By Leonard Eiger Today marks the anniversary of the day in which the world entered the atomic age. On July 16, 1945, at 5:29:45 AM at the Alamogordo Test Range, on the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death) desert, in the test code-named Trinity, the experimental device known as the “Gadget” was detonated, creating a light “brighter than a thousand suns.” A mere 6 kilogram (13.2 pound) sphere of plutonium, compressed to supercriticality by the surrounding high explosives, created an explosion equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT (20 Kilotons). Was this, as thought nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the beginning of […]
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Letters to the Editor – An Important Outreach Tool!
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following letters to the editor (one recently submitted and one published) are from activists dedicated to putting an end to the threat of nuclear war. Letters to the editor are an important tool in not only reaching our fellow citizens and sharing our views, and also reminding our news outlets know that this issue is of extraordinary importance to all of humanity. Please share your letters to the editor; send them to outreach@gzcenter.org. A Tale of Two Nightmares: Global Pandemic and Nuclear War By Mona Lee, Seattle At some level, human civilization has long been aware of […]
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Letter to a Trident Crew Member
“Letter to a Trident Crew Member” was written by James Douglass, and originally published in the Ground Zero Newsletter, Fall 1986, Vol. 5, No. 3. Dear Friend, I write to you in the hope that you are open to reading a letter from someone who believes in you but rejects Trident as a crime against God and humanity. I believe in you as a person of conscience, at the same time as I am deeply troubled by the power you have to destroy the world. I believe and hope in you, but I hate what lies within the Trident missiles […]
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Put civilization at the top of our agenda!
Editor’s Note: This post is a letter to the editor written by Ground Zero’s Mary Gleysteen, It was published in the Kitsap Sun on January 27, 2020. We invite you to write letters to the editor of your local newspapers. Click here to learn more about the Doomsday Clock. Check out our Take Action page to learn more about the new “low-yield” W76-2 Trident warhead. ******** The Sun just ran an article about the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moving the Doomsday Clock to 100 Seconds to Midnight. This represents the closest we have come to destroying civilization with dangerous technologies of our own making since the clock’s […]
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They came to stop a crime
Instead, seven Catholic peacemakers were convicted and now await sentencing By Jack Cohen-Joppa, The Nuclear Resister “…You are the hope you have arrived to find.” So ended a brief message that Fr. Steve Kelly wrote from jail last month to be read to more than 100 friends and supporters. We had travelled from across the United States for a Festival of Hope on the eve of the trial of the Kings Bay Plowshares in coastal Brunswick, Georgia. While many of us hoped for their acquittal, Steve reminded us that hope in the nuclear age comes first from building community, and hope […]
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