RootsAction.org is joining with a rapidly growing
list of organizations and individuals from around the
world to send an urgent appeal to the presidents,
prime ministers, and legislatures of nine nuclear
nations: China, France, India, Israel, North Korea,
Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United
States.
This is an appeal from the
people of the world to nine nuclear governments to
each commit to a nuclear policy of no first
strike, not ever, not for any reason; and to sign
and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear
Weapons, and to collectively agree to immediately
begin disarming on a schedule to completely eliminate
all nuclear weapons from the earth no later than
August 6, 2045.
Click
here to see the list of supporters and to add your
name.
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The full text of the appeal is as follows
(available on
the website in various languages):
We,
the people of good will, of all walks of life, living
on all continents and professing different creeds and
religions, direct your attention to the threat of an
all-out nuclear war that can erupt very easily either
due to deliberate actions of any nuclear-weapons
state or because of unintentional, human, technical
or other mistake.
We are witnessing that
the threshold for the use nuclear weapons in a
limited or on large-scale attacks recently has been
dramatically lowered, bringing the entire world to
the brink of a nuclear Armageddon.
Many
high-ranking military and civilian officials,
politicians and experts are openly talking about the
possibility of using nuclear weapons in a first
strike attack against any nation under many pretexts
with low-yield or high-yield nuclear charges.
The
United States in fact has withdrawn from a number of
rather well-known and useful nuclear arms control
treaties and accords for dubious reasons and
illogical explanations.
Nuclear arms
delivery vehicles are becoming more sophisticated,
faster and more precise. They have been combined into
a dangerous combination of arms embracing strategic
and tactical nuclear weapons with missile defense
assets and conventional capabilities, and with a
possibility to place strike weapons in space,
including missile defense systems and anti-satellite
weapons.
Many military exercises that
earlier have been conducted with the use of
conventional weapons, gradually are being transformed
into drills using mock nuclear weapons.
Nuclear
arms experts calculate that during an initial massive
nuclear attack, at least 34 million people will
immediately perish and 57 million people will receive
multiple injuries and wounds that will cause horrible
pain, suffering, radiation sickness and death.
Additionally, various kinds of infrastructure, flora
and fauna, nuclear power plants, water resources –
including potable water and hydropower dams –
will be heavily damaged or destroyed completely by
huge firestorms, vast nuclear contamination, powerful
explosions, and earthquakes.
But that is
just the immediate impact. The nuclear winter that
would be created by even a limited nuclear war would
threaten all of humanity with starvation and other
mortal threats.
We who have voluntarily
signed this appeal urge you, as the leaders of all
nine nuclear nations, to take the following actions
in 2020:
First, as an initial step leading
to comprehensive and irreversible nuclear disarmament
on a global scale, to pledge not to use and denounce
any kind of nuclear weapon use in a first strike
against any nation at any time.
Second, to
sign and ratify the international Treaty on the
Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons with the subsequent
commitment specified in the next item.
Third,
to commit to irreversibly dismantling all nuclear
weapons by no later than August 6, 2045 or earlier –
by all nine nuclear weapon states, in carefully
calibrated stages and through well-developed and
mutually acceptable mechanisms of inspections,
provided that all nuclear-weapon states will follow
this pattern simultaneously and honestly.
Please
add your name.
After signing the petition,
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-- The RootsAction.org
Team
P.S. RootsAction is an independent
online force endorsed by Jim Hightower, Barbara
Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn
Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Bill Fletcher Jr., Laura
Flanders, former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, Frances
Fox Piven, Phil Donahue, Sonali Kolhatkar, and many
others.
www.RootsAction.org
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