Shout It Out: We Dont Want Nuclear Weapons!

It is now fifty-nine years since the USA dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, following another bomb three days earlier in Hiroshima, killing over 140,000 people... and what have we learned? That might is right? That nuclear weapons are necessary to guarantee our safety and our national sovereignty?

In the aftermath of the Nagasaki bombing, a young girl named Miyo Pinette, one of the few survivors, asked the world:

"when can we have real peace - peace based on religious faith and humanitarian love? Such is a world we wish to live in, such is an age we desire to reach."

Amen to that.

"America once shocked the world by dropping bombs," Piyette now says from her US home. "America should shock again by abandoning nuclear weapons."

Not likely at the moment, is it? In four years - despite all the goodwill towards the USA that existed in the aftermath of 9/11 - Bush has destroyed countless international alliances and treaties, making a mockery of the very ideals that supported the concept of a "free world". Threatening other countries against pursuing nuclear weapons while their own massive stockpile grows, the USA can no longer dodge charges of hypocrisy by claiming a moral imperative.

Today, Russia is again warning the USA against deploying its "Star Wars" missile shield, after a United States deal with Denmark to upgrade radar facilities in north-western Greenland.

The USA is getting increasingly belligerent towards Iran, even though "evidence" of nuclear weapons in Iran has actually come from US-ally Pakistan (see below). This is a war that neo-cons in the White House have been urging for years, the "jewel in the crown" of their plans for global US Empire.

"Bringing Iran in from the cold is a time-consuming business," says The Guardian. But the Bush administration, as usual, is in a hurry."

And meanwhile North Korea continues quietly to develop nuclear missiles, with cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki once again the number one target.

Are we really, as a species, really so stupid? Are we so incapable of reaching out to one another across social, religious and national boundaries? Or are we just trapped in a system that is controlled by political and business interests that will not bow to the overwhelming will of ordinary people everywhere, people who only want peace?