Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

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  • Stoking an Asian Cold War?

    This article was originally published by In Depth News.

    Proxy wars between countries was one of the more tragic features of the Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR. Both super-powers fuelled the conflicts supplying military materiel and political support while they piously claimed that nuclear deterrence worked so that they themselves never went to war. The U.S. in particular claimed that the George Kennan doctrine of the “containment” of the USSR worked and ere long the Communist giant imploded obligingly.

    Fast forward two decades, and a declining U.S. super power, trapped in economic woes of its own making, is groping for ways to contain a rising China. Proxy wars are no longer possible especially for a super power mired in the morass of Iraq and Afghanistan and encumbered by the unending and ubiquitous “war against terrorism” fighting an unseen enemy.

    What better then than to outsource the task of the containment of China to ambitious India and reluctant Japan? That, essentially, is the subtext of the unusually lengthy Joint Statement that came out at the conclusion of President Obama’s recent visit to India and the rationale for his Asian tour. Unsurprisingly both Japan and now India are the chosen candidates of the U.S. for permanent member status in the UN Security Council.

    The scenario has been a long time in gestation and operation and spans the presidencies of Bush the Son and of Barak Obama giving it the bipartisan support it needs as national security policy. For India — the world’s most populous democracy unable to match China’s poverty alleviation record and bedevilled by home-grown terrorism — the opportunity to escape the stigma of ostracism following the 1998 nuclear blasts was too good to be true.

    The Nehruvian vision of Non-alignment and moral superiority as the key to Great Power status had failed to unlock the door. Now it was self-built economic muscle (and a clever manipulation of the U.S. political system by the wealthy Indian lobby) and a replay of the old “Yellow Peril” cry replayed as a “string of pearls” theory that secured a place at the high table.

    The sophistication of Indian diplomacy will ensure that the new game will be played with finesse and without any of the crudity of the earlier proxy wars. It will garner huge bilateral trade and technology-transfer benefits for itself while maintaining normal relations with China competing at the same time for economic payoffs and political influence with China in Asia and Africa with U.S. support.

    Japan was settling into a low-key role after brief episode of assertiveness under Koizumi and a succession of bland Prime Ministers with little impact on the international political and economic scene. But China’s ill-conceived saber-rattling over the Diaoyu Tai or Senkaku islands plus Medvedev’s ill-timed visit to the Kuril Islands has made her ready to question China on its intentions in the East and South China Seas, recall its Ambassador from Moscow and play hard ball in the Six Nation Talks over North Korea’s nuclear weapon programme.

    It is a dangerous game to play especially since China is able to revive old animosities against the Japanese with its domestic audience and apply economic pressures as well. For the U.S. the revitalization of its old alliance with Japan on the eastern flank of China was long overdue and the rebuff over Okinawa was a sign that Japan had to fall back in line.

    While the speculation over the shift of the global centre of gravity from the Atlantic to the Pacific goes on, the Atlantic powers — the U.S. and NATO militarily and the U.S. and the EU economically — are not ready to abdicate their role in global affairs. The logical — and inexpensive — way to continue to exert influence in the Pacific and the Indian Oceans is through allies justifying their selection as a natural alliance among “democracies” with a common allegiance to human rights, anti-terrorism and nuclear non-proliferation (giving the Obama slogan of “a nuclear weapon free world” a rest).

    The side benefits are to break Non-aligned and G77 solidarity in the UN and other forums like the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round of negotiations and the upcoming Climate Change talks in Cancun isolating China at the same time. Possible irritants in the newly forged U.S.-EU-Japan-India axis will continue to be India’s stance regarding Iran’s nuclear programme, China’s human rights record and Myanmar or Burma’s military junta. The adroit management of this will be a small price to pay rather than giving the Republicans the satisfaction of shredding Obama’s foreign policy as they have done with his domestic policies.

  • Of Hawks and Drones

    A red-tailed hawk soars and circles
    above the tall trees and silent fields
    looking down for movement, for prey.
    Gray clouds press against nearby mountains.
    From another direction the sun lights up
    the fields and mountainside.

    Somewhere in an innocuous, but not innocent,
    place in the United States of America,
    a young military technician stares intently
    at a computer screen.  He operates
    the remote control of a predator drone flying
    softly above houses in a far away country,
    namely Pakistan, but it could be any country
    on the planet.  

    The predator drone is armed with precision missiles
    that the young technician from the land of the free
    releases near the target he has been given.  People die.
    They are not always the right people.  Sometimes
    they are children.  Sometimes the information
    is wrong, the coordinates are mistaken. 

    The red-tailed hawk glides on currents of thin air,
    then dives toward earth, talons at the ready.

  • Another World Is Possible

    Dorothy and I are pleased and delighted to be here for this occasion. And on behalf of our families and ancestral families, on behalf of our sons and grandchildren, on behalf of the struggle of people everywhere for that other world that is possible, that other society that is possible, we accept with deep appreciation this award from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. I am profoundly moved this evening for this opportunity, and in so many different ways you have encouraged my own spirit. The things that we’ve heard this evening are just wonderful, marvelous. The way in which this Foundation and David Krieger and the Board have sought to push the matter of peace, the end of war, the end of nuclear weapons, is for me a great shot of encouragement and adrenaline to keep on keeping on.

    I have friends in this audience and I’m delighted to see them, as well. To walk in and see Stanley Sheinbaum here, one of my own personal heroes, a man with whom I’ve been related in a great variety of ways over the last 35 or 40 years, and who remains a stalwart figure in the tradition of what Joshua Heschel spoke of as God’s pathos, God’s passion. He is a wonderful illustration of that.

    I looked over the invitation for this evening fairly carefully at home for several days. I noticed you have Glenn Paige and me joining a distinguished group of people, and I want to express my own humility to be on this list of people.  I appreciate all that Glenn Paige has done, he belongs in that category, and his “nonkilling” notion, politics, are a tremendous idea, an idea whose time has come, and I want to especially applaud that we can have another kind of society.

    I decided, in fact, I wanted to address quite briefly from the perspective of one on your Advisory Council, Harrison Ford, who is, in addition to his fame and celebrity and acting, an environmentalist who has worked in many different parts of the world as well as in the United States. This past January, I was taking a trip somewhere on Southwest Airlines.  As I often do, I picked up their monthly magazine called The Spirit, and in that issue, January’s issue, there was this conversation between Bill Ford, of the Ford Company, and Harrison Ford—a conversation around the issues of the environmental movement and struggle. They have both participated in this cause around the world and know each other from that participation. It’s a very interesting piece, but towards the end of the piece, Harrison Ford, after talking with Bill Ford about environmental issues and the movement and the struggle, said something like this, and I’m not going to quote it exactly, but I’m going to give you the gist of what he said. He said what he sees now, after the years he’s given to it, is the failure of the environmental movement. He suggested something that I think is a point of strategy that has interested me ever since.  He said the movement has failed because we have worked over the years from issue to issue and from species to species. That made a vivid picture in my mind, as I followed that movement across these decades. Then he said, concluding his critique of his own work and of a great movement, that what we need is a movement like the civil rights movement of a few years ago. So that’s going to frame the structure of what I’m going to say this evening.

    In many ways, we who are the advocates of peace, we who want peace, have obviously failed in our own country and in the world. One could say this about the civil rights movement. One could say this about the anti-poverty movement. One could say this about the living-wage movement of which I’ve been a part for some now 25 years. I suspect many of the critical issues that you and I have worked for, and believe in, and imagine, have over the last 30 years, maybe more, simply not taken off in the mind of the people, the mind of the nation. We know our work remains in many different ways and forms. We can’t afford to have the peace movement fail. And in the first instance, across these last 30 years, we 300 million, plus a few, of this land are now participants in this nation that—as David has said here, which I have rarely heard anyone say—because of its military power and its financial power, has become, as Martin King said, the genitor of violence around the world.  I’ve said it like this in the past:  We in the United States have intentionally or unintentionally become the number one enemy of peace and justice in the world today.  We’ve become the number one military, bar none, today or in the past, with 800 military installations in 130 countries, with naval fleets and with air fleets, and with military people on the ground, with massive technology, even with nuclear weapons for our use.

    The nation has become a military security nation in many different ways, whether we have liked it or not, or whether we ourselves are or have been victims of it. But a major way in which we’ve failed is that we’re in a society now where there’s tremendous confusion and animosity, a lack of civil conversation and discussion, the unwillingness to put on the table the issues that we feel deeply about and the issues that are hurting and paining millions of our fellow citizens around the country. In all complexions and in all parts of the country, our own visions for our own land are being smashed steadily by a media that talks and talks and talks and talks, but very rarely about real human beings, very rarely about our country, very rarely about this magnificent 300 million people that we represent.  On almost every issue in the present electoral scheme, there is little common sense being put on the table. There is very little wisdom from our own past as a nation, and the wisdom of the human race is nowhere to be found to any extent in most of the elections and the campaigns. And I’m sure there are a few instances where that’s not the case, but in most of the ones we hear about and read about, that wisdom from our own ancestry of the human race is simply not there.

    Take this matter of nuclear weapons. This issue is a very personal issue with me. In August 1945, I was preparing for my senior year in high school in Massillon, Ohio, when the bomb was dropped on the 6th on Hiroshima, and then on Nagasaki on August 9th.  For quite a number of years now I’ve tried to observe those two days in some ways of contemplation and peace. Within a few days after the 9th of August, the National Forensic League of the country sent out urgent letters to high schools across the country, saying the topic that had been designated for 1945-46 had been changed. It would now be “Does the atomic bomb make mass armies obsolete?”

    So for the next nine months, my colleagues and I at Washington High School studied and explored and read about this question about which there was very little written. It was three months after that topic was chosen that the director of the Manhattan Project wrote a book called The Manhattan Project. No one knew very much about this at all. So, I learned in my reading that the soldiers of World War II in 1945 went into Japan to occupy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were told that the radiation was beneath the levels that would affect them. And when they began to report their sickness, they were told that whatever it was was not connected to the bomb. It took 30 years before the Army and the Navy and the U.S. Government admitted that the impact of those weapons upon those men had indeed produced the things the men and their wives and their families were reporting across the decades.

    The weapons must be abolished. Not just nuclear weapons, but also every form of mass destruction weapons must be abolished.

    I ask us the question, “What kind of people are we that we do not rise up with indignation?” That our own land, in spite of the lofty ideals and history that is extraordinary, will be using its energy and resources, as it has been said already this evening, for trying to get the human race to commit suicide, trying to reduce and discontinue this extraordinary species of life that you and I and billions of others represent.

    I want to go to the second point here, namely, that we have not persuaded the American people that there is a quality of life that they’re missing, and that the leadership of many different governmental levels is refusing to allow us to have or to reach.

    And that comes then to the concluding point that I wanted to make, namely, that in all the good work we are doing, somehow, we must help to ignite the non-violent struggle in the 21st century in our country, in the United States, that will help us on the one side not only to continue to dismantle those elements of our history and of our life today that we know are wrong, unjustified, impractical. At the same moment then, we lift up the highest values that we can achieve, namely equality, liberty and justice for every boy and every man and every girl and every woman in every part of our land, access to life, access to the opportunity for life, access to make themselves what God decrees their life is about, access to the resources that we have in the 21st century that can make life, human life, beyond our imagination, even maybe beyond the graphs of past history and the like.

    For a non-violent struggle, what we do must sow the seeds. Nonkilling is critically important. I like Professor Paige’s use of the words “a science of non-killing.”  I love it.

    May I suggest to you the things about Gandhi and non-violence that are critical? Because Gandhi again and again insisted, “I am experimenting with, I am offering the evidence and the facts and the history of, a science of non-violence that allows human beings to create the sort of nation, and world, and community that they want. Non-violence is a science of social change. I will not say much beyond that, but I do want to insist upon this, something that Glenn has said, and also that David has said, namely:  “Why is it that we are not at the place where we’d hope to be in this 21st century, where many of our ancestors wished us to be?”  Part of the reality is that we have deceived ourselves, not only with these myths of violence and killing and nuclear deterrence.  But most of all, we think that human life allows us to take a short cut, that we can create good out of wrong or evil, that we can create human affections that will hold us together in unity out of thinking and practicing the very opposite of human affections, namely hatred and despising or, very specifically, in some of our own systems, out of racism, sexism, violence, and economic greed, all of which denigrate human beings of infinite worth in the journey of life.

    There’s a beautiful story, in the 19th chapter of the Book of Luke in the Christian Bible, of Jesus looking down across Jerusalem and weeping and saying, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, would that even today you knew the things that make for peace, but they are hidden from your eyes.” We today in our country, our leadership, our Pentagon, and the rest, do not know the things that make for peace. As A.J. Muste said at one point, “Peace is the way to peace,” the things that make for peace. We have great need for socio-political and economic change in the United States. Somehow we must persuade ourselves that the arena of social change, the arena of hope for the nations, is not in the troubled places around the world where we have our hands and our resources, but in Santa Barbara, in Chicago, in Waycross, Georgia, in Florida—here in our own country. The movement of which I was a part—which represents for me, indeed, an exhilarating time of life—did make the impact because King and Rosa Parks and Fanny Lou Hamer, and a whole host of people whose names are long forgotten, were convinced, like Gandhi, that, in a very real way, you cannot resist indignities in life with new indignities. Gandhi in South Africa invented the term “non-violence” for the first time, around 1906 or 1908. The reason he invented this was because he was organizing Muslims and Hindus for resisting the very racist and colonialist sort of laws that were being imposed upon his fellow countrymen in South Africa. He said, after great conversations and great contemplation, “I cannot resist this; I cannot move to change this by imitating it; I cannot challenge the government with the government’s theory and the government’s practice, that will only compound our difficulty.” It was there in that cauldron that he coined the term “non-violence” not as a negative, but as he says in his own writings, a positive. That love, the paramount force of life and of the universe, must be the context by which we resist the wrong that we feel and know. The reason that the Movement had the energy it did in those days was because we sought to insist that what we human beings are about anyway are not the things that are the agenda of the powers.  They were about our families, sustaining love, encouraging life, healing love. We’re about the business of organizing our neighborhoods, our congregations, our schools, hoping to nurture life, not destroy it. The agenda of others who want power and domination are not where we see ourselves, and Gandhi insisted that the vast multitude of people of India and around the world were of the same mind.

    Harrison Ford was right. The movement for which in part you celebrate my life and work this evening was a 20-year period of intensive strategizing and action and work of civil disobedience and, yes, of martyrdom for some, of injury for others; a 20-year period when, in each of those years from 1953-1973, there were literally thousands of actions across the country to make a difference, in which the people, millions of us, all around the country, worked on the new agenda, such as “Head Start,” worked in a legislative way while people were in jail and marching. We worked to pull the signs down in California, as well as in Tennessee. And we did this out of a sense that we could have another kind of society, somehow in our time and in our day.

    I accept this award with a personal sense that I will continue to work on it. Somehow in our day we must convince ourselves we can have another world, we can have another nation. There is a more powerful vision that cannot only hold us in a way, but will allow us in the United States to find the burst of freedom and equality and liberty that will shock our imaginations, and will help us to see that we can be and will be the people history designates us to be in the 21st century.

    Thank you very much.

  • 2010 Evening for Peace

    The lives of our two honorees, like the lives of so many other individuals in this country and throughout the world, have been deeply affected by war.  

    Reverend James Lawson was a conscientious objector during the Korean War, for which he spent time in prison.  It helped mold his life as a leader in peace and nonviolence, and then as a mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr.

    Professor Glenn Paige served as an enlisted man and officer in the Korean War and then wrote a book justifying the war.  Later, he would criticize his own book and conclude there was no justification for killing in that war or any war.  

    For both men, the experience of war changed the course of their lives and put them on the path of peace.  

    One of the great myths of our time is that war creates peace.  It does not.  War breeds war, laying the groundwork for future wars.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. observed, “Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows….  We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.”  As our 2007 honorees – Peter, Paul and Mary – asked in song, “When will we ever learn?”  

    War kills not only with bullets and bombs.  It also kills indirectly by robbing the world’s people of the resources necessary for survival.  As President Eisenhower emphasized in his Farewell Address, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

    The world is spending more than $1.5 trillion annually on war and its preparation.  While it does so, the United Nations struggles to raise the needed resources to meet its eight Millennium Development Goals: to eradicate poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and build a global partnership for development.

    For only five to 10 percent of global military expenditures annually for the next five years, the world could reach the markers that have been set for these Millennium Development Goals by the year 2015.  Instead, we choose to use our scientific and financial resources to build and deploy ever more powerful weapons.  It is a soul-deadening exercise.

    War and violence are the enemies of humanity.  There is a better way forward as shown in the lives of our honorees, based on nonviolence and nonkilling.  

    At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we believe that nuclear weapons have made peace an imperative of the Nuclear Age.  We must eliminate these weapons, which threaten civilization and the human future, and we must also eliminate war.  That is the work of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and we need all of you to join with us to achieve our goals.

    Let me give you a few relevant statistics about the Foundation.  Our membership is over 37,000 people.  More than 30,000 individuals participate in our Action Alert Network, sending messages to elected representatives. 

    Our Peace Leadership Program Director, Paul Chappell, has given over 100 talks or workshops in the past year to high schools, universities, churches, activist organizations, and veterans groups throughout the country.  There are over 2,100 people now in our Peace Leadership Program. 

    Some 700,000 people have visited our WagingPeace.org and NuclearFiles.org websites in the past year.   Our Sunflower e-newsletter is distributed to tens of thousands of people worldwide. 

    We are intent upon breaking down the walls of ignorance, apathy and complacency that surround issues of nuclear weapons and war, and replacing them with new and abundant energy and commitment directed toward peace and human survival.  This is the responsibility to future generations demanded of those of us alive on our planet today.

    With six hard-working and talented staff members and dozens of volunteers, including our dedicated Board, our distinguished Advisors and Associates and our enthusiastic and competent college interns, we are committed to building a safer and saner world.  We educate and advocate to abolish nuclear weapons, strengthen international law, and empower new generations of peace leaders.

    Let me conclude with three short quotations from three giants of the 20th century.

    Albert Camus, an existential philosopher and Nobel Laureate in Literature, said, “I have always held that, if he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward. And henceforth, the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions.”

    Albert Einstein, the great scientist and humanist who changed our understanding of the universe, said, “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”

    Eleanor Roosevelt, who was the driving force behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, said, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”

    It is in the creative tension between words and actions that we must seek to fulfill our dreams.  May we never lose hold of the dream of peace.  May we choose hope and find a way to change the world.  May we each do our part to pass the world on intact to future generations.

  • The Nonkilling Idea Can Lead

    You will note that I have greeted you with a gesture of nonkilling respect for you and for all life.  It comes from the non-violent Jain tradition of India.  Since air, like earth and water, is essential for life, Jains avoid conventional clapping as doing violence to life.  I invite you to try it out and add it to your repertoire of nonviolent actions.  You will note that it produces an electric group atmosphere of respect for life.

    It is a great honor for me and my wife Glenda, along with co-director Greg Bourne and global monitor Tom Fee of the Center for Global Nonkilling, to be with Rev. and Mrs. Lawson, all of you, and with leaders of the pioneering Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.  Among them I cherish friendships with Board Chair Professor Richard Falk, respected colleague from Princeton days, inspiring poet Dr. David Krieger, who completed his peaceful doctoral program at the University of Hawai‘i one year after I arrived from Princeton as a war-fighting “hawk” in 1967, and former Army Capt. Paul Chappell who contributed by Skype to the 2nd Global Nonkilling Leadership Academy program in Honolulu completed just two weeks ago.

    Gandhi rightly said, “My life is my message.”  In this case, however, the message is not the life, but a question.  The question is:  “Is a nonkilling society possible?”  Is it possible for us humans to stop killing each other, from the family to the global humanity?

    The question is unusual, for one thing because the word “nonkilling” is not yet in a standard English dictionary.

    Let’s take a vote.  What do you think right now?  We might change our minds tomorrow.  How many say “No”?  How many say “Yes”?  How many say “Yes” and “No”?  How many say “I don’t know”?  How many abstain?  

    Whatever you now think—“Yes,”  “No,” or “Other”—you are invited to explore grounds for confidently answering “Yes.”  They are set forth in the book Nonkilling Global Political Science.  First published in 2002, it has been translated into 22 languages, with 13 more in progress, including into Arabic, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Urdu.  Chinese and Japanese are forthcoming.  There are grassroots teaching versions in Haitian Creole, in Ogoni and Ijaw of the Niger Delta, and Kiswahili of Great Lakes Africa (DR Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda).  

    There are many grounds for confidence that we can stop killing each other.  Most humans have never killed anyone.  Otherwise humanity long ago would have spiraled into extinction.  Ninety-five countries have completely abolished the death penalty.  Twenty-seven countries have no armies.  Forty-seven countries accept conscientious objection to military service.  Spiritual traditions and humanist philosophies proscribe killing.  Science promises new understanding of causes and prevention of killing.  Components for nonkilling societies already have been demonstrated somewhere in human experience.  If creatively combined and adapted in any single place, nonkilling societies can be approximated even now anywhere.  In short, knowledge exists to assist crossing the threshold of lethal pessimism to confidently envision a nonkilling global human future.

    Since ideas can lead, the Distinguished Leadership Award in this case needs to be directed not to a person but to leadership by an idea—the idea that a killing-free world is possible.

    The Nonkilling Leadership Story is a remarkable one.

    It starts with Spirit.  “No More Killing!”

    Spirit becomes a Question.  “Is a Nonkilling Society Possible?”

    The Question becomes an Answer.  “Yes!”

    Answer becomes an Organization: “Center for Global Nonkilling,” focused upon advancing research, education, training, putting knowledge into action, and nurturing global nonkilling leaders.

    The Organization affirms the Global Nonkilling Spirit which is invoked in the following way:

    AFFIRMATION OF THE GLOBAL NONKILLING SPIRIT

    In remembrance of all who have been killed
    Of all the killers
    Of all who have not killed and
    Of all who worked to end killing

    Guided by the Global Nonkilling Spirit
    Taught by faiths and found within
    We pledge ourselves and call upon all
    To work toward the measurable goal
    Of a killing-free world
    With infinite creativity in reverence for life.

    The Spirit guides the Mission:   “To promote change toward the measurable goal of a killing-free world, by means of infinite human creativity with reverence for life.”

    Miracles begin to happen, such as:

    •    Humanity United, founded by Pamela Omidyar, steps forth in 2008 with strategic planning and capacity-building support for the unique Center for Global Nonkilling in 2009 and 2010 to carry forward the vision and accomplishments of its predecessor Center for Global Nonviolence, founded in 1994.  The vision seeks to evoke the spiritual, scientific, skill, and artistic creativity of nonkilling humankind.

    •    The thesis of Nonkilling Global Political Science escapes the bounds of political science and begins to question the killing-accepting assumptions of other academic disciplines.

    •    In 2009 young Joám Evans Pim in Spain edits and publishes Toward a Nonkilling Paradigm, engaging 22 authors in 15 disciplines, including chapters on nonkilling history, nonkilling mathematics, and nonkilling engineering.

    •    In addition, Joám mobilizes 375 scholars in 200 universities in 50 countries in 20 nonkilling research committees.  He creates a series of books by multiple authors published or forthcoming, including Nonkilling Societies, Nonkilling History, Nonkilling Engineering, Nonkilling Psychology, and Nonkilling Korea:  Six Culture Explorations.  Planned are volumes on Nonkilling Economics, Futures, Geography, Linguistics and Spiritual Traditions.

    •    Spontaneously, organizations and movements begin to arise to carry the nonkilling idea into research, education and action.  They arise in Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Haiti, India, the Philippines and Great Lakes Africa.  A little nonkilling school for 230 children aged 5-6 and 7-8 with 5 teachers arises in the village of Kazimia on the banks of Lake Tanganyika in the DR Congo.  A pioneering nonkilling anthropology course is created by Professor Leslie Sponsel at the University of Hawai‘i.

    •    On nurturing leadership, in 2009 and 2010, the first two Global Nonkilling Leadership Academies are held to bring young women and men together for two weeks to share experiences and to make plans for nonkilling change in their societies. They review lessons from leaders like Queen Lili‘uo‘kalani, Gandhi, King, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Ron Mallone, Petra Kelly and Governor Guillermo Gaviria of Colombia, among others.

    •    Participants have come from Bangladesh, Colombia, Germany, Haiti, Hawai‘i, Ireland, India, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Liberia, Palestine, Philippines, Thailand, Trinidad, and Western Sahara.

    Going forward:

    •    The Center for Global Nonkilling becomes a partner of the WHO Violence Prevention Alliance in its work to eliminate human violence (suicide, homicide, and collective violence) as a “preventable disease.”

    •    Introduced by Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire, the Center becomes a Friend of the Nobel Peace Laureates’ World Summits and contributes to Principle 13 of its Charter for a World without Violence:  “Everyone has the right not to be killed and the responsibility not to kill others.”

    What does the nonkilling idea mean for support for the work of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and other great organizations that celebrate life while working for a world free of war and other threats to human survival and well-being?  It simply means adding nonkilling confidence to inspired work for nuclear disarmament and security, economic well-being, freedom and human rights, protection of the biosphere, and every other issue requiring universal problem-solving cooperation.

    The nonkilling idea seeks a killing-free world achieved by global diffusion of a strong nonkilling ethic combined with global citizen understanding of ways and means to bring it about.  It is a process in which each human being who shares the air and precious gift of life on earth now and in the future becomes a center for global nonkilling.

    And so, I share with you a nonkilling gesture, a question: “Is a nonkilling society possible?,” and an answer: “Yes!,” and offer some evidence that the ancient nonkilling idea is beginning to lead anew in the 21st century. More can be found on the website of the Center for Global Nonkilling (www.nonkilling.org).

    To all of you, Glenda and I bring warmest Aloha from Hawai‘i.

  • 2010 United Nations Day Keynote Address

    Thank you to the San Francisco Chapter of the United Nations Association for organizing this celebration of the 65th anniversary of the United Nations and for bringing together such an impressive group of leaders for this event.  Thank you also to Soka Gakkai International for hosting this event in your Ikeda Auditorium.  

    I want to draw attention to the beauty of the flower arrangements on the dais.  They are filled with sunflowers, and sunflowers are the universal symbol of a world without nuclear weapons.  Whenever you see a sunflower, I hope you will think of the need to work for a world free of nuclear weapons.  Sunflowers are beautiful, natural and nutritious.  They turn toward the sun.  They stand in stark contrast to the manmade missiles that threaten death and destruction on a massive scale.  Sunflowers remind us of the importance of preserving the natural beauty of our planet and ending the manmade threats of massive annihilation with which we currently live.

    My subject today is nuclear disarmament.  The United Nations Charter was signed on June 23, 1945.  The first nuclear weapon was tested successfully just over three weeks later on July 16, 1945.  The United Nations sought to save the world from the “scourge of war,” among other high ideals.  Nuclear weapons threatened to destroy the world.

    The subject of nuclear weapons is one that many people, perhaps most, understandably would like to put out of their minds.  Assuring a human future demands that we resist that temptation.

    We know that a single nuclear weapon can destroy a city and a few nuclear weapons can destroy a country.   Scientists also tell us that an exchange of 100 Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons on cities, such as could occur between India and Pakistan, could result in a billion fatalities, due to blockage of sunlight and crop failures leading to mass starvation, in addition to the blast, fire and radiation.  A full scale nuclear war could destroy the human species and most complex forms of life on Earth.  

    Given such high stakes, why do we tolerate nuclear weapons?  I believe that there are two major reasons.  First, we have been misled to believe that nuclear weapons actually protect their possessors.  They do not.  These weapons can be used to threaten retaliation, to retaliate or to attack preventively in a first-strike, but they cannot protect.  

    Second, we have grown far too complacent about these devices of mass annihilation over the period of 65 years since their last use in warfare.  But the odds of catastrophe are too high for complacency.  According to Stanford Professor Emeritus Martin Hellman, an expert in risk analysis, a child born today has at least a ten percent chance over the course of his or her expected lifetime of dying in a nuclear attack and possibly as high as a fifty percent chance.  These are clearly unacceptable odds.

    Any use of nuclear weapons would be a crime against humanity.  These weapons cannot discriminate between soldiers and civilians, and the unnecessary suffering they cause is virtually boundless and can continue through generations.  The International Court of Justice, in its 1996 landmark Advisory Opinion on the illegality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons, described the unique characteristics of nuclear weapons as “their capacity to cause untold human suffering, and their ability to cause damage to generations to come.”  The Court wrote: “The destructive power of nuclear weapons cannot be contained in either space or time.  They have the potential to destroy all civilization and the entire ecosystem of the planet.”

    The use, even the threat of use, of nuclear weapons is morally abhorrent.  The possession of nuclear weapons should be taboo.  No country has the right to possess weapons that could destroy our species and much of life.  They threaten our true inalienable rights – as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – to life, liberty and security of person.  Nuclear weapons are the negation of these rights.  They are an extreme manifestation of fear and militarism, reflecting the most destructive elements of the human spirit.

    The generations who are alive today on the planet are challenged by the imperative to end the nuclear weapons era and strengthen our common efforts for achieving the global good as reflected in the eight Millennium Development Goals.  This will require leadership.  At present, this leadership has resided primarily with the United Nations and with civil society organizations.  The UN and its supporting civil society organizations have provided vision and direction for social responsibility on disarmament, demilitarization and improving the lives of the world’s people.  

    The key to achieving a world without nuclear weapons lies in a Nuclear Weapons Convention, a treaty for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.  But agreement on such a treaty will require a far greater commitment by the governments of the world, including the nine nuclear weapon states.  The United States, as the most powerful of these governments, will need to be pushed from below by its citizens.  Each of us needs to embrace this issue, along with whatever other issues move us to action.  It is an issue on which the future of humanity and life rest.  

    I’d like to share with you a reflection from my new book, God’s Tears, Reflections on the Atomic Bombs Dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It is called, “The Final Period?”

    The Final Period?

    “Scientists tell us that the universe was created with a “Big Bang” some 15 billion years ago.  To represent this enormous stretch of time, we can imagine a 15,000 page book.  It would be a very large and heavy book, some 50 times larger than a normal book.  In this book, each page would represent one million years in the history of the universe.  If there were 1,000 words on each page, each word would represent 1,000 years.  

    “Most of the book would be about the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang.  Our solar system would not occur in this history of the universe until page 10,500.  It would take another 500 pages until the first primitive forms of life occurred on Earth some four billion years ago.  The slow evolution of life would occupy the book nearly to its end.  It would not be until page 14,997 that human-like creatures would appear on the planet, and it would not be until just ten words from the end of page 15,000 that human civilization would make its appearance.  

    “The Nuclear Age, which began in 1945, would be represented by the final period, the punctuation mark on the last page of the 15,000 page book.  This small mark at the end of the volume indicates where we are today: inheritors of a 15 billion year history with the capacity to destroy ourselves and most other forms of life with our technological achievements.  It is up to us to assure that the page is turned, and that we move safely into the future, free from the threat that nuclear weapons pose to humanity and all forms of life.”

    Let me conclude with these thoughts: As the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have warned us over and over, “Nuclear weapons and human beings cannot coexist.”  We must choose, and we are fortunate that we still have a choice.  In another great war, such as World War II, the war that gave birth to both nuclear weapons and the United Nations, that choice could be foreclosed.  Or, it could be foreclosed in less dramatic ways, by a nuclear accident or nuclear terrorism.  

    Now, today, we have the opportunity to turn the page of that great book that documents the development of our universe, the evolution of life and the history of humankind.  Let us seize that opportunity with all our hearts and all our capacities by working to abolish nuclear weapons, strengthen the United Nations and international law, and put the missing Millennium Development Goal, disarmament, to work in achieving the elimination of poverty and hunger, and the promotion of education, health care, opportunity and hope for all of the world’s people.

  • Consequences of Nuclear Weapons

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  • Shining a Light on Peace Leadership

    At the Foundation’s 27th Annual Evening for Peace on October 29, 2010, we will honor two outstanding individuals who have made significant contributions to building a more peaceful world.  

    Reverend James Lawson, a proponent of Gandhian nonviolence, was a mentor in nonviolence to Martin Luther King, Jr.  When Reverend Lawson speaks of nonviolence, he speaks authoritatively of his experience in one of the most important nonviolent movements of the 20th century, the U.S. civil rights movement.   

    Professor Glenn Paige is the author of Nonkilling Global Political Science and founder of the Center for Global Nonkilling.  He is pioneering in working for a nonkilling world, seeking to make the killing of other human beings a taboo.  

    The lives of our two honorees, like the lives of so many other individuals, have been affected by war.  Reverend Lawson was a conscientious objector during the Korean War, for which he spent time in prison.  Professor Paige served as an enlisted man and officer in the Korean War and then wrote a book justifying the war.  Later, he would criticize his own book and conclude there was neither justification for killing in that war nor any war.  For both men, the experience of war changed the course of their lives and put them on the path of peace.  

    War not only kills with bullets and bombs.  It also kills indirectly by robbing the world’s people of the resources for survival.  As President Eisenhower emphasized in his Farewell Address, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

    The world is spending more than $1.5 trillion annually on war and its preparation.  While it does so, the United Nations struggles to raise the resources to meet its Millennium Development Goals to eradicate poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and build a global partnership for development.

    War and violence are the enemies of humanity.  There is a better way forward as shown in the lives of our honorees, nonviolence and nonkilling.  Nuclear weapons have made peace an imperative of the Nuclear Age.  We must eliminate these weapons, which threaten civilization and the human future, and we must also eliminate war.  That is the work of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.  The support of individuals like you allows us to work each day for a more peaceful and decent world, free of nuclear threat.

  • Un día brillante para Chile y el mundo

    Click here for the English version.


    En estos tiempos difíciles que estamos viviendo, tan llenos de deprimentes malas noticias en lo económico, político y el medio ambiente, el rescate exitoso de los mineros en Chile es un soplo de aire fresco.


    Al sobrevivir en forma increíble 69 días, atrapados a más de 600 metros bajo tierra, estos valientes hombres han hecho historia al salir con vida en el rescate a mayor profundidad que jamás se haya hecho. Los que muchos consideran esto como un milagro también deben tomar en cuenta el uso beneficioso de la tecnología moderna, que ha permitido la comunicación, así como proporcionarles el vital oxígeno, alimentos y agua.


    Algo muy importante en la búsqueda de la paz y el entendimiento humano es evidente en cómo Chile ha manejado la crisis. En otros desastres naturales, algunos países, en lugar de aceptar o pedir ayuda exterior, se aferran a viejos odios, a orgullos nacionalistas, a diferencias políticas y divisiones religiosas evitando que  dicha cooperación se lleve a cabo.


    En Chile, independientemente de ideologías políticas o religiosas, se ha aceptado sin reservas la ayuda de muchas naciones. La asistencia técnica y el asesoramiento llegó en abundancia con los resultados positivos que todos vemos.


    El presidente de Chile, Sebastián Piñera, resumió este logro, diciendo que la operación “no tiene paralelo en la historia humana.”


    Esperamos que este ejemplo positivo de cooperación y comprensión nos ayudará a reconsiderar que somos un solo planeta, un solo hogar, un solo pueblo. Hay soluciones a los problemas que enfrentamos, aún el terrible peligro de la aniquilación por las armas nucleares. Estas soluciones se basan principalmente en el amor a la paz, el medio ambiente y la humanidad.


    Saludamos a los hermanos chilenos, que por fin se han  reunido con su familia y amigos, y a todos aquellos que han contribuido a los resultados positivos que el mundo celebra con alegría.

  • A Bright Day for Chile and the World

    Vaya aquí para la versión española.

    In these troubled times we are living, so filled with depressing economical, political and environmental bad news, the successful rescue of the miners in Chile is a breath of fresh air.

    Surviving a remarkable record of 69 days, trapped at more than 2000 feet deep underground, these brave men have excelled in breaking any record, surfacing alive from the deepest rescue ever made.  What many see as a miracle, must also consider the beneficial use of the modern technology that has allowed communication as well as providing them with vital oxygen, food and water.

    Something very important in the quest for peace and human understanding is evident in how Chile has managed this crisis. In  other natural disasters, some countries, rather than accept or ask for outside help, hold on to old hatreds, nationalistic pride, political differences and religious divisions preventing such cooperation to be carried out.

    In Chile, the aid has poured in from many nations and in many forms. Regardless of political ideology or religions, technical and advisory assistance arrived in abundance with the positive results we see.

    The president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, summed up this achievement by saying that the operation “has no parallel in human history”

    Hopefully, this positive example of cooperation and understanding will help us reconsider that we are one planet, one world, one people. There are solutions to problems including the awful danger of annihilation by nuclear weapons.  These solutions are based primarily on the love of peace, the environment and humanity.

    We at NAPF  salute the Chilean brothers, finally reunited with family and friends and also, all those who have contributed to the positive outcome that the world celebrates joyfully.