LETTER TO A PAST PRESIDENT—NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT PAST DUE

Letter never responded to. See next week for further details of the continued struggle towards nuclear disarmament.

May 8, 2000

Dear President Bill Clinton,

You have a few months left to give the people of this country something of lasting value--a world working towards peace through disarmament. This is the only political treasure worth having, or passing on to our citizens as your legacy. Peace through weapons is the lie that has killed millions down the millennia.

Now we have the zenith of weapons madness--the nuclear arms race. We have the hugest surplus of nukes; the Russians have too many and don't have the means to get rid of them; the bombs never helped either country; we don't want any new countries to have them; we say we want to get rid of them. Yet we will not stop testing, designing, and building new ones. We shot down the Comprehensive Test Ban. And now we risk destroying the small limits of the START nuclear arms treaties, by violating the ABM treaty--setting up our own "limited missile defense" system.

Anti-Ballistic Missile bomb catcher as devised "the boys in the back room" as envisioned by Dr. Seuss in his Butter Battle Book

We appear to be making up our own rules. We have the best and most nuclear weapons so we'll sit pretty with them thumbing our nose at the rest of the world and trying to put up a technologically imaginary ABM Star Wars system to protect ourselves and our missiles. And then we tell them not to build any nukes themselves. Non-proliferation for you guys, nuclear weapons plus for us. This is the incredible arrogance of people in Congress like Jesse Helms and the weapons merchants and ballistic think-tankers he and others like him represent.

I heard the very depressing commentary of Daniel Schorr on NPR, May 1st [I hope you will listen to it if you haven't already--see web address below]*. He describes the machinations of these nuclear death star true believers, and how they've completely lame-ducked you on disarmament. Don't let them do this. You can banish the influence of those who've been sitting in smoke-filled rooms endlessly planning more deadly missiles to protect their scandalous wealth.

Say right now that there will be no Star Wars ABM system--limited or not. What need for further tests in June, or ever? Go to Russia, more a statesman than any we've had in the past 100 years, and negotiate deep reductions in nuclear weapons beyond START II into START III, until they are finished, gone. And we can begin to base our national security on something other than the most lethal machines ever devised, and start having a real peace dividend--work on health, education, and creative ecologically responsible energy technology, becoming true leaders of a free world.

It is high time your presidency took the high road. Put the weaponeers on notice that they no longer run our country [as President Eisenhower on his retirement suggested we do]. We can then forthrightly tell the rest of the world, Iraq, North Korea, Israel, Pakistan, India, etc., not to build nuclear bombs. These weapons are the doomsday virus, still exceeding virulent, that we cannot let proliferate. Their control and elimination are crucial to any national health plan. Be the disarmament president! Lead the nation to renounce its inordinate belief in, and addiction to, all weapons great and small.

Yours truly,
Michael McCarthy

Depiction of projected weapons control from space. Donald Rumsfeld was chairman of this report's commission, until nominated for Secretary of Defense by President-Elect Bush on Dec. 28, 2000

*
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1073609
Take time to listen to this year 2000, Daniel Schorr [died last month] report, on the almost impossible U.S. politics of nuclear disarmament.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed....
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." --President Eisenhower, 1953

Illumination by Kathy Brahney

Next week--some current hope that the START treaties, can be now "re-started", and then strengthened, to lead finally to a world with no nuclear weapons.