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From Joan Rivers to Vanunu and Iran by way of WMD

By Eileen Fleming

Last Wednesday Joan Rivers was asked by the celebrity website Splash News Online about Israel’s Operation Protective Edge and replied, “When you declare war, you declare war. They started it. We now don’t count who’s dead. You’re dead. You deserve to be dead. You started it. You started it. Don’t you dare make me feel sad about that” and went on to compare Israel’s operations against Gaza to America’s atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 69 years ago.

In 1995, from his windowless tomb sized prison cell in Ashkelon Prison, Israel’s Nuclear Whistle Blower Mordechai Vanunu wrote:

A radioactive cloud consumed rubbed out Hiroshima… U.S. revenge for Pearl Harbour, Hiroshima…Hollywood doesn’t know you – you are not a Jewish Holocaust.

Since August 7, over 9,300 replies have been posted to Joan Rivers Facebook page comment:

…What I said and stand behind is, war is hell and unfortunately civilians are victims of political conflicts. We, The United States, certainly know this as 69 years later we still feel the guilt of Hiroshima and Nagasaki…Along with every other sane person in this world, I am praying for peace…

“Praying for peace without action is like praying to win the lottery and never buying a ticket. But unless we work for peace, saying ‘peace, peace, peace,’ means nothing. If we want peace, we must work for justice.”- Dr. Khaled Diab

Also last Wednesday, Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui issued The Hiroshima Peace Declaration commemorating August 6, 1945

From infants to the elderly, tens of thousands of innocent civilians lose their lives in a single day…

Approximately 6,000 young boys and girls died removing buildings for fire lanes. One who was a 12-year-old junior high student at the time says, ‘Even now, I carry the scars of war and that atomic bombing on my body and in my heart. Nearly all my classmates were killed instantly. My heart is tortured by guilt when I think how badly they wanted to live and that I was the only one who did.’

People who rarely talked about the past because of their ghastly experiences are now, in old age, starting to open up.

‘I want people to know the true cruelty of war,’ says an A-bomb orphan. He tells of children like himself living in a city of ashes, sleeping under bridges, in the corners of burned-out buildings, in bomb shelters, having nothing more than the clothes on their backs, stealing and fighting to eat, not going to school, barely surviving day to day working for gangsters.

Immediately after the bombing, a 6-year-old first-grader hovered on the border between life and death. Later, she lived a continual fearful struggle with radiation aftereffects. She speaks out now because, ‘I don’t want any young people to go through that experience.’

After an exchange with non-Japanese war victims, she decided to convey the importance of ‘young people making friends around the world’ and ‘unceasing efforts to build, not a culture of war, but a culture of peace.’

Military force just gives rise to new cycles of hatred. To eliminate the evil, we must transcend nationality, race, religion and other differences, value person-to-person relationships, and build a world that allows forward-looking dialogue.

Hiroshima asks everyone throughout the world to accept this wish of the hibakusha [surviving victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] and walk with them the path to nuclear weapons abolition and world peace.

Each one of us will help determine the future of the human family. Please put yourself in the place of the hibakusha. Imagine their experiences, including that day from the depths of hell, actually happening to you or someone in your family.

To make sure the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki never happen a third time, let’s all communicate, think and act together with the hibakusha for a peaceful world without nuclear weapons and without war.

President Obama and all leaders of nuclear-armed nations have been called to visit the A-bombed cities in the hope they will be convinced that “nuclear weapons are an absolute evil that must no longer be allowed to exist.”

Japan has avoided war for 69 years and has pledged “to join forces with people the world over seeking the abolition of the absolute evil, nuclear weapons, and the realization of lasting world peace.”

In the moment that followed the Trinity Test-the first atomic explosion, its ‘father’ Dr. Robert Oppenheimer Oppenheimer recalled this sentence from the Bhagvad Gita, “Now I have become death, the destroyer of the worlds.”

When Oppenheimer was asked for his thoughts regarding Sen. Robert Kennedy’s efforts to urge President Lyndon Johnson to initiate talks to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, he responded: “It’s 20 years too late. It should have been done the day after Trinity.”

Today’s UN-Holy “Trinity” is a triune of radiological horrors: nuclear bombs, nuclear reactors, and conventional Uranium Weapons (such as Depleted Uranium or DU) that are used in military testing, training, and military combat.

WMD refers to nuclear, radiological, biological, chemical or other weapon that can kill and bring significant harm to a large number of humans, cause great damage to man-made structures, natural structures and the biosphere.

The deliberate use of manmade ionizing radiation is an assault upon people, the environment, and all living things. Since the first Plutonium and Uranium nuclear bomb was exploded in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, the contamination of the United States and the rest of the world [continues].

Those responsible for seven decades of both domestic and international radiological assault are our own government agencies: the Departments of Energy and Defense, and the NRC (some say it stands for the Nuclear Radiating Committee) along with a multitude of corporations involved in various aspects of manufacturing munitions of both nuclear and ‘conventional’ weapons varieties.

Used in military combat, these radioactive munitions have been contaminating the Middle East and other nations wherever they are fired and tested.

On Monday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called critics of his nuclear policy “cowards” and defended his stance to engage in talks with the West.

In his annual address to Iranian ambassadors and diplomats, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said:

Some people deliver slogans but they are political cowards and as soon as there is talk of negotiations they say ‘we are trembling’.

Well, to hell! Go and find a warm place for yourselves. What should we do? God has made you fearful and trembling.

It is wrong to fear from interaction, negotiation and mutual understanding?

On Tuesday, President Hassan Rouhani said in an address to an economic conference that Iran is serious and determined in the nuclear negotiations, but the world needs to know that the opportunity offered by the Islamic Republic is not everlasting and a final nuclear deal over Iran’s nuclear energy program would serve the interests of all parties.

Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – the United States, France, Britain, Russia and China – plus Germany agreed on the extension of nuclear talks until November 24 with a view to achieving a permanent deal that would end the decade-old dispute over Iran’s nuclear energy program.

In April 2010, Iran hosted a conference in Tehran on nuclear disarmament with sixty countries represented but America did not attend.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stated that nuclear weaponry was “haram” meaning prohibited under Islam and he also blew the doors off Israel’s and America’s nuclear deceptions:

If America’s claims of fighting the proliferation of nuclear weapons were not false, would the Zionist regime be able to turn the occupied Palestinian lands into an arsenal where a huge number of nuclear weapons are stored while refusing to respect international regulations in this regard, especially the NPT?

There is only one government that has committed a nuclear crime so far. Only the government of the United States of America has attacked the oppressed people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs in an unfair and inhumane war using or even threatening to use such weapons is a serious violation of the most basic rules of philanthropy and is a clear manifestation of war crimes.

The greatest violators of the NPT are the powers who have reneged on their obligation to dispose of nuclear weapons mentioned in Article 6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

These powers have even surpassed other countries with respect to promoting nuclear weapons in the world.

By providing the Zionist regime with nuclear weapons and supporting its policies, these powers play a direct role in promoting nuclear weapons which is against the obligations they have undertaken according to Article 1 of the NPT.

We believe that besides nuclear weapons, other types of weapons of mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons also pose a serious threat to humanity.

The Iranian nation, which is itself a victim of chemical weapons, feels more than any other nation the danger that is caused by the production and stockpiling of such weapons and is prepared to make use of all its facilities to counter such threats.

We consider the use of such weapons as haram (religiously forbidden) and believe that it is everyone’s duty to make efforts to secure humanity against this great disaster.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy warned US, “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”

In 2009, President Obama stood on the world stage amongst thousands of flag-waving Czechs and spoke of good humor, home town Chicago, the will of the people over tanks and guns, old conflicts, revolution, moral leadership as the most powerful weapon, iron curtains that fell and the state of 21st century nuclear weapons:

“We are here today because enough people ignored the voices who told them that the world could not change. We’re here today because of the courage of those who stood up and took risks to say that freedom is a right for all people, no matter what side of a wall they live on, and no matter what they look like. We are here today because the simple and principled pursuit of liberty and opportunity shamed those who relied on the power of tanks and arms to put down the will of a people.

“Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked -– that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.

“As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act…It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, Yes, We Can!

“Words must mean something [and] violence and injustice must be confronted by standing together as free nations, as free people…Human destiny will be what we make of it.”

In 1987, from Ashkelon prison, Mordechai Vanunu wrote:

The passive acceptance and complacency with regard to the existence of nuclear weapons anywhere on earth is the disease of society today.

This struggle is not only a legitimate one – it is a moral, inescapable struggle.

No government, not even the most democratic, can force us to live under this threat.

No state in the world can offer any kind of security against this menace of a nuclear holocaust, or guarantee to prevent it.

Already now there are enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world many times over. This issue should unite us all, because that is our real enemy.

Any country, which manufactures and stocks nuclear weapons, is first of all endangering its own citizens. This is why the citizens must confront their government and warn it that it has no right to expose them to this danger. Because, in effect, the citizens are being held hostage by their own government, just as if they have been hijacked and deprived of their freedom and threatened.

Indeed, when governments develop nuclear weapons without the consent of their citizens – and this is true in most cases – they are violating the basic rights of their citizens, the basic right not to live under constant threat of annihilation. Is any government qualified and authorized to produce such weapons.

“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.”- 8 July 1996, the International Court of Justice

The ICJ also affirmed the “fundamental, cardinal and intransgressible” rule that “States must never make civilians the object of attack and must consequently never use weapons that are incapable of distinguishing between civilians and military targets.”

Anti-nuclear civil resistance is the right of every citizen of the world, for the nuclear threat attacks every core concept of human rights and “calls for urgent and universal action for its prevention. If it is a basic human right to be free of threat or violence, if the right to life is a basic human right, if the protection of children and future generations is a basic human duty, international law must unhesitatingly recognize that the right to non violent resistance activities for the prevention of such an international crime is basic to human dignity.” -Judge Weeramantry, “The Trident and International Law, Scotland’s Obligations” Feb. 3, 2009.

Governments have obligations, People have rights but “we live in a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We have solved the mystery of the atom and forgotten the lessons of the Sermon on The Mount. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about dying than we know about living.”-General Omar Nelson Bradley, 1948.

In 1966, at the height of the Cold War, the US nuclear arsenal had over 32,000 warheads and ever since, America maintains a nuclear arsenal of nearly 2,000 on hair-trigger alert.

The Department of Defense disclosed in 2012 that “as of September 30, 2009, the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons consisted of 5,113 warheads.”

A 2013 Federation of American Scientists report stated the United States has 7,700 nuclear warheads.

President Obama’s FY 2015 budget for direct nuclear weapons activities is $8.3 billion-most of which will go toward building WMD and maintaining the stockpile America is supposed to be dismantling under our NPT obligations.