Will Hiroshima return?
US President Trump says he wants to prevent a nuclear war by deploying smaller nuclear weapons.
His new, “modern” nuclear arms should have an explosive force similar to the ones used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. These have cost the lives of about half a million people to date. Even these days, up to 3,000 people in southern Japan die every year as a result of 1945. Will nuclear war really become less likely if Hiroshima returns? Isn’t it rather the other way round?
According to the new US nuclear arms strategy, a “small number” of nuclear warheads will be converted in such a way that they are “able to penetrate the enemy defense”. Besides, already existing cruise missiles equipped with conventional warheads shall also be able to carry atomic warheads in the future. The integration of conventional and nuclear warheads shall be reinforced. As Russia has already carried out this rearmament, the existing strategic nuclear arsenal of the USA is no longer sufficient, according to the US administration. The “cruise missiles” stored in Büchel in Rhineland-Palatinate shall also be “upgraded” atomically in order to be used in a “more targeted, destructive and flexible manner”. Planned mass murder!
With this strategy of eternal rearmament the USA has announced to take nuclear arms from the bunkers back to the battlefield. If cruise missiles can also be equipped with nuclear weapons, how should a potential enemy recognize that rockets arrive which are “only” conventionally equipped? For Heaven’s sake, Mr Trump, how should a nuclear war become less likely with this strategy? The US military budget is actually about eight times larger than the Russian one – so, who threatens whom?
This means playing with atomic hellfire – a nuclear war might become more likely. But what about a worldwide outcry against this renewed madness of an atomic arms race? With President Trump Cold War and the threat of a nuclear war are back. What we now need is a worldwide renaissance of the peace movement and a debate about the new war preparations. Only serious disarmament, not new and “smaller” nuclear bombs, does guarantee peace – a policy that Mikhail Gorbachev and President Reagan determined, and later implemented, in Reykjavik over 30 years ago. As many as 80% of the nuclear weapons of that time were destroyed and not “modernized”. So it works if it is politically desirable.
The ancient Roman principle “If you want peace, you have to prepare war” has become obsolete in the nuclear age at the latest . The only alternative means: “Whoever wants peace has to prepare peace”, that is disarm. Or should Hiroshima be everywhere?
The planned “modernization” of the nuclear arsenal is illegal, immoral, dangerous and contrary to the spirit of peace. We love life and not its annihilation. Nuclear rearmament is – implemented by whoever – mental illness. The militarization of foreign policy leads into the nuclear trap and thus to the possible extinction of the entire life on our planet. This is what Hiroshima and Nagasaki really teach us. A nuclear war would be the final war in the history of mankind, because nobody would be left to wage another one.
