Nuclear weapons are weapons of terror

Worldwide, we currently spend more than 2,000 billion euros on armaments every year and at the same time let millions of people starve to death.

In a television interview, the peace politician Mikhail Gorbachev once asked me the question: “What could the world look like today if, after 1945, we had spent the many billions of dollars on overcoming poverty and on education instead of on armaments and preparing for war?”

Today, experts have the answer: one tenth of the global armaments money would be enough to overcome hunger in the world, and a second tenth would be enough to finally provide schooling for all the world’s children.

He who wants peace must prepare peace

For more than 2,000 years, the ancient Roman principle has been “He who wants peace must prepare war.” Result: 2,000 years of repeated wars, mass misery and millions of deaths. As long as wars are prepared, they are waged. We are all painfully experiencing this with the Ukraine war. President Putin has been preparing this war for a long time.

What would it be like if we were to live in the future according to the motto: “Whoever wants peace must prepare peace”? And how would that be done concretely and practically? Our aspiration must be to win peace in the future and no longer war.

A new policy begins with new thinking

Mikhail Gorbachev, a real politician with vision, successfully demonstrated this to us. The result of his policy has given us thirty years of peace in Europe.

Why? Because someone had the courage to go ahead and rely on realizable visions in an environment of hardliners, entire weapons systems could simply be scrapped for the first time in human history – scrapped in a controlled manner. Eighty percent of all nuclear weapons were scrapped about 30 years ago. On the 78th anniversary of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, this shows: : Nuclear disarmament is possible if it is really wanted.

What would be a nuclear war, I ask the expert Gorbachev in our joint book: “Listen to reason – War no more!: An Appeal from Mikhail Gorbachev to the world”. His answer: “A nuclear war would probably be the last war in the history of mankind, because after that there would be no people left to wage another war.”

Gorbachev in our book: “The West also made big mistakes after 1990 with NATO’s eastward expansion.” In 1990, NATO had 16 members, today 30, and more want to join. Of course, this was and is not a problem for us in the West, but we must also ask ourselves: What effect does our security policy have on the other side?

No question: Every nation has the right to join a military alliance. But in the nuclear age at the latest, smart politics must understand that security for us must also always be the security of the other side. For we would all be the victims of a nuclear war. Real security is common security.

A few months ago, President Biden said: “The world has never been so close to the nuclear abyss or to a third world war since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. That the West must defend Ukraine’s security interests, including militarily, is self-evident even for me as a pacifist and Christian. Anything else now would be a failure to help. We stand in solidarity with Ukraine.

But as a pacifist and a Christian, I would point out that 144 million Russians also have security interests. Mikhail Gorbachev has repeatedly insisted on this in many talks with me, but German politicians such as Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl have also pointed out Russia’s justified security interests, as has Henry Kissinger these days on the occasion of his 100th birthday.

We will probably only get the aggressor Putin to the negotiating table if the West and NATO are also willing to talk about our past mistakes. We, too, must learn to dismantle enemy images – just as Jesus suggested in his Sermon on the Mount. Former communist Gorbachev “Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is the survival program in the nuclear age.” When will we finally begin to understand the power of the Sermon on the Mount? That would mean. That we too cannot overcome our own fears by making the other side more and more afraid. This policy will one day lead to total disaster.

Only when we understand our own shadow can we learn to win peace instead of wars. Whoever dismisses “love of the enemy” as naive, please think of the consequences of hatred of the enemy.

In our city of Baden-Baden 123 nations live together peacefully, In this city De Gaulle and Adenauer decided after 1945 the end of the mutual slaughter between Germans and French and laid the foundation for the German-French friendship and for the peaceful European Union. In this city it was proved that peace is always possible. Never has a country of the EU waged war against another country of the EU. For this, the EU rightly received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012. War is not a judgment of God, war is not a natural event, war is always waged by us humans. So humans can always end wars.

The first and most important step towards a safer world is the abolition of all nuclear weapons.

Source

Franz Alt 2023 | Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)