Donald Trump’s recent tweet regarding his “Much bigger and more powerful” nuclear button should alarm if not terrify reasoned and civilized human beings world wide. Trump’s nuclear bravado and veiled threat was in response to comments by North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un. This latest bombast rivals our president’s earlier proclamations that if provoked he would unleash “Fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
Historians will have to look long and hard to find any comparable events since the dawn of the nuclear age where an elected leader has told the world that he will with intent destroy an entire nation and murder over 29 million people. If such a scenario were to unfold it may well escalate on a global scale unimagined and easily trigger a nuclear holocaust where the least of our concerns would be nuclear winter.
All global citizens with even a modest concern for the future of their children and life on earth need to rise up and in unity refute and condemn what is happening right before our eyes. All of us need to share and send the same message: that any nuclear exchange is a planetary death sentence.
In late 2017, I had the good fortune and honor to attend a function that honored one of the surviving victims of Hiroshima. As a child, our survivor saw the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. This from a distance that allowed her survival. What we need to understand and internalize now is that the nuclear horror unleashed on Hiroshima is a fireworks display compared to our arsenals on hair-trigger alert today.
We cannot allow a mindset and a mentality to exist or endure which proclaims and boasts about these weapons as legitimate war-fighting options.. The issue is not about war or vanquishing an enemy. The issue is and has always been about human survival.
Jim Sawyer
Edmonds
