There is no acceptable rationale for the United States to conduct more nuclear weapons testing. I was surprised when I heard the president took to Truth Social on Oct. 30, to post he had “instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons…” The president says a lot of crazy stuff, yet I was scratching my head over this one.
The global moratorium on nuclear testing is a mainstay against the dangers inherent in the existence of nuclear weapons. The question should be whether the world can bring a complete end to nuclear testing by ratifying and putting into force the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The president would take us in the opposite direction.
Mine is not the position of a few activists. Literally millions of people, around the globe, have stood up and fought to bring a complete end to nuclear testing.
According to Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association, “The journey has been long and difficult, from the citizen-led campaign that prompted Kennedy and Khrushchev to sign the 1963 ban on atmospheric blasts… to the campaign to push Congress to halt testing in 1992… and secure the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996.”
Nuclear testing should remain “taboo.” We should resist the president by contacting our U.S. Senators and Members of Congress and telling them so.
No other nation is testing nuclear weapons. Nor should the United States.
~ Submitted as a letter to the editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette
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One of my close relatives was a soldier who witnessed Nevada nuclear testing because he was assigned, as a trained Army journalist, to write stories for Army media long ago. He remembered, for the rest of his life, the horrible light that couldn’t be shut out even by turning one’s back to the blast with hands over blindfold over closed eyes. He remembered blind rabbits and other injured wildlife running terrified through the desert. It was a ghastly experience. And like many others who were exposed to the testing, he suffered health impacts that lasted the rest of his life.
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