Comments on: Should anything trigger the use of nuclear weapons?

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:34:39 +0000

I meant this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iB0JBD9nDY

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:32:44 +0000

Re: Robert Karp

Strong leadership is the byproduct of an engaged, educated and mobilized public! We need to move the masses. Anybody seen this yet?

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:58:33 +0000

Use of a fraction of today’s 26,000 nuclear weapons would also bring about global climate change – in just hours (to say the least).

This needs to be hammered home to the receptive media and public consciousness, at every opportunity.

By: Robert Karp

Robert Karp — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 20:17:38 +0000

Developing, stockpiling and deploying nuclear weapons is a false option. Countries that have “the bomb”, and those aspiring to have it, need to be convinced that having “the bomb” is more a survival threat to themselves than a deterent they perceive it to be. When that mindset takes hold and nations adopt it as public policy, the nuclear world will stand down. Strong leadership with courage and conviction can get us there. The rest of us must demand that it happen.

Robert Karp,
Stamford, CT
USA

By: Michael Christ

Michael Christ — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:09:30 +0000

Writer CL raises an important point. IPPNW’s founding co-president, Dr. Bernard Lown, put it this way: “Above all, it is mandatory to dispel a central myth in confronting the unthinkable. We think of nuclear war as war, but with magnified consequences. We must break out of the intellectual strangle-hold of conditioned responses and habitual modes of thinking. Nuclear war is a term of deception. ” He added that, “Nuclear boms are not weapons. They are instruments of genocide. They are not peacemakers or instruments of national policy. Cholera or crematoria are not made acceptable whatever the sponsorship. We must promote a social revulsion against nuclear weapons…and foster a popular anti-nuclear survival instinct as we hunger for food.”

By: C. Llewellyn

C. Llewellyn — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 03:32:29 +0000

The candidates can sidestep the issue because there is no public outcry against “nuclear weapons.” Why not? I find most of the “public” doesn’t have a clue as to what constitutes “nuclear weapons” or a clue as to the magnitude of destruction which even a single warhead exploded on a single target would bring about. I think using the “nuclear weapons” terminology only connotes some kind of imagined (not a real “tactical”) hightech, handheld device which has limited force with no- or low-level radiation, and which can be seen on a Star Trek episode.

I’m questioning whether this “nuclear weapons” terminiology could be in part responsible for this trivialization and confusion?

In contrast, many of us remember the public outcry and organizing, both for containment and toward abolition, of “the H bomb,” which went on in the Sixties and Seventies. That awareness, outcry and action, in large part, was because mainstream news coverage of the arsenals of the “Cold War” or about pending NPT and other treaties, would also include the number and megatons of “hydrogen bombs” and explanations of the alphabets and destructive properties of missiles (ICBMs etc.). Such newscoverage also defined terms like “ground zero” and “nuclear winter.”

Am I correct in saying the “nuclear weapons” catchall term is largely of post-cold war usage? And don’t many folks now believe that the threat of “nuclear war” has gone away because the “Cold War” with “Russia” was ended?

I’ve read other messages in this IPPNW/ICAN exchange, so I know there is writing more informed and articulate. So help me out, those of you reading this who better understand this language-thing.

I’ll end with a trivial but relevant idea? Do you remember how food packagers used to print “artificial flavoring and coloring” on their label to avoid alerting consumers to the health risks of eating the product?

Thanks for listening, CL

By: Andreas Nidecker

Andreas Nidecker — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 12:21:29 +0000

World citizens aware of the increasing dangers of nuclear proliferation have the highest hopes in the next president of the US. The United States of America under President Barack Obama will lead the world on the path towards a world free of nuclear weapons. But it is also the responsibility of our whole generation to fullfill this vision for our children and grandchildren and make an allout effort accordingly.

A. Nidecker, Switzerland

By: Chuck Baynton MD

Chuck Baynton MD — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 04:50:42 +0000

The history of war is the history of miscalculation. Of all people, Americans who have experienced our Iraq and Vietnam wars ought to understand that. No government is immune to miscalculation.

It is immoral to bet the future of every nation’s children on the proposition that America’s repeated threats of nuclear attack (“all options are on the table”) can never lead to a fatal miscalculation.