Steven Staples has long been committed to peace and disarmament. He founded Ceasefire in Ottawa, is a member of the Canadian Pugwash Group, the Group of 78 and the international network of anti-nuclear groups, Abolition 2000. He has written extensively about missile defense, nuclear weapons, and the Cold War. He was recently appointed Acting Publisher of Rabble.ca.
Did you know that all nuclear weapons could have been dismantled and that greenhouse gas emissions could have been kept at the safe level of 350ppm at the end of the Cold War in 1990? Did you know that militarized economic power and sheer dishonesty have taken the world in the opposite direction, to the brink of human extinction, accelerating greenhouse gas emissions and nuclear weapons proliferation? Did you know that right now the majority of the worldâs nations are meeting at the U.N. to develop a plan to eliminate nuclear weapons and to finally address the humanitarian consequences of nuclear war? And did you know that Canada voted against this resolution and even refuses to take part in the meeting? You might not know because the media is silent. There was no reporting in Canadian major media of the 2014 Vienna meeting leading to the humanitarian pledge to abolish these weapons, the 2015 Non-Proliferation month-long meeting, the 2015 Quebec meeting on uranium, the 2015 New York meeting on nuclear weapons, and the March 2017 meeting in New York. You might not know about nuclear weapons if you went to university after the end of the Cold War. The nine nuclear states together possess a total of approximately 15,395 nuclear weapons, with the United States and Russia accounting for more than 93%. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, just two small sized nuclear bombs, killed 250,000 people in Hiroshima and an estimated 70,000 people in Nagasaki. The explosive force of the Hiroshima bomb was 15-16 kilotons of TNT, whereas todayâs bombs are in the range of 100 Kt to 550Kt of TNT (6 to 34 times the Hiroshima force). By comparison, the blast yield of the largest non-nuclear bomb, the MOAB just dropped on Afghanistan, is 0.011 kilotons. Even a small-scale nuclear war involving one hundred Hiroshima-type nuclear bombs between two countries such as India and Pakistan, would lead to ânuclear winterâ and likely human extinction. https://www.opencanada.org/features/sitting-out-nuclear-weapons-meeting-canada-backtracks-its-commitment-peace/ http://worldbeyondwar.org/remembering-past-wars-san-francisco-public-library/?link_id=1&can_id=a9f18c03ec939092f95c38f7a42 https://www.womenbanthebomb.org www.dontbankonthebomb.com www.icanw.org https://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/ban-bomb-anti-nuclear-movement/ http://www.reachingcriticalwill http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/02/02/unspoken-words-nuclear-war-provocations-and-plans/
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