Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Hirosima Nagasaki

In all of earth's sixty-five-million-year history, we are living in the most dangerous of times. The fact that a bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and two hundred thousand lives were vaporized within twenty minutes has not prevented man from dreaming up more ways to fill space with weapons of mass destruction. We were not created for militarism, but to turn our swords into plowshares. We have arrived here today by no accident. We have been summoned by the universe to claim the highest common ground. As the Dali Lama said, the radicalism of our age is to be compassionate human beings. We have been called to bring love and compassion back into the equation and assist others to connect with the deepest parts of themselves. Now is the time to realize, as never before, that when any of us suffer, we all suffer. All life is interconnected, interdependent, and greatly loved by the creator, the sustainer of the universe. We are called by love, for love, and to love.
This August 6th and 9th marks the 63rd anniversary of the most brutal act of terrorism upon innocent people; America's atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the time is now to shed some light upon it.
At 2:45 AM, on August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber flew north from Tinian Island toward Japan. Three and a half hours later, the Enola Gay dropped "Little Boy" an 8,900-pound atomic weapon upon civilians in Hiroshima and leveled almost 90% of the city. On August 9, "Fat Man" was dropped on Nagasaki, and one third of that city was destroyed. "Little Boy" was fuelled by highly enriched uranium-235 and generated a destructive force of about 15 kilotons—the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT. "Fat Man" consisted of a plutonium core surrounded by high explosives wired to explode simultaneously and yielded a 22 kiloton explosion. America has a nuclear arsenal of over 10,000 weapons and nearly 2,000 remain on hair-trigger alert ever since the end of the Cold War. An estimated 150 – 240 tactical nuclear weapons remain based in 5 NATO countries and the United States is the only country with nuclear weapons deployed on foreign soil.
American taxpayers provide $54 billion annually to maintain WMD's, which is but a drop in the bucket of the overall U.S. military spending. The U.S. is also a co-conspirator in international nuclear apartheid and collaborator in Israel's policy of nuclear ambiguity.
We live in an insecure, uncertain world; it is also a time of opportunity. It is a time to put aside many of the old ways and with creativity and imagination, develop new thinking, ideas, institutions, etc. Young people and women will help this process; they know that Nuclear weapons belong to the cold war thinking, and can never be used. To do so, would be immoral, illogical and destroy the Environment. They know our real problems, are: Poverty, Environment, unethical globalization, abuse of Human Rights and International Laws, gender inequality, ethnical/political conflict, State and paramilitary acts of terror…They know that spending trillions on weapons that can never be used, while each day over 30,000 children die of preventable disease, is immoral and unacceptable.

The wisdom of non-violence teaches that:
War is not the will of God.
War is never justified.
War is never blessed by God.
War is not endorsed by any religion.
War is the very definition of mortal sin.
War is demonic, evil, anti-human, anti-life, anti-God, and anti-Christ.

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