Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

Feachtas um Dí-armáil Eithneach

http://indigo.ie/~goodwill/icnd.html P.O. Box 6327, Dublin 6, Ireland e-mail: irishcnd@ireland.com Telephone: 087-236 4312
Fax: 01-4977043

On this day fifty six years ago there occurred what we now can see was the most appalling case of mass murder in the chequered history of mankind - the most appalling for the reason that every thinking person must ponder on every day, that from then till now, and as far in the future as the world’s leading politicians and their paymasters, the multi-millionaire manufacturers of nuclear arms are allowed to play from their well-fortified offices with the fate of every single living being. For once the first nuclear weapon was used and proved to be the most destructive type of weapon ever devised the chance of such a weapon, its horrors even more refined, being used again at the command of some arrogant political leader of a state rich enough to acquire such weapons is with us every minute of every hour of every day.

This is the world out children and their children after them are condemned to live in unless we, the ordinary people, do something to change it.

We were told in 1945 that the two atom bombs used on August 6 and 9 would bring peace. We now know that peace was already on the way and the use of those bombs was in fact a signal by the firms that make super-weapons and the pathetic politicians who order them, that that handful of evil-intentioned people will from now on be the ultimate masters of the world with its millions of human beings and huge wealth of animal and plant life.

I remember August 1945 and I remember going to see my wife in hospital where our eldest daughter had just been born, and how my wife said “Look at this lovely little scrap of life, and then think of the world we have brought her into, wasting its enormous wealth on preparing mens’ murder.” That was how she came to be in the group that founded the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

But the inhuman wickedness of the leading people in the big powers of the world goes further still. We, the people, have to realize that the great powers are not only at this moment preparing to scrap the arrangements to which our one time foreign minister Frank Aiken contributed so much thereby helping to give our country a reputation for believing in a future without wars, but they are, at huge cost, while children are dying of starvation in many lands, building up huge arsenals of germ weapons, with which they propose if they think a war is necessary to consolidate their power, they will condemn whatever populations to the most horrible death by the spread on the air or in water supplies by some of the most deadly diseases known to mankind. I was horrified recently to learn that the Allies, or N.A.T.O., the states fighting together to prevent the imperialist governments of Germany and Japan from conquering the world (which they began trying to do with the actual encouragement of their later foes) were planning to spread Anthrax. perhaps the most horrible of all diseases, among the population of their enemies. What credit can violence done by such means do the victors? And be it noted that in modern wars, such as N.A.T.O. recently launched on Yugoslavia and before that in Iraq, not only are the enemies’ sewage systems, schools and hospitals destroyed but quite a high proportion of the victors casualties are inflected by their own side (do the big men in the great capitals care?) - in the last stage of the Yugoslav war 25% of U.S. casualties were inflicted by their own side.

In this category of deliberate preparation in time of peace of particularly inhuman ways of killing civilians as well as combatants on the “enemy” side the world has evidence of the British government’s deliberate use of diluted uranium tips of their tanks and other shells, the dust of which on explosion can affect civilians just as likely as fighters and very likely induct cancer in the victim, probably the world’s most feared disease. The officials who authorise such weapons, which no doubt bring a nice profit to their sellers are every bit as guilty as M^r. Milosevic or any other criminals of the wars stirred up by the Great Powers in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. An article in the Irish Times last week showed clearly how the British military authorities insist on practising with diluted uranium pointed shells in practice in Scotland though many got lost and remain a permanent danger to civilians. One has even gone into the sea, prompting an eminent scientist to warn that at this rate diluted uranium will get into the food chain with appalling results. The British authorities know well that eminent scientists condemn these shells as inhuman but refuse to set up a full enquiry into the disgusting nature of their lovely new weapon.

Opening this speech I asked you please to Beware. The governments of the big powers are openly preparing for war on a scale never seen before. They denigrate states whose politics they dislike as “rogue” states and have the cheek to expect us to believe that a state like Iran or North Korea has a few nuclear weapons - foolishly and worse, we believe - will be stupid enough to fire one at the U.S.A. and obviously get annihilated in retaliation from the state with the most criminally large nuclear arsenal of all. States, such as Sudan, Iraq, a small British West Indies island, whose government was going to build a big airport which Washington at once saw as Russian-financed and various other states have been bombed by the U.S. with no declarations of war and no authorisation form the United Nations. This is supposed to be “world leadership.” In fact it is the conduct of the ignorant big bully, the government which in case the huge profits of its industry are marginally affected refuses to cooperate with the rest of the world in reducing its output of poisonous waste into the atmosphere. There are millions of civilised North Americans many of Irish origin. We should call on them to halt their government’s warlike plans: no use asking European governments to do so - they are virtually in the pay of the U.S. armament millionaires.


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