EDITOR’S NOTE: Check out the leaflet we brought to the showing of Command and Control in Seattle late last month. Click here to download and print some to hand out wherever you have the urge this holiday season.
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Did you see the Seattle bus ads? They read: “20 miles west of Seattle is the largest concentration of deployed nuclear weapons in the U.S.” In light of recent media attention on who should have their finger on the nuclear button, this statement seems to beg the question: With so many nuclear weapons, what would happen should the president order their use?
A single thermonuclear warhead deployed from Naval Base Kitsap on Hood Canal – and the 8 Trident submarines based at Bangor carry approximately 768 warheads – would wipe out a large city like Seattle and make the land in and around it uninhabitable for centuries.
The United States is the only nation to have used nuclear weapons against another, and we have led the nuclear arms race from its beginning in 1945. Now the government is moving forward with a trillion-dollar plan to rebuild the entire nuclear-weapons complex, including replacing the Trident submarine fleet, over the next 30 years. Experts such as former Secretary of Defense William Perry say it will trigger an arms race—jeopardizing national security.
Our nations leaders (starting with the President) must understand that nuclear weapons are immoral and must never be used. Nuclear weapons threaten genocide on a scale that decision-makers refuse to talk about. The use of nuclear weapons are illegal under the laws of war and humanitarian law — unusable because there is no sure way to limit escalation, they are exorbitantly expensive and a massive diversion of human talent and resources away from diplomacy, foreign assistance, innovation and public health.
U.S. priorities in the world are clearly written into our national budget. For the sake of future generations, we ask, “What will be the priorities of the next administration?”
Join with us at Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, as we continue to resist Trident and work for a nuclear weapon-free world – at gzcenter.org, and also on Facebook.
