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Unholy trinity

Unholy Trinity
ON LINE opinion by Bill Williams 28 July 09
“……………………..We have just entered the 65th year of humanity’s troubled relationship with nuclear arms, the world’s worst weapons of terror. So it’s a good time to be promoting their retirement and for Australia to be using every tool in its diplomatic kitbag to encourage the nine Nuclear Weapons States (NWS) to negotiate and implement a global treaty that eliminates their nukes once and for all.

On July 16, 1945 the Americans detonated their first nuclear weapon – the “Trinity” test – in the New Mexico desert, prompting its mastermind Robert Oppenheimer to recall the words of Vishnu in the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

This fantastic power was unleashed upon the residents of the Japanese city of Hiroshima just three weeks later, at 8.15 on the morning of August 6, when the uranium-bomb – “Little Boy” – exploded above the city: by nightfall about 70,000 people were dead and since then an estimated further 180,000 have died. The cancer rates among the ageing survivors continue to rise even today.

But we all still live in the shadow of nuclear Armageddon. There remain 23,000 nukes in the arsenals of the nine Nuclear Weapons States (NWS): Russia, USA, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and now North Korea. Two thousand five hundred of these weapons are retained on high-alert status, capable of launch within 15 minutes – and there’s no bringing them back. Meanwhile the risk of other nations joining the “club” is on the increase, with the current focus being on Iran. Bear in mind, however, that at least 44 nations have nuclear bomb-making capabilities, including all those states with civil nuclear power plants, which are producing plutonium as a fission byproduct in those reactors.

Unholy trinity – On Line Opinion – 28/7/2009

July 28, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 1, 2 WORLD, weapons and war | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear weapons