Category: StratCom & Nuclear Weapons
The following Washington Post editorial, published July 8, 2012, outlines what should be a no-brainer, the case for the U.S. and Russia to take our nuclear weapons off hair-trigger, launch-ready alert. Our friends at Peace Action would like us to join them in asking President Obama to Prevent Doomsday - Take Nuclear Weapons Off Hair-Trigger Alert.
Both Nebraskans for Peace and Peace Action want all nuclear weapons abolished worldwide, but de-alerting is one of the single most effective steps we could take to reduce the danger of nuclear war.
Click on this link to tell the president he needs to do it, right away!
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Nobuko Tsukui, a Japanese scholar of the literature of the atomic bombings, was the guest speaker at the Lincoln NFP Chapter’s annual Hiroshima/Nagasaki Lantern Float this past August. During her visit in Nebraska, she was given a copy of Joe Starita’s new biography of Chief Standing Bear, I Am a Man. Reading the book on her return to her home in Tokyo, she recorded her reflections on this momentous episode in Nebraska’s history and has graciously agreed to share them with us.
With very little knowledge of the history of the Native Americans, I started to read this book, I Am a Man by Joe Starita, the subtitle of which is “Chief Standing Bear’s Journey for Justice,” with a conscious intention of learning historical facts. When I reached about a third of the book, I found myself crying as I kept reading and taking notes. Something like this happened before, when I was reading some of the writings by the atomic bomb survivors. Now that I finished reading this memorable book, I asked myself why I cried reading it and why I also cried reading some works of the atomic bomb literature. What follows is my reflection – in an effort to find answers to my own question.
It’s true that I Am a Man deals with facts of nineteenth-century U.S. history, focusing on Chief Standing Bear and his “journey for justice.” The book is a “compelling narrative of injustices finally righted,” a story of “the struggle of our nation’s first inhabitants to find justice in the land of their birth.” (The quotes are from the excerpts under the heading, “Praise for I Am a Man” printed on pp. i – ii.) The book gives detailed accounts of Standing Bear’s experience, his family’s experience, and his people’s – the Ponca’s – experience: the suffering, pain, agony, hardship, starvation, illness, death, arrest, imprisonment, and more. Through all these ordeals, his “perseverance” sustained the Ponca Chief, and on May 12, 1879, Judge Dundy “had declared for the first time in the nation’s history that an Indian was a person within the meaning of U.S. law.” (p.157) Hence the reviewer for Kirkus Reviews writes: Standing Bear’s ‘case’ “established legal personhood for American Indians.” (p.i ) (Of course, May 1879 was not the end of his “struggle,” but only the beginning of the end, which came in 1890, when “Standing Bear received Allotment No. 146: a 297.8-acre parcel of rich, dark soil hugging a bend on the west bank of the Running Water.” (p. 233) [The significance of this event for Standing Bear and his people is explained by Starita: “In short order, in going from a tribally owned reservation to individual allotments, the Northern Ponca has lost 70 percent of their original homeland.” (p. 233)]
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Loring Wirbel
Citizens for Peace in Space
A new Pentagon strategy released July 13 assigns the primary duty of cyber operations to U.S. Strategic Command, with secondary missions assumed by U.S. Cyber Command, based at the National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. This “Cyberspace Operations Strategy” is more ominous than might otherwise be suspected with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s revelation at a news conference in mid-July that the Pentagon now considers the commercial Internet to be “another operational theater of war”—and that StratCom and Cyber Command must be ready to take on more offensive roles in combating cyber assaults.
Scare tactics were in abundance at the July announcement with the Department of Defense disclosing that a foreign agency had collected more than 20,000 documents in a cyber-assault on a U.S. military contractor this past spring. This March 2011 attack was in fact of an altogether different degree than the previously-known assaults on Lockheed Martin and RSA Security Inc. Though Panetta revealed no details, most bloggers agreed the foreign agency in question was most likely China, and that the targeted contractor had been Northrop Grumman.
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The following statement by Nobuko Tsukui, a Japanese national from Tokyo who has specialized in the literature of the atomic bomb, was delivered at the 2011 Annual Lantern Float at Lincoln’s Holmes Lake Park Saturday evening August 6—the 66th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.
(First, I wish to pay a tribute to the memory of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and of the March 11 disaster.) I have no word to describe the sense of devastation I felt at the triple disaster of March 11. The earthquake and the tsunami were, of course, caused by the forces of nature. But I could not help reflecting on our civilization in the face of this catastrophe. The Fukushima nuclear disaster, especially, symbolized the problem of civilization in the nuclear age vis-à-vis the forces of nature in their most destructive form. The world witnessed how utterly defenseless the nuclear power plant—supposedly the epitome of nuclear science and technology—could be against the earthquake and tsunami. And I believe that the Fukushima disaster has compelled us to re-examine our attitudes toward both ‘nuclear weapons’ and ‘nuclear energy.’
I wish to refer to two writers who, nearly 30 years ago, tried to awaken us.
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Cindy Lange-Kubick
Posted: Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Lincoln Journal Star
The story is on the second page of the book.
"On the third day, most of the dead and wounded students had been taken care of, and I went home in the dusk. All was burned ashes. I immediately spotted a black lump at the site where the kitchen had been. It was the charred remains of my wife's pelvis and vertebrae. Nearby was the rosary with a cross attached to it..."
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