combined explosive force of all the bombs exploded in World War II.

A single strategic nuclear weapon, when detonated above a city, would within tens of minutes create a mass fire over an area of 20 to 100 square miles. This firestorm would generate ground winds of hurricane force with average air temperatures well above the boiling point of water. There would be no possible escape from the fire zone. The firestorm would extinguish all life and destroy almost everything else within its boundaries.

Imagine this event happening, in less than an hour, with not one, but with thousands of strategic nuclear weapons detonating in the cities of the

U.S., Russia, China, Europe, India, and Pakistan. The details of such a holocaust are already inscribed in the guidance mechanisms of the missiles waiting to deliver the warheads. Now you have some idea of what the global nuclear arsenals, continually kept at launch-on-warning status, are capable of doing.

What are you going to do about it?

See: http://www.abolition2000.org/ site/c.cdJIKKNpFqG/b.1315003
/k.BCFA/Home.htm

http://www.wagingpeace.org/

http://www.thebulletin.org/
article.php?art_ofn=jf04eden

http://www.thebulletin.org/
article_nn.php?art_ofn=jf06norris
http://www.thebulletin.org/
article_nn.php?art_ofn=ma06norris

The End of War or the End of Humanity
by Steven Starr
Fall 2006

Shortly before his death in 1955, Albert Einstein worked with Bertrand Russell to create one of the most profound and prophetic statements ever written about the danger of another World War fought with nuclear weapons. The Russell - Einstein Manifesto was written at the dawn of the nuclear age and before the Cold War led to the

creation of enormous global stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

Yet Einstein, whose insight had led to the invention of nuclear weapons, fully understood the ultimate danger that a nuclear arms race and nuclear war would pose to humanity.

Although thermonuclear weapons (Hydrogen bombs or H-bombs) had only just been invented, it was tragically clear (to Einstein and Russell) that if they were manufactured on a large scale and used in war, it would mean the utter destruction of civilization and worse – the radioactive poisoning of the Earth.

Going beyond the need to abolish nuclear weapons, Einstein and Russell also understood that the institution of War itself must be ended. Otherwise, if War broke out, nuclear weapons would again be produced and used in War. They said:

manufactured the bombs and the other did not, the side that manufactured them would inevitably be victorious.”

Sixty-one years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the subsequent Cold War, the arsenals the U.S. and Russia still contain tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. Here in the U.S. , we now spend 40 billion dollars a year to maintain and perfect our nuclear weapon systems; the Bush Administration is planning to build a new factory to produce the plutonium pits for a new generation of nuclear warheads while it promotes the construction of “useable” nuclear bunker-buster weapons.

We have a lot of work to do if we wish to prevent the War which Einstein and Russell warned us about.

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -Einstein