In case you wonder or even care what I have been doing this summer besides fishing, researching gambling issues and conducting a survey of Canadian Bloggers, you might be interested in a book I helped out on.
Beyond Hiroshima
When the first atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, it could hardly have been imagined that 60 years later more than 30,000 nuclear weapons would be in existence. The Cold War is long over, but half the world’s population still lives under a government that brandishes nuclear weapons.
In Beyond Hiroshima, Douglas Roche, Canada’s former Ambassador for Disarmament, exposes the myths about nuclear weapons and offers solutions that will help make global peace and political stability possible.
In his view, it is reasonable to hope for and work for a world beyond Hiroshima.
All I really did was provide a nice list of websites at the back of the book, offer the odd idea (mine usually are!) and read and re-read the proofs and galleys.
It was a very interesting learning experience. I remember being really concerned as a six year old kid about nuclear weapons.
But somehow that issue fell off the radar.
With the spectre of terrorism and the way the world is today, I’d say it’s a scary place when more people have nukes.
I was able to spend a bit of time in Mr. Roche’s office. He has pictures of him with so many people. I saw one of him and Pope John Paul II and decided that Mr. Roche’s life has indeed been a life well-spent. I saw the Nobel Prize he shared through the Pugwash Group. He has done a tremendous amount of work and it is far from finished.
Douglas Roche is an all-around stellar person and a statesman worthy of the name.
If you remember how worried you were about nukes when you were a child and if you want to know what concrete actions you might take to help your little ones (at present or in the future) to not have to worry about such horrors, I would suggest you read his book.
I leave you with this excerpt from another book, which sums up my feelings on war quite nicely.
“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed.
. . .
War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society.
. . .
It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.”
Thank you and good day.
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