Comrades,
I can only say that it warms the cockles of the heart of a proud long-time member of Drinkers for Disarmament that my good friends at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons [ICAN] have won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.
Not before time.
That's 8 million Kroner in the protest "war chest" and you can auction off the gold medal itself in due course for north of a million $US.
Has it struck anyone as ironic in the extreme that the people who want to rid the world of nuclear weapons forever have won a prize donated by the inventor of dynamite - who heavily invested his enormous profits in artillery and munitions manufacturing - as a sop to his own late-life regret at devising such a dastardly thing?
Or that the all important explosive yield of The Bomb has always been measured in tons of TNT?
What is TNT?
It's not at all similar to dynamite, which is really dangerous shit - although it is often confused with it - it was dynamite's natural successor, because it's as safe as houses to handle and you don't need as much TNT to blow the living' bejesus out of something or someone.
If you were a military man and you could have kilotons, nay megatons of the stuff in just a few hundred kilo's of really heavy uranium derivative, would you argue?
Nah.
It was a pretty soft choice, I'd say a no-brainer, for the Norwegian Committee this year - in a world racked and riven by internecine warfare and ethnic cleansing - after the UN adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons a few months ago [that's explained elsewhere in this bloggy blog blog thingy].
Never mind that the idea of ICAN was cobbled together by a few Pinko's sitting around a card table in Melbourne, there are two chances at the moment of Australia agreeing to the thing, let alone ratifying it - none and Buckley's.
Thailand, Guyana and the Holy See are the only lot to have signed-up and ratified the prohibition treaty.
There is a long, long, long way to go and it is vitally important to keep pursuing it.
The last genuine protest placard I made I stole the slogan from a photograph I'd seen from some protest march in D.C. that read "I Can't Believe We Are Still Protesting About This" and that must have been more than five years ago now.
[It was about retaining as public land a choice slice of Sydney real estate; the only bit of remnant Cumberland Plain forest left in the Inner West, as I recall - and yes, we're still protesting about it].
While that's by-the-by, the message applies all the same to The Bomb.
Why-oh-why so long?
It took an enormous amount of time and effort in protesting to drive nuclear testing underground...18 years to ban atmospheric testing with the Partial Test Ban Treaty, and then another 33 years for the USA and USSR to stop testing altogether with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, then another four years again before China and France finally gave the game away, but they've kept their options open, not signing up to any nuclear ban treaty of any kind.
It's been 21 years since the final significant nuclear weapons test; The Yoof of Today have no personal history of it or investment in it, so it's oh so easy to be complacent.
I was six years old when atmospheric testing ended, and they were still letting them go at Maralinga just up the road from where I lived at the time in Adelaide to the bitter end, and it took forever to get the Poms to pay the British Army the $100M+ to pick up all the 100,000+ bits of plutonium left behind - and still they didn't do a great job of it.
Secrecy surrounded British atmospheric tests going horribly wrong back in '57, you know, the "Black Mist", that sort of thing and in the end, plutonium had purposefully and shamefully been shattered to smithereens by conventional explosives and scattered over a large defined range that's now fucked-over forever, all in the name of finding out whether you could have a nuclear weapon, bomb it, and blow it up without actually setting it off.
Turns out, you can.
There was a Royal Commission into the whole gigantic fiasco, goddamit.
But I digress.
Read the report.
The really strange thing about this weird uranium gear is that nobody now can be absolutely 100% certain that the weapons will actually work at all, although there's a mighty mighty good chance they will.
Without testing, the staggeringly stupendous cost of maintaining nuclear weapons alone should have seen an end to it by now, but no, wiping out these things altogether, most unfortunately, won't be done in my lifetime, so...to the barricades children!
Everybody's talkin' about and thinks Fatboy Kim is real bad, and while the world nuclear stockpile has shrunk by about two-thirds from its Cold War highs, there are still at least 14,000 nukes on the loose [roughly 5,000 are effectively decommissioned, in the process of being dismantled and won't be replaced, about 8 or 9,000 are in some kind of rotational operational state, of those, about 4,000 are deployed, and 1500 or so are fully-armed and ready to go at a minute's notice].
And about 93% of all nuclear warheads are held in America and Russia.
I grew up with this obscene madness [MAD, the doctrine of "mutually assured destruction"] and got mad about it, still do, as you might have guessed.
Even a very cursory study of the truly awesome destructive power of The Bomb can't fail to impress, let alone the gruesome invidious nature of radiation - "the invisible silent killer" - it's all enough to put you right off it for life.
In an ideal world, it should have finished where it began in '45, as if Japan wasn't enough of an ideal test bed to see what two low yield primitive nuclear weapons can do to living breathing cities.
And we've gone way out there - thermonuclear, baby - since then.
72 years on and I'm sorry, but on this one, if you don't say NO, you're complicit in it.
There isn't any saying "I don't care" here.
Never forget.
Dream the impossible dream no longer.
Just do it.
Ban The Bomb.
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