July 2018 Philadelphia Chapter of Pax Christi U.S.A.
Vandenberg: Fifty years of imperilment and hypocrisy – and still we hope
Article first appeared in the Beatitude House Catholic Worker
Newsletter Vol. 22. No.2, June 2018 –
printed with permission
The following is an open letter to be published in every major newspaper in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties the first week of August 2018.
The publication will mark the 73rd anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. … Dennis Apel
The United States brought nuclear weapons into the world. It is the only country to have used them, and did so on innocent civilians.
Nuclear weapons are now many times more powerful than the fission bombs which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They make no nation safer, but imperil all nations and the planet we all live on. Nuclear weapons are intrinsically immoral.
Fifty years ago in 1968, the United States signed the Treaty on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). We joined the four other nuclear countries at the time in promising to work “in good faith” toward “complete disarmament,” while other nations that signed the treaty agreed to never obtain them.
The current nuclear arsenal of the United States, however, and its plans to modernize its nuclear weaponry over the next 30 years (at a cost of 1.2 trillion dollars, according to the U.S. Congressional Budget Office https://www.cbo.gov/publication/53211), radically belie the promise our nation made when it signed the NPT. Our country’s current deployment of over 12,500 nuclear warheads in its triad of intercontinental ballistic missiles, strategic bombers, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, endows us with monstrous nuclear capacity and supremacy over all other nations.
In February of this, the fiftieth anniversary year of our signing the NPT, the Pentagon released its “Nuclear Posture Review.” In his preface to the 2018 Nuclear Posture Reviews, General Jim Mattis states:
And further:
So 50 years after promising to help purge the world of nuclear weapons, our nation insanely believes the best way to prevent the use of nuclear weapons is to assure that they are ever more effective. Moreover, we have the audacity to demand that other nations such as Iran and North Korea not have such weapons.
Has there ever been a greater and more dangerous hypocrisy in the history of civilization?
We are people who have protested at Vandenberg Air Force Base against nuclear weaponry. We protest at Vandenberg, because our nation tests its intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) by firing them from the base at the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, degrading the environment, health and economic welfare of the small country’s indigenous peoples. We also protest at Vandenberg because the soldiers assigned to launch our nations’ nuclear ICBMs are trained at the base.
Many of us have protested at Vandenberg for decades. We are old, and young. We are Asian, Black, Brown, Native American, Pacific Islander and White. We are Agnostics, Atheists, Buddhists, Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and Quakers. Some of our military veterans of wars; others are lifelong pacifists. Many of us have been arrested during our peaceful protest at Vandenberg. Some of us have gone to prison; one of us went before the U.S. Supreme Court.
We are all one in our opposition to the possession of nuclear weapons by any nation; foremost our own. We are also one in our love for humanity, and hope that our nation will one day rid itself of its nuclear arsenal and authentically lead other nations to join it.
Until that day, we continue our protest. Signed
Dennis Apel
Beatitude House Catholic Worker 267 Campodonico Ave.
Guadalupe, CA 93434