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U.S. Weapons of Mass Destruction
my2hands
Posts: 17,117
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/080206B.shtml
Weapons of Mass Destruction Discovered Here: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and North Dakota
By Bill Quigley
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 02 August 2006
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, the US dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki. These nuclear weapons killed over 100,000 people, almost all civilians, and injured many tens of thousands more.
Fr. Carl Kabat, 72, Greg Boertje-Obed, 51, and Michael Walli, 57, sit in jail in North Dakota awaiting a federal criminal trial because of weapons of mass destruction and because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I visited them last week.
Their crime? They tried to disarm one of the 1700+ nuclear weapons in North Dakota. On June 26, 2006, they went to the silo of a Minuteman III first-strike nuclear missile and wrote on it, "If you want peace, work for justice." Then they hammered on its lock and poured some of their own blood over it. They waited to be arrested and have been in jail ever since. If convicted, they face imprisonment of up to ten years for criminal damage to federal property.
The Minuteman III is a first-strike intercontinental nuclear missile with a range of over 6,000 miles and carries 27 times the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There are over one hundred fifty Minuteman III missiles planted in the ground in silos in just the northern part of North Dakota.
Fr. Kabat has been a Catholic priest for over forty years. Greg Boertje-Obed was a First Lieutenant in the US Army. Mike Walli served two tours in Vietnam. All three men were born in small towns or rural areas of the Midwest. Walli and Boertje-Obed are members of the Loaves and Fishes Catholic Worker community in Duluth, Minnesota. Together they are called the "Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares." The Plowshares movement seeks to follow the instructions of Isaiah (2:4) and Micah (4:3) to "beat your swords into plowshares."
At the time of their arrest, the three specifically linked their actions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "Two of the most terrible war crimes occurred on August 6th and 9th, 1945. On August 6th, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, killing more than 100,000 people (including U.S. prisoners of war). Three days later the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki, Japan, killing more than 50,000 people. Use of these weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations were abominable crimes against humanity."
They went on to say, "U.S. leaders speak about the dangers of other nations acquiring nuclear weapons, but they fail to act in accordance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which commits the U.S. to take steps to disarm its weapons of mass destruction. We act in order to bring attention to people's responsibility for disarming weapons of state terrorism. We can begin the process of exposing U.S. weapons of mass destruction, naming them as abominations that cause desolation, and transforming them to objects that promote life."
Mike Walli enlisted in the army as a young man. With the experience of two tours in Vietnam, he said: "This is not about our national defense. The hundreds of Minuteman III nuclear weapons are offensive weapons of mass destruction. Martin Luther King Jr. preached that the United States is the chief purveyor of violence in the world. We must become a people-oriented society rather than a thing-oriented society. We must kick the war economy habit."
Greg Boertje-Obed, who, after his time as an officer in the military, married and is the father of an eleven year old daughter, told me: "There is a sense of righteousness and harmony that comes from being in jail on August 6. When I was in the military, I was trained to fight and "win" a nuclear war. It became clear that all the preparations for a nuclear war were wrong. In contrast Jesus taught "Love your enemies - don't fear those who can kill the body - those who live by the sword will die by the sword." Now is the time to turn away from the ways of violence. Treat others the way we want to be treated. Now is the time to take steps to help the starving, ill, orphaned, weak, war-oppressed, and down-trodden all over the world. It is time to turn away from the bomb and the possibility of ending all life on our planet and to end the nuclear nightmare.
Fr. Carl Kabat spent several years in the Philippines and Brazil. "August 6th and August 9th are appropriate times to be in jail," he reflected. "We are here to witness against the insanity of nuclear weapons. When these bombs were dropped on the Japanese I was too young to realize what had happened. Those bombings were war crimes that we, even today, do not acknowledge. The indiscriminate killing of children, women, old people and everyone else certainly cannot be accepted under any just theory of war. Perhaps the fact that we are in jail can help us as a nation remember the criminality of those days in the past. None of us can make up for the killings in the past, but there is a possibility that our being in jail during this time might help stop such insanity from being repeated in the future."
North Dakota is home to more nuclear weapons than any other of the 50 states. The Bureau of Atomic Scientists estimated that the state contained more than 1,700 nuclear warheads, not counting the ones planted in concrete silos in the ground.
A friendly cab driver in Bismarck told me "If North Dakota seceded from the Union, we would be the world's third most-powerful nuclear state."
The Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares hope their actions will invite the people of North Dakota, and the rest of the US, to do something about our nation's nuclear weapons of mass destruction in light of many issues of justice, including the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and professor of law at Loyola University New Orleans. Bill is a legal advisor with the Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares. You can write Fr. Carl Kabat, Greg Boertje-Obed, or Mike Walli c/o Southwest Multi-County Correctional Center, 66 Museum Drive, Dickinson, ND 58601. You can find out more about the Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares at: http://www.jonahhouse.org. You can contact their community c/o Loaves and Fishes Catholic Worker Community at 218.728.0629. You can email Bill Quigley at Quigley@loyno.edu.
Weapons of Mass Destruction Discovered Here: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and North Dakota
By Bill Quigley
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 02 August 2006
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, the US dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki. These nuclear weapons killed over 100,000 people, almost all civilians, and injured many tens of thousands more.
Fr. Carl Kabat, 72, Greg Boertje-Obed, 51, and Michael Walli, 57, sit in jail in North Dakota awaiting a federal criminal trial because of weapons of mass destruction and because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I visited them last week.
Their crime? They tried to disarm one of the 1700+ nuclear weapons in North Dakota. On June 26, 2006, they went to the silo of a Minuteman III first-strike nuclear missile and wrote on it, "If you want peace, work for justice." Then they hammered on its lock and poured some of their own blood over it. They waited to be arrested and have been in jail ever since. If convicted, they face imprisonment of up to ten years for criminal damage to federal property.
The Minuteman III is a first-strike intercontinental nuclear missile with a range of over 6,000 miles and carries 27 times the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There are over one hundred fifty Minuteman III missiles planted in the ground in silos in just the northern part of North Dakota.
Fr. Kabat has been a Catholic priest for over forty years. Greg Boertje-Obed was a First Lieutenant in the US Army. Mike Walli served two tours in Vietnam. All three men were born in small towns or rural areas of the Midwest. Walli and Boertje-Obed are members of the Loaves and Fishes Catholic Worker community in Duluth, Minnesota. Together they are called the "Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares." The Plowshares movement seeks to follow the instructions of Isaiah (2:4) and Micah (4:3) to "beat your swords into plowshares."
At the time of their arrest, the three specifically linked their actions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "Two of the most terrible war crimes occurred on August 6th and 9th, 1945. On August 6th, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, killing more than 100,000 people (including U.S. prisoners of war). Three days later the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki, Japan, killing more than 50,000 people. Use of these weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations were abominable crimes against humanity."
They went on to say, "U.S. leaders speak about the dangers of other nations acquiring nuclear weapons, but they fail to act in accordance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which commits the U.S. to take steps to disarm its weapons of mass destruction. We act in order to bring attention to people's responsibility for disarming weapons of state terrorism. We can begin the process of exposing U.S. weapons of mass destruction, naming them as abominations that cause desolation, and transforming them to objects that promote life."
Mike Walli enlisted in the army as a young man. With the experience of two tours in Vietnam, he said: "This is not about our national defense. The hundreds of Minuteman III nuclear weapons are offensive weapons of mass destruction. Martin Luther King Jr. preached that the United States is the chief purveyor of violence in the world. We must become a people-oriented society rather than a thing-oriented society. We must kick the war economy habit."
Greg Boertje-Obed, who, after his time as an officer in the military, married and is the father of an eleven year old daughter, told me: "There is a sense of righteousness and harmony that comes from being in jail on August 6. When I was in the military, I was trained to fight and "win" a nuclear war. It became clear that all the preparations for a nuclear war were wrong. In contrast Jesus taught "Love your enemies - don't fear those who can kill the body - those who live by the sword will die by the sword." Now is the time to turn away from the ways of violence. Treat others the way we want to be treated. Now is the time to take steps to help the starving, ill, orphaned, weak, war-oppressed, and down-trodden all over the world. It is time to turn away from the bomb and the possibility of ending all life on our planet and to end the nuclear nightmare.
Fr. Carl Kabat spent several years in the Philippines and Brazil. "August 6th and August 9th are appropriate times to be in jail," he reflected. "We are here to witness against the insanity of nuclear weapons. When these bombs were dropped on the Japanese I was too young to realize what had happened. Those bombings were war crimes that we, even today, do not acknowledge. The indiscriminate killing of children, women, old people and everyone else certainly cannot be accepted under any just theory of war. Perhaps the fact that we are in jail can help us as a nation remember the criminality of those days in the past. None of us can make up for the killings in the past, but there is a possibility that our being in jail during this time might help stop such insanity from being repeated in the future."
North Dakota is home to more nuclear weapons than any other of the 50 states. The Bureau of Atomic Scientists estimated that the state contained more than 1,700 nuclear warheads, not counting the ones planted in concrete silos in the ground.
A friendly cab driver in Bismarck told me "If North Dakota seceded from the Union, we would be the world's third most-powerful nuclear state."
The Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares hope their actions will invite the people of North Dakota, and the rest of the US, to do something about our nation's nuclear weapons of mass destruction in light of many issues of justice, including the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and professor of law at Loyola University New Orleans. Bill is a legal advisor with the Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares. You can write Fr. Carl Kabat, Greg Boertje-Obed, or Mike Walli c/o Southwest Multi-County Correctional Center, 66 Museum Drive, Dickinson, ND 58601. You can find out more about the Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares at: http://www.jonahhouse.org. You can contact their community c/o Loaves and Fishes Catholic Worker Community at 218.728.0629. You can email Bill Quigley at Quigley@loyno.edu.
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Comments
Hypocicy -- sitting on the world's third largest oil reserves and telling the world you need nuclear energy, while calling to "wipe out" a soverign nation?
I will say I trust our values as a civilization with 10,000 nukes a lot more than I'd trust some others with even 1 nuke....
Yeah, pretty much. Some may find this offensive, but its true. How long has the U.S. stockpiled nukes? Decades? And besides Japan to end WW-II, when has there ever been a situation where the world was going "OMG, the U.S. is going to kill us all!" ... These "we are the REAL WMD threat" arguments are just nonsense to me. I don't lose sleep over the U.S. and Britain having these weapons. China worries me a bit more, but even in that case, realistically, what's the danger? Even China doesn't threaten to wipe countries out. Israel worries me the most, perhaps ... Not because they'd use them preemptively, but because I worry that some terrorist is going to do something really dumb to Israeli civilians, provoking a potentially apocalyptic response.
Maybe not, but in this day and age, what effects would dismantling the entire U.S. nulcear arsenal have? Do you think they'd be uniformly positive?
Lead by example
In an ideal world, my friend.
That is a reasonable statement. Just what are those values that you think America is in possession of? I'd like to know.
old music: http://www.myspace.com/slowloader
Tolerance, freedom, respect for difference and diversity.
Now those being the ideal that we strive for, we're of course not pefect. But amen that we can come together and talk about it all without being rounded up and tortured for our speech, neh?
Of course these values have their burning point, for instance when they run into the polar opposiste. Please don't ask me to respect and tolerate those who preach intolerance (for instance).
Oh -- and the Value of Rock n Roll of course! But that's kinda embedded in freedom, right? Kinda nice to see how rockin Japan is these days, huh? Germany too! Man they're pumping out some Grade-A rock-n-roll! Can't say the latest releases from the Egyptian music scene have really floated my boat, but hey, I value diversity! Just happy they can MAKE music, yet alone listen and dance to it, huh?
Well, seeing that Rock and Roll evolved from the Black communities in the US, wouldn't it be more accurate to attribute Rock and Roll to africa? What was that about the brittish music invasion? Mozart, Bach and Beethoven, guess where they were from?
Being that I am an individual that listens to a fair amount of German music. I'd have to say you are wrong in assuming they have good music because of US occupation of germany. Actually, germany has amazing musical talent that existed long before the US ever existed. Part of the reason American's don't know about it, is because if it's not in English the majority won't listen to it. Peter Schilling as an example, originally recorded his song "Major Tom" in german, but wrote an english version which became extremely popular in N. America. Die Toten Hosen had a couple of tracks on the Resident Evil sountrack, their english tracks of course. The best german music hasn't even been heard yet by N. America
Point being -- I'm all for cultures that value music, period. Artistic expression -- I'd prefer that over it's opposite?
Now, as towards the path to peace question -- I'm a realist, cat's outta the bag, nukes are here. No, 10,000 nukes is not in itself a path to peace -- it's the stick part of "carrot and the stick" which is the essence of diplomacy and negotiating.
And I don't think it's arrogant on our part to want to keep as many nations as possible non-nuclear. I accept it can be interpretted that way....
I just discovered this song Elles Dansent by Nuttea born and raised in Guadeloupe. Good stuff, cross between Hip-hop and raggae, in french.
Hmmm. Ok ok, region of France I suppose, but c'mon gotta be more Carribean influence than french, no?
And just to stay on thread -- THERE'S the real weapon of mass destruction!
ROCK-N-ROLL
Should check it out, good music, check out Massive Töne out of deutschland if you like Hip-hop. Still, most of these bands include some english in their songs. English is truly at the front in music. Strangely, in N. America we are more likely to accept Spanish in music than french or german.
Indeed we should ... But doing so should not involve hasty mistakes.
No, because said black people were Americans.
yeah, because all Iran wants is energy. <
insert "can you believe this guy" face here.
www.myspace.com/jensvad
Of course this is debatable because it's already so widely accepted that these weapons were necessary in the canonical historical texts used in classrooms.
But after about 30 years most government documents get de-classified, that's why we constantly have to revisit our actions, because we only know the real intentions so many years later.
The reason two nukes were dropped is because we had to make sure both the plutonium and uranium type of nuclear weapons functioned in a combat scenario.
The nukes were not fired at Japan, they were fired at Russia. Why were there so many civilian deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Because we deliberately avoided conventional bombing in order to have a properly clean slate to test the effectiveness of the weapons.
In fact prior to bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki the USA had levelled fully ten square miles of Japanese cities, and industry and military, we were running out of targets.
It wasn't to get the Japanese to surrender, it was to get the Japanese to agree on terms of unconditional surrender, including making the emperor step down, which we in fact didn't even pursue, the emperor stayed until the late 80's.
We made completely unrealistic terms for unconditional surrender as a way to prolong the war just long enough to test the weapons that would make us the pre-eminent world power afterwards, and afterwards Japan obviously had no choice but to capitulate to any demand we made.
But that's not to say we haven't learned our lesson, we've in fact learned how to use nuclear weapons that don't destroy cities, they just destroy hope, they leave men sterile, and woman barren, they cause massive increases in cancer, and they spread in the wind all over the battlefield. They do not discriminate friendlies from foes, they do not avoid drinking water, or babies and children. Today Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain a lesson only in how to be subtler with WMD's. We have no dis-armed, in fact we have barely scratched the surface of reducing those insidious weapons, and in the meantime while we still keep the hammers of god locked away in North Dakota silos, the breath of god, that evil green vapor that disperses from every missile and armor piercing round in the form of depleted uranium threatens daily to destabilize major populations around the planet, and cripples thousands of our own troops in every major conflict they are used in. The tragedies of the past have never taught us how to avoid the next, they have merely taught us how to hide the next tragedy.
I distinctly remember them being 3/5ths of an American.
actually we had an agreement w/ the russians to do just this but the bush adminsitration decided to break it...not only that they decided to break the icbm treaty and broke the nuclear non-proliferation treaty
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
yeah, and the US really wants to spread freedom and democracy and work for the ppl, not their corporate rulers. <
insert "can you believe this guy" face here.
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
thank you... one of the more eloquent elaborations of truth i have seen on here in a while
and they really can't catch a cave dwelling 6'4 arab with a dialysis machine. <
insert "can you believe this guy" face here
yeah, and it's just a coincidence norad was stripped of it's shoot down authorization 2 months before 9/11 and cheney waited until the pentagon was hit (how many hours since the first hijacking???) before he gave the order. <
insert "can you believe this guy" face here
he had a voice that was strong and loud and
i swallowed his facade cos i'm so
eager to identify with
someone above the crowd
someone who seemed to feel the same
someone prepared to lead the way
<
insert "Kool-Aid guy face" face here
I don't believe a sitting US President since we've had nukes has ever threatened to wipe a people off the face of the earth... the Iranian president has repeatedly stated his wish that the Jews were annihilated. You want to let this lunatic develop a nuke?
Is your head that stuck in the sand to believe that these extremists will not use a nuke when/if they get their blood-soaked hands on one?
do you have a link for this... i would love something on this...i have always heard this but havent found any type of documentation (havet really looked in a while)