… war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.
— Howard Zinn (1922-2919),”Violence Doesn’t Work”, The Progressive, July 18, 2007
All war represents a failure of diplomacy.
— Tony Benn MP., (1925-2014) Tony Benn: “His views on socialism, Europe, war and writing“, BBC News, March 14, 2014
No country too poor, too small, too far away, not to be threat, a threat to the American way of life.
Not too far away from Seattle, Washington there are eight ballistic-missile submarines carrying the world’s large shipments of nuclear weapons.
The 560-foot-long black submarines are docked at the Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, hauling what is described by Rick Anderson in a recent Los Angeles Times article as “the largest concentration of deployed nuclear weapons in the US.”
After Donald Trump threatened the Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” I spoke to K.J. Noh, a peace activist and scholar on the geopolitics of the Asian continent.
Rehearsing Armageddon
Ann Garrison: North Korea is standing up to the US’s 4800 “locked and loaded” nuclear weapons with an estimated 30 to 60 of its own. Do you think it would still be standing without them?
K.J.Noh: It’s hard to imagine so.
Like obscene profits from great fraud or theft, “wonder weapons” of mass destruction, to which the atomic bomb certainly belongs, have their origins in the inability and unwillingness to accept the equality and dignity of one’s opponents/ competitors (never mind whether one’s cause/product is legitimate).
The ambivalence of the US position during WWII — the discrepancy which became apparent after 1945 between the stated and unstated policies — allowed and even promoted the mythic justification for US atomic bombing.
The war of words between North Korea and the United states reached new heights last week. US President trump pledged to meet any further threats by North Korea to the US “with fire and fury like the world has never seen”. North Korea’s response was a threat to vaporize Guam, a US colony and important military base in the Pacific.
Because of recent media frenzy over nuclear explosives and ballistic missile tests by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, a.k.a North Korea), and US President Donald Trump’s angry threats in response that imply nuclear retaliation, I thought it might be useful to remind you of why nuclear weapons are obsolete as military tools for the United States.
The US submarine captain says: “We’ve all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you’re never ready, because you don’t know when it’s coming. Well, now we do know and there’s nothing to be done about it.”
He says he will be dead by September. It will take about a week to die, though no one can be sure. Animals live the longest.
The genesis of the world, the myth of creation speaks of seven days.1 Six days of divine labour whereon the seventh the lord of the universe rested.
