Work for the abolition of nuclear weapons | Letters To Editor | union-bulletin.com – Walla Walla Union-Bulletin

This week, we mourn the hundreds of thousands who died as a result of the making, testing, and dropping of the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We do so amid an ever-increasing arms race among the nine nuclear nations. Our own country has committed 1.7 trillion to upgrading our nuclear stockpiles.

In 1977, six years after releasing the Pentagon Papers, when he was part of a Continental Walk for Disarmament and Social Justice, Daniel Ellsberg wrote: "At this moment, the likelihood that our life will long survive on this planet seems less than that it will not. Yet it is not less it could hardly be than the likelihood, billions of years ago, that we would be here today, that there would ever be on this particular planet any human life to be risked, to be lived and used."

Forty-four years later, the likelihood of our survival is certainly less. We cannot coexist with nuclear weapons. We must get rid of them before they get rid of us. As Ellsberg suggests, it took a miracle to get us here and will take another one to keep us here.

Work for the miracle. Work for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Patrick Henry

Walla Walla

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Work for the abolition of nuclear weapons | Letters To Editor | union-bulletin.com - Walla Walla Union-Bulletin