Embracing Imagination
The 75th anniversary of the dropping atomic bombs by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki passed with little notice. The bombs killed 210,000 people and tens of thousands more were to die of radiation poisoning, minutes, days, weeks and months later. For many others, death came more slowly, after lifetimes of illness and pain. Many of the few remaining survivors continue to advocate for a nuclear free world.
Of all of the brutalities of the last century, nuclear devastation unleashed by the US, now endangers all life. Dr. Helen Caldicott, who has been a leading thinker-activists for the elimination of nuclear weapons observed: “Seventy-five years after the dawn of the nuclear age, we are as ready as ever to extinguish ourselves. The human race is clearly an evolutionary aberrant on a suicidal mission. Our planet is in the intensive care unit, approaching several terminal events. Will we gradually burn and shrivel life on our wondrous Earth by emitting the ancient carbon stored over billions of years to drive our cars and power our industries, or will we end it suddenly by creating a global gas oven?”
This is not an abstract question. Caldicott explains, “The International Energy Agency said recently that we only have six months left to avert the effects of global warming before it is too late. Earlier this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s ever been.”
The drive toward extinction has accelerated under President Trump. Along with the denial of climate change, the removal of even modest efforts to limit deadly corporate extraction of vital resources, Trump is moving us closer to nuclear devastation. He used this anniversary as an opportunity to announce the resumption of nuclear weapons programs.
Further, the Washington Post reports his administration has been holding discussions on carrying out nuclear test explosions for the first time since 1992.
Since coming into authority, Trump has been dismantling international safeguards aimed at limiting nuclear weapons. He has withdrawn the United States from arms treaties including the landmark INF agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. He has failed to extend the New START accord, and rejects the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which bans all nuclear test explosions.
He has gone forward with expensive nuke modernization plans, spending billions of dollars on weapons of mass destruction. Almost all of this has happened with little public attention or outcry.
But Trump is only the latest manifestation of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called a deep “malady within the American spirit,” rooted in our denial of the death and destruction we cause to protect the power and privilege of a few.
King understood that “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.” That is why he called upon us to make a “radical revolution of values.” We must rapidly begin,” he said, “the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
We are today again in revolutionary times. The promise of creating the world anew is being raised daily as people gather in the streets, in neighborhoods, and across the country asking how can we live peacefully, with compassion and joy. As Einstein commented in the shadow of the bomb, it is our imaginations that will enable us to create and embrace this new world.