Preventing Nuclear War VI

Yesterday, July 16, was the spectacular debut of the horror that has come to be known as the nuclear age.  

Wait, first I have to remind you to DONATE TOMORROW, JULY 18, to our YOUTH EMPOWERMENT TO PREVENT EXTINCTION campaign. If you donate tomorrow and ONLY tomorrow, your gifts will be matched according to some strange system that no one can understand but that will, for sure, help us, so please do DONATE TOMORROW JULY 18.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming. July 16. The Trinity test. The first-ever atomic explosion, which turned sand to glass but, luckily, did not set the Earth’s whole atmosphere on fire, which some scientists working on the bomb thought was possible.

Unluckily, in fact, tragically, it seems to have killed babies in New Mexico, a fact I only found out yesterday, thanks to Arnie Gundersen and Greg Mello. In Trinity: ‘The most significant hazard of the entire Manhattan Project’, Kitty Tucker and Robert Alvarez have drawn attention to a sudden spike in stillbirths and defects taking place right after that Trinity test spewed tons of radioactive fallout into the air and onto populations hundreds of miles away. So right out of the gate, nuclear weapons started killing indiscriminately.

The nuclear industry was born of fear, hatred, and utter disregard for international humanitarian law. The Hague and Geneva conventions should have been enough to prevent instruments of mass, indiscriminate, murder and mayhem. But they didn’t, and from this original sin burst forth a collection of weapons and an industry dependent on trillions upon trillions of taxpayer dollars made possible by ignorance-enhancing deceit, which has already been the cause of illness, misery and death for unknown and unknowable millions of innocent noncombatants.

But the real problem is not the weapons, the power plants or even the radiation. It’s the violent cutthroat competition for dominance that is the force behind the fear and hatred that gave birth to these horrors. The Hibakusha Rebellion has arisen to oppose specifically the nuclear march to human extinction, but rebelling against the nuclear industry is not enough. With AI, killer robots, antibiotic-caused superbugs, bee-killing pesticides, opioids, White supremacist militias, the military-industrial-Congressional-penal-media-Amazon complex, CO2 emissions, and Monsanto, we have endless means of collective suicide. If we, as a species, cannot shift dramatically from competition to cooperation, or in Riane Eisler’s terms, from dominance to partnership, or in Hiroshima’s terms, from the war culture to a peace culture, we will not survive this century. This shift is the goal of our rebellion.

WE HAVE TO BECOME THE MOVEMENT WE WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD.

JOIN THE HIBAKUSHA REBELLION.