nuclear disarmament – COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE

_{E. Martin “Marty” Schotz, M.D., Veteran Activist, U.S. Peace Movement}

Our friend Marty Schotz was interviewed August 18, 2022 by Abhishek G. Bhaya of the China Global Television Network, for which Bhaya is a “senior journalist and international affairs commentator.” Schotz lives in Western Massachusetts and is a peace activist and retired physician.

What follows is Schotz speaking uninterruptedly for a little over four minutes. A video presentation of the interview appears here, along with an accompanying article. The link for the article is here.

Prospects for World Peace

I don’t see China as a threat to the American people. As for the peace movement, part of its responsibility is to explain to people that these ideas that Russia and China are threats to us are untrue. We, the common people, are not being represented with this “us” that they are referring to. The ‘us” that is being represented are corporations and rich people, and not ordinary people.

All this talk of democracy, autocracy — it’s all a Cold War narrative, which is created to justify militarization. And there is no future for mankind in militarization. The only future for mankind is in disarmament and cooperation to deal with protecting the environment.

People speak of a “new cold war.” I don’t think old Cold War ever ended. I think it quieted down. And as long as Russia was not asserting itself internationally, things were quiet. But the institutions and all the foundations that were behind the Cold War never went away when the Soviet Union disappeared. They stayed.

Another problem area is the idea that war begins with weapons going off. That’s a mistake. The Cold War is part of the hot war. And when it comes to nuclear weapons, the last thing that will happen is nuclear weapons going off. We have to realize that what is going on is part of a war. Right now. And we have to oppose all of it.

So the minute Russia and China emerged as significant major powers, you then see Cold War institutions re-emerging. Former CIA analyst -turned-political activist Ray McGovern talks about what he calls the MICIMATT – the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-think tank-complex. That’s what we are dealing with. It’s enormous.

War is a process, and peace is a process, and actually these are two processes that are simultaneously competing with each other. This is critical.

Peace is a process of understanding and respecting the other, seeing what their concerns are, finding agreements of mutual benefit. That’s the peace process. And anything that is creating the image of enemies or demonizing other people or other leaders: that is part of war. That is war-making. Of course, it’s extremely dangerous in the present circumstances.

Therefore, what I advocate is that our representatives take a peaceful position and not get caught up in this. And you know I would hope that other powers would not be unnecessarily drawn into conflict and not react to the situation, and, as much as possible, not play into them, not play into the narrative that’s being structured by war forces and Cold War forces. They should keep on articulating what people’s real needs and interests are, because there is, for example, genuine concern in the United States amongst the population about what’s happening to the environment. That is a very significant issue.

If China and other countries in some way could communicate to the American people that they too have the same understanding, then there would be this common concern that from my point of view would be part of a peace process, which would be countering the war process.

_{E. Martin Schotz, is a retired physician, a Board member of Traprock Center for Peace & Justice, and a member of Massachusetts Peace Action.}

_{Abhishek G Bhaya is a senior journalist and international affairs commentator. The article reflects the author’s opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.}

_{The urgency of organizing against nuclear weaponry, much of it produced at the Livermore Labs in California, was one of the demands for peace at the annual Good Friday event, a virtual one this year. Above, Nagasaki, Japan, the last city to be destroyed by a nuclear bomb. The bomb was dropped by the U.S., the only country ever to drop a nuclear bomb on another country. | Yosuke Yamahata/UN}

LIVERMORE, Calif. – As nuclear disarmament, peace and justice advocates gathered virtually April 15 for the annual Good Friday Worship and Witness focusing on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, they posed a question: “This Tax Day – What Does the Lord Require of Us?”

Participants in the event organized by the Ecumenical Peace Institute/Clergy & Laity Concerned and Livermore Conversion Project linked the struggles to eliminate nuclear weapons and to win peace in the Ukraine and worldwide with the observance of Easter, Ramadan and Passover, and the significance of Tax Day.

Addressing the gathering from just outside the Lab’s West Gate, Marylia Kelley, executive director of the Livermore-based Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, warned that work to increase and expand nuclear weapons capabilities is “at an inflection point. We need to change course.”

Reminding the gathering that Livermore Lab is one of two U.S. national laboratories that design every nuclear warhead and bomb in the U.S. arsenal, she told the gathering, “On this Good Friday, we must confront that the Biden administration’s request for Fiscal 2023 is the largest military request in U.S. history.”

Of the $813 billion the administration is requesting, Kelley said, some $30 billion would go to the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons and related programs. Livermore Lab would receive about $2 billion, with some 80 percent going to fund nuclear weapons activities.

Heading the list are two new warheads, the W80-4 and the W87-1.

The lab is developing the W80-4 for what’s being called the Long Range Stand Off Weapon, which Kelley said is meant to enable pilots to stand off a target a thousand miles away and launch a precisely-guided, radar-evading nuclear weapon. “By any measure,” she said, “Livermore Lab’s new warhead for the Long Range Stand Off capability is an offensive, first-use weapon – and I mean both meanings of that word, offensive – it’s immoral!”

When development of the W80-4 is completed, Livermore Lab plans to modify it for use on a new sea-launched missile to arm small attack submarines that at present don’t carry nuclear weapons. Kelley warned that the resulting inability of a potential target to know whether an incoming missile is conventional or nuclear “might trigger nuclear annihilation for all of us.”

The other warhead, the W87-1, is the first completely new nuclear warhead the U.S. has developed since the end of the Cold War. Kelley said among a long list of new technologies being developed for the W87-1 are its new plutonium bomb cores, slated to cost billions of dollars.

Besides its work to halt development of nuclear weapons and abolish them completely, Tri-Valley CAREs also addresses the great environmental and health harms their development has caused in Livermore and surrounding areas.

Kelley said the lab has dribbled over a million curies of radiation into the air during its decades of operation, and the related Experimental Test Site 300 near the city of Tracy has also been polluted by the lab’s activities, and both are now on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund list of the country’s most polluted sites. Lab employees have experienced high levels of cancers and other illnesses from exposure to radiation on the job, and children in Livermore have experienced more cancers than similar children living elsewhere.

Kelley urged vigil participants to press the U.S. government to change its nuclear weapons policy, including joining the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, often called the Ban Treaty, “in whatever creative nonviolent ways you feel moved to do.”

In her homily, the Rev. Allison Tanner of Oakland’s Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church called the war in Ukraine “another manifestation of expanding empire that is seeking to destroy yet another people, community and culture and land.”

But, she said, “Glorification of war to keep our enemies at bay is not the answer. If we are committed to peace and justice, we must find humane ways to hold tyrants accountable, to hold warmongers accountable – ways to hold people accountable without destroying our own humanity, our environment, our world, in the process.”

Turning to April 15’s significance as Tax Day, Tanner said the day “calls on us to answer the question, where are we putting our money, our resources and our attention?” In 2018, she said, “nearly $20 billion of our tax dollars were used to fund nuclear weapons … We gather to say we cannot fully control what happens to our tax dollars but we can insist that it’s wrong. We can insist that we will give to God the deepest treasures that we have and we will follow the ways of peace and justice and love as best we are able.”

Tanner cited Roman Catholic Archbishop John Wester’s Pastoral Letter, in which he declares, “We can no longer deny or ignore the dangerous predicament that we have created for ourselves. We need to start talking about it with one another – all of us – and figure out concrete steps toward abolishing nuclear weapons and ending nuclear threats if we care about humanity.” She urged participants in the Worship and Witness to discuss the issue with family and friends, read and share the Pastoral Letter, express their support for the Ban Treaty, and divest from nuclear weapons activities.

Among the many who helped to lead the observance were Farha Andrabi Navaid, Mountain View/Palo Alto Musalla; musicians Betsy Rose and the Rev. Silvia Brandon-Perez; liturgical dancers Carla de Sola and Zara Anwar; Carl Anderson, Livermore Conversion Project; Janet Cordes Gibson, Ecumenical Peace Institute; Isabella Zizi of the Northern Cheyenne, Arikara and Muskogee Creek Nations and Mark Coplan, St. John’s Presbyterian Church, Berkeley.

_{Marilyn Bechtel writes for People’s World from the San Francisco Bay Area. She joined the PW staff in 1986 and currently participates as a volunteer.}

_{People’s World, April 20, 2022, https://www.peoplesworld.org/}