"North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the 'Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.' Will someone from his
depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!"
--President Donald J. Trump, January 2, 2018
and
“My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before. Hopefully we will never have to use this power, but there will never be a time that we are not the most powerful nation in the world!”
“The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”
“Perhaps someday in the future there will be a magical moment when the countries of the world will get together to eliminate their nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, we are not there yet.”
"'America First' will be the major and overriding theme..."
--President Trump
VERSUS
"A nation that continues year after year, to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift, is approaching spiritual death."
--MLK
--
YET, even without President Trump's new trillions on war-making, the U.S. already has the ability to damage civilian structures greater than all the way around the earth, 48,269 km!!
Nations in the "Nuclear Club" already have enough weapons to annihilate all humans living:-(
Tragically, former President Obama also started an update of our nuclear arsenal--that will cost, eventually, at least 1 trillion dollars!
And some Congressmen and Senators have also called for the possible use of nuclear arms, particularly against Iran.
Here we go with a new nuclear arms race:-(
“The new arms race has already begun,” says former Defense Secretary William Perry. “It’s different in nature than the one during the Cold War, which focused on quantity and two superpowers producing absurd numbers of weapons. Today it is focused on quality and involves several nations instead of just two. The risk for nuclear conflict today is higher than it was during the Cold War.”
--
Time Magazine
Of course, in some ways nuclear arms are no more lethal when they hit their targets than any other major bombs. Major regular fire-bombing campaigns of the past killed MANY MILLIONS of civilians.
BUT nuclear weapons of the present, bomb for bomb, will slaughter far more than conventional bombs. And the newer ones will destroy a much larger area, will turn civilization to ash, reduce cities to moonscape.
--
from
The Washington Post:
"Every president since Reagan has worked to reduce the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and dreamed of a world free from nuclear weapons. Not Trump. 'Perhaps someday in the future there will be a magical moment when the countries of the world will get together to eliminate their nuclear weapons," he said. “Unfortunately, we are not there yet.” He proposed more spending to “modernize and rebuild our nuclear arsenal.”
--
Washington Post
James Hohmann
--
from
Time Magazine:
"In addition to putting the Nevada testing ground on notice, he has signed off on a $1.2 trillion plan to overhaul the entire nuclear-weapons complex. Trump has authorized a new nuclear warhead, the first in 34 years. He is funding research and development on a mobile medium-range missile. The new weapon, if tested or deployed, would be prohibited by a 30-year-old Cold War nuclear-forces agreement with Russia (which has already violated the agreement). And for the first time, the U.S. is expanding the scenarios under which the President would consider going nuclear to “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks,” including major cyberattacks."
"Trump has openly threatened to unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” and has been hostile toward international agreements. He reportedly called for more, not fewer, nuclear weapons in a July 20 Pentagon briefing, where military advisers were upbraided for presenting global reductions in nuclear stockpiles as progress."
“The long-standing strategic policy of the United States has been to reduce the role and number of nuclear weapons,” says Andrew Weber, who spent 30 years on nuclear-weapons issues in the State and Defense departments before retiring in 2015. “That idea seems to have been balled up and thrown out the window.”
http://time.com/5128394/donald-trump-nuclear-poker/
W.J. Hennigan
From
The New York Times:
"The United States currently has about 7,000 nuclear weapons in the stockpile, including about 1,750 strategic warheads deployed in missile silos, on bombers and in submarines around the world, according to the Federation of American Scientists. That is down from more than 30,000 warheads at the height of the Cold War. Russia has about 7,300 nuclear weapons, the federation says.
Under the New Start treaty, both countries have committed to reducing the number of deployed nuclear weapons to 1,550 by 2018, though that figure can be exceeded because each bomber is counted as a single weapon even if it carries more than one.
David Wright, co-director of the global security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, expressed dismay at Mr. Trump’s choice of Twitter to discuss nuclear weapons policy."
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/us/politics/trump-says-us-should-expand-its-nuclear-capability.html
--
All of President Trump's push for more weapons including nuclear ones is so CONTRARY to other statements by him about human life:
“In America, we know that faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, are the center of the American life. Our motto is "in God we trust."
--President Trump at the March for Life
"Under my administration, we will always defend the very first right in the Declaration of Independence, and that is the right to life."
Vice President Pence called Trump "the most pro-life president in American history."
Certainly not.
If in doubt read the actual accounts of horrific civilian deaths in past nuclear bombings including the eyes of children literally running down their ashed faces:-( And how so many non-military individuals including firefighters and doctors were turned, literally, to cinders.
1. For many years during my teaching of American literature-history, we covered most of the 8 views of human violence including the many cases of the actual slaughter of civilians. The use of nuclear weapons was one of the worst terrorist actions ever committed. Then there were the fire-bombing campaigns against Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, etc., also, some of the worst terrorist actions ever, also.
Of course, those slaughters weren't nearly as evil as the intentional murder of millions of civilians by the Nazis and the Communists.
2. Even if one could justify doing evil to obtain good, according to some scholars the atom bomb wasn't nearly the preventive that many think. And don't forget the wasted multi-billions spent on bombs instead of positive civilized actions--for the impoverished, the ill, for clean water, for education, enhancement, the arts, and so forth.
3. Furthermore, murdering any number of children, the elderly, doctors, patients, firefighters, etc. NOW
in order, hypothetically, to prevent the murder of future humans is one of the worst forms of ethics, very immoral, anti-humanistic.
DOWN-WRONG MASS MURDER!
This is exactly the sort of justifying of slaughter that many nations and political groups such as HAMAS and other Muslim organizations use in the Middle East.
They emphasize that they kill enemy civilians NOW to prevent civilians from being killed in the future.
When I lived in Palestine-Israel, Muslim soldiers came over the Jordan River a little over a mile away from us, attacked an apartment building, and shot down unarmed families:-(
Were those Muslims soldiers justified in fighting against the Israeli government? Yes.
Were they justified in intentionally shooting down Jewish civilians? NO.
--
This was the same sort of ethically wrong thinking that most Americans held about our warring in Vietnam, Nicaragua, El Salvador, etc. Kill and destroy to save and bring peace later!
4. Besides, General Dwight Eisenhower and some other major military leaders opposed the use of nuclear weapons.
And Senator Mark Hatfield, who as a young Navy man was one of the first Americans to observe the result of Little Boy:-(
Senator Hatfield, forever after, strongly opposed any sort of such slaughter. He was one of only 2 senators to oppose the Vietnam War. Read his article against such killing, and his 2 books about the importance of making wise moral choices.
Also, read
Hiroshima by John Hersey which shows the obscenity of killing civilians, including all the kids whose eyes melted:-(
And the many who suffered radiation sickness to death.
#5 Many think, like President Trump, that creating more nuclear weapons keeps the peace, prevents war!
On the contrary, nuclear weapons don't stop a lot of war slaughter. Since WW ll, millions have been killed in numerous proxy wars.
The major powers just shoved the death down by proxy to places such as Laos, Cambodia, Latin America, and so forth.
It's true that the death toll hasn't been as horrible as WW ll. See Steven Pinker's brilliant tome on human violence:
The Better Angels of Our Nature is a powerful study.
HOWEVER, those millions of humans killed in the recent minor wars are still dead, and still suffered horrifically before dying.
CONCLUSION:
The human species doesn't deserve to exist if it bases its existence on the killing of civilians including children.
In this I TOTALLY identify with the character in
The Brothers Karamazov who said that the death of even ONE innocent child
wouldn't be worth it.
BUT what about Islamic regimes such as Iran who have no ethical conscience against slaughtering civilians?
I have no illusions about Muslim governments, secular or dictatorial or jihadist.
They would annihilate Israel and the U.S. if they could.
Heck, recently Muslim leaders praised a Muslim teen for murdering a 13-year-old Jewish girl in her bedroom.
Suddenly, this thug was hailed as a "martyr" and a Palestinian "hero" by HAMAS and Fatah. Something like 75% of Palestinians support the killing of civilians. Really!
I also stand against all the injustices and inequality that the Israeli government does.
I know their history, their killing, their land theft, and so forth.
--
But doesn't America's MADD protect against the worst of such wars?
It seems to me based on my own reading of many history books that increasing weapons NEVER reduces wars,
but only makes them horrifically worse, especially for families and the most vulnerable.
What mostly hindered the former Soviet Union from launching an horrendous war that would slaughter millions wasn't MADD
but that its leaders were cognizant--extremely so--
of the many millions of their loved ones they lost in WW ll.
They realized that ANY sort of overt war among the major powers would be horrific.
They, like the U.S., didn't want a major war, so both sides did minor wars by proxy. And the Soviet leaders in the 70's and 80's weren't as irrationally fanatical as earlier Soviet leaders such as Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky.
Putin appears to be a very nationalistic Russian Orthodox Christian who doesn't seem to worry about civilians being killed.
And Trump also claims to be a Christian.
If so, it's, again, Christian leader against Christian leader engaging in murderous threats, creating weapons of Mass Slaughter in the name of God and their countries.
TO BE CONTINUED:
How tragic is "humanunkind'!
Daniel Wilcox
