Nuclear weapons still threaten the world

by Tony Magliano · August 1, 2014

Americans and Russians living in or near a large city or major military installation are within 30 minutes of possibly being incinerated by nuclear weapons. And when considering that radiation fallout from a nuclear attack would hurt virtually everyone, we are all threatened by nuclear weapons.

An International Atomic Energy Agency inspector checks the uranium enrichment process inside Iran�s Natanz plant in January. U.S. bishops and Iranian ayatollahs held a March dialogue on nuclear arms. (CNS photo/Kazem Ghane, EPA)

Dr Bruce Blair, a former officer responsible for 50 Minuteman nuclear missiles in Montana, and now co-founder of Global Zero (www.globalzero.org) � an international organisation dedicated to eliminating all nuclear weapons � shared with me a highly dangerous little known fact:

Both the United States and Russia each have approximately 1,000 nuclear warheads still aimed at each other. And what�s even worse, these weapons of mass destruction are programmed at launch ready alert � otherwise known as hair-trigger alert.

Because Russian and American land-based nuclear missiles can reach their targets in just 30 minutes, Blair said �the president, after a very short briefing, would have just 12 minutes max, and more plausibly only five minutes to decide whether to launch a nuclear attack against Russia. And if a reported Russian attack is launched from sea, the president would only have seconds to make a decision�.

Blair said that Russia has a very similar system, except that much of theirs is antiquated, thus increasing the chance of a nuclear exchange based on misinformation or technical malfunction.

In fact, due to sloppy communications and/or computer errors, Russia and the U.S. have come within minutes of nuclear war more than once.

And when we factor in that seven other nations possess nuclear weapons, the chance of nuclear war increases significantly, especially when we consider the very unstable regimens of Pakistan and North Korea.

On August 6, 1945 over 70,000 people � mostly civilians � were killed when a United States Boeing B-29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

Then on August 9, 1945 the U.S. dropped a second atomic bomb, this time on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, killing at least 60,000 people � again mostly civilians.� Nagasaki was the centre of Japanese Catholicism, a city where at one time St Maximilian Kolbe served as a missionary.

The tremendous death and destruction caused by these two nuclear weapons is small in comparison to the carnage that would result today from the detonation of two far more powerful modern nuclear weapons.

Global Zero has developed a plan to completely eliminate the world�s approximate 16,000 nuclear weapons by 2030. To learn how you can help, go to www.globalzero.org/our-movement.

Global Zero co-founder Bruce Blair said that an international conference of all nuclear countries, and would-be nuclear countries, needs to be convened to work out a process towards a world without nuclear weapons.

Also, Russia and the U.S. need to take the missiles aimed at each other off hair-trigger alert by physically removing the warheads form each missile, said Blair.

Please contact President Obama, urging him to convene an international nuclear weapons elimination conference, and to enter into negotiations with Russia to take the missiles aimed at each other off hair-trigger alert. Just go to www.whitehouse.gov and click �contact us�. And ask your parish, school, and friends to do this.

St John XXIII would like to weigh in here. In his prophetic encyclical Pacem in Terris (�Peace on Earth�) he wrote: �Justice, then, right reason and consideration for human dignity and life urgently demand that the arms race should cease � that nuclear weapons should be banned.�

Let�s pray and work that justice, right reason, consideration for human dignity and life prevail!