End the New Nuclear Arms Race

Making Connections to End the New Nuclear Arms Race

by Mona Lee

On August 8, 1945 when atomic bombs were falling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I was six years old and living on Chambers Road in Ferguson, Mo. which at the time was a working class suburb of a predominantly poor black city. To this day, I vividly recall a photograph on the St. Louis Post Dispatch front page of Japanese faces distorted into hideous masks of terror. In school we learned this had been done to end the War. Thus began the old nuclear arms race. From then on, that race escalated as later we were told the US nuclear arsenal was to prevent “the communists” from taking over the world. In Catholic school we learned that communism was the essence of evil although my mother, who lived in fear of my father losing his job, once told me that under communism she wouldn’t have to worry because the government gave everyone a job. I also remember my father saying that nuclear weapons made our country the most powerful nation on earth. Yet we were frequently reminded that the bombs could, and in fact most likely would, eventually destroy the world. It was not until much later that I figured out why our country needed to be the most the most powerful nation. That was to control the world’s resources because our economic system, called capitalism, runs on the need for ever increasing profits for the wealthy. It is also capitalism’s insatiable hunger for profits that has increasingly deflated the wages and living standards of working people until today we have the most obscene income gap between rich and poor in more than a hundred years. And the people to whom the least of all this trickles down are today’s young people, especially African American descendants of slaves like the ones who now inhabit my home town, Ferguson. Recently our government has decided to spend one trillion dollars to modernize its entire nuclear arsenal, thus enabling our weapons to destroy missile silos of other nations before they can strike back. This, of course, has frightened Russia and other nuclear arms nations, thus triggering a new arms race that has made nuclear war more likely than it has been since the Cuban missile crisis. The capitalist ruling elites have decided that their profits are worth the risk of nuclear war. So where will the trillion dollars come from to pay for this insanity? From you and me and working class people of places like my home town where the African American teenager, Mike Brown, was shot by police the day before he was to enter College . . . like New York City where James Garner, another young black man was suffocated by police . . . like Cleveland where twelve year old Tamir Rice was shot while playing with a toy gun in a park . . . and countless other places where a bludgeoning US police state currently imprisons more African Americans than it once held as slaves. On August 8 2015, 60 years after Hiroshima woke us up to audacity of our country’s military might, the Ferguson incident jolted us into the realization that this military power could be turned against its people as police, equipped with M16 rifles, riot gear and armored vehicles, descended upon peaceful protestors decrying the untimely death of their young neighbor. We learned that that all this war machinery had been supplied by the same military establishment that owns the nukes. An affective capitalist police state had been stealthily created in America, our “land of the free” without our knowledge. It took a shock wave like Ferguson to jolt the capitalist media into letting us know. I shudder to think what it might take to force them to inform us about the “New Nuclear Arms Race.” During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 everyone with a TV set was sitting in front of it trembling and biting their nails. Yet when I spoke to nearly a hundred young activists gathered at the University of Washington last month, virtually none were aware of the new nuclear arms race. Most were unaware that the Trident Base Bangor is located in Hood Canal only 15 miles northwest of where we sat and contains the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons on the planet. So of course, it had not occurred to them that an accident in loading or unloading a missile there could contaminate the entire Puget Sound Region. Those young activists gathered that day at UW were some of the most aware people I know. Most had worked hard to deliver Seattle workers their famous $15 minimum wage; every one of them was clued in to the likelihood of capitalism’s insatiable thirst for profit destroying all life on the planet by disastrous climate change; most had marched to cry out that, “black lives matter.” But the recently increased threat of nuclear war had not crossed their radar screens, nor had it occurred to them how much good the millions of dollars poured into nuclear weapons modernization might otherwise do to further their many worthy causes like education, health care, public works, jobs programs. Two years before I had joined them to work on issues they cared about, and that’s what gave me the opportunity to address them on the nuclear threat and how it is integrally connected with all their other concerns. Bruce Gagnon of Global Networks speaking at Ground Zero during the Martin Luther King Day Activities reminded us that, “All of our progressive movements are on the losing end of things these days. We’ve got to get out from behind our single issue silos and make connections between our various campaigns if we hope to have any success. I am going to explore going to the unemployment office, Social Security office, welfare office and hand out flyers that show the links between massive cost overruns on Navy warships, F-35 fighters, space war fighting technologies and the real cuts coming in social programs that are daily impacting the lives of people across the nation. When we begin to shine a light on these wasteful military programs for endless war, and help the public see the deadly connections to cuts in social program, then we can seriously talk about expanding our movements. Until we take these steps to connect the dots across issue lines, we will remain isolated, weak, and ultimately ineffective.” The hundreds of leaflets we hand out will continue to be tossed into the nearest trash bins until we succeed in making those connections. All our efforts to awaken young people to the threat of nuclear war will fall upon deaf ears unless we call awareness to those connections.

Visit http://www.notnt.org/ for more information and ways to get connected.