Last Updated on 2 years by IMYM Tech Lead
Approved by Intermountain Yearly Meeting on June 17, 2022
Background
During our time of gathering this year, we acknowledge with sorrow the 77th anniversary of the birth of the age of nuclear warfare – the Trinity Test at what is now White Sands Missile Range. At the time, one of the creators of the atomic bomb, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoted a line from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Just over three weeks later, we saw the impact of “the destroyer of worlds” on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Today we have more than 12,000 nuclear weapons in the hands of nine nations. While that is an 80% reduction from the peak, every one of today’s nuclear warheads is many times more powerful than the explosion Oppenheimer witnessed. The United States has invested billions of dollars in facilities to develop, deploy and store nuclear weapons. We have embarked on a program of “modernization” that will spend $1.7 trillion on nuclear facilities and technology over the next decade.
This is, in essence, a gigantic public works program built on an immoral premise.
It is today’s analogy to the German industry producing Zyklon B gas to exterminate Jews. The world sees the folly of this enterprise; the U.S. joined 190 other nations in agreeing to work toward banning nuclear weapons totally in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, effective in 1970. More recently, 122 nations agreed to the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons on July 7, 2017. Pope Francis has spoken out against nuclear weapons and Santa Fe Archbishop John C. Wester, on January 11 of this year, issued a bold pastoral letter advocating nuclear disarmament: https://archdiosf.org/documents/2022/1/220111_ABW_Pastoral_Letter_LivingintheLightofChristsPeace_Official_Reduced.pdf:
Minute on Nuclear Disarmament
Friends today reaffirm our longstanding opposition to the existence of nuclear weapons, which are still the “destroyer of worlds.” We commit ourselves to opposing the “modernization” of these infernal tools of war, to supporting the U.S. in joining the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and to, wherever possible, advocating for the repurposing of the expertise and facilities of the nuclear weapons complex to peaceful purposes. We have gone down this road too long already!