By Jim Clune
The original impetus to forming Broome County Peace Action was the Freeze Campaign of the 1980’s.
However, the nuclear weapons never went away. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock is now set at 2 minutes to midnight. The current resident of the Oval Office tears up treaties with impunity and calls for a new arms race, even into space, while Pentagon planners continue to pursue “total spectrum dominance” of all of humanity.
It is hard to get public attention onto American Weapons of Mass Destruction because they have institutional momentum with unlimited funding, timid political will to oppose them, and most people are just trying to financially and medically survive. The survival of life on this planet hangs in the balance while other ways of plundering our environment economically and socially continue apace. Holding WMD’s at humanity’s collective throats sets the pattern. It is not just that a nuclear accident could occur, but that the destruction is already happening to almost everybody and everything under an ongoing 73-year reign of terror.
The existence of WMD’s calls into question our morality as a species, the fate of the poor of the world which is on track to eventually include almost everybody, and the entire balance of factors that allow ANY life on this planet to continue, even if the bombs never go off.
The King’s Bay Plowshares 7 (Kingsbayplowshares7.org or Kings Bay Plowshare on Facebook) are nonviolent activists who entered the Trident sub base in King’s Bay, Georgia last year on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination. They are awaiting trial. Their message was loud and clear: “The Ultimate Logic of Trident is Omnicide.” Getting rid of all WMD’s is quite doable, and is a necessary first step to addressing ALL other questions.
It is time to face our fears and self-imposed limitations. We deserve a better fate than this, and we are all quite capable of choosing a different course, believe it or not.
