Many Congress people hope to spend at least $100 billion in the next decade on “modernizing” the planes, missiles and submarines that are ready to deliver the warheads to an unidentified “enemy.”

Nuclear weapons are completely indiscriminate. They incinerate adults, children and pets in the target area without regard for innocence or guilt. The radioactive fallout drifts for miles on the shifting winds. For example, Russian scientists recently concluded that the fallout from Chernobyl has killed 950,000 Europeans.

Even a relatively small nuclear war would create so much soot that it would drift around the earth for years, blocking the sun and reducing crop yields, thus causing widespread famine. At the same time, the great heat of a nuclear fireball and the following firestorm carries radioactive materials into the stratosphere, where they weaken the ozone layer, causing blindness, skin cancer, and damaged immune systems. It would also destroy aquatic ecosystems, resulting in reduced ocean productivity for years. (for an excellent summary of these effects see: www.ippnw.org/pdf/zero-is-the-only-option.pdf)

For those who are concerned that a nation might try to cheat a Nuclear Weapons Convention, a world system of sensors is now in place. While it is almost impossible to produce a nuclear weapon without testing, this worldwide system will make any nuclear weapons test immediately known to all.

The generals and admirals, the senators and representatives, the nuclear laboratories and plants, believe that they are defending America. Their experts can calculate the megatons of explosive power in each of the weapons systems. But they do not represent the human future, or the millions who would disappear instantly in the fireball or slowly succumb to radiation disease. It is up to people of conscience  to make their voices heard. It is up to mothers and grandmothers to say that it is intolerable and criminal that more than twenty years after the end of the Cold War, Russia and the United States still have more than 3,300 warheads targeted on each other.

To Be, Or Not To Be

If we love money more than life, as some supporters of “modernizing” our nuclear weapons and facilities seem to do, then we must accept the idea that we, or our children and grandchildren, sooner or later, will be incinerated in a flash, poisoned by radioactive fallout, or starved by a nuclear winter.

As long as we persist in having these weapons, we are investing in a worldwide holocaust that will incinerate, sterilize and starve distant people who have nothing to do with the nations involved in the war, accident, or act of nature that detonates these weapons.

God has given us this beautiful, abundant planet and the miracle of human life. Human cleverness has provided us with the tools of worldwide suicide. Can we admit that we have gone too far? Those human, mechanical or natural failures can plunge us into the final fire? That the only recourse is to overcome our fears, our dream of domination, and our attachment to the profits of death? Only then can the United States take the lead in freeing the world of these suicidal weapons.

[Author is an artist and writer, has been a student of nuclear weapons since creating materials for SANE’s Ban the Bomb testing campaign in the 1950s.]