As we mark the 62nd anniversaries, on August 6th and 9th, of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it's time to realize that we've been pushing our luck. The first and only nuclear weapons to be used in war (so far) destroyed two cities, killing more than 200,000 people by the end of 1945. The radiation from these two nuclear bombs continues to cause cancers, mutations and birth defects that are still being documented today.

Since President Harry Truman, a Democrat, ordered the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, every U.S. President, Republican and Democrat, has prepared and threatened to initiate nuclear attacks. This has happened on more than thirty occasions during international crises, confrontations and wars, primarily to reinforce U.S. hegemony in the East Asia and the Middle East.

Over the six decades of the nuclear age, every site worldwide, involved in the mining, milling, production and fabrication of uranium, for either weapons or "peaceful" energy, has left a lethal legacy of radioactive waste, illness, and damage to our genetic heritage. Indigenous and colonized people have borne a disproportionate share of the suffering resulting from the theft of their land for uranium mining and nuclear weapons testing. Plutonium, created by burning uranium fuel in reactors and used to make nuclear weapons, stays radioactive for more than 250,000 years and we still haven't figured out how to safely contain it. So-called "depleted" uranium metal, a by-product of the nuclear fuel cycle, has been manufactured into armaments used by the U.S. in all its recent wars, spreading illness and death through toxic and radioactive contamination.

For the people of world to have a real chance to stop nuclear proliferation and avoid a tragic repetition of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it's clear that we must eliminate the bombs as well as the nuclear power reactors that produce plutonium that can be processed into bomb material by metastasizing nuclear weapons states.

No Nukes! No Wars!

The assassination of Nagasaki Mayor Iccho Itoh on April 17th of this year tragically underscores the daily violence all too familiar in our world. A popular political figure and advocate for the A-bomb survivors of Nagasaki, Mayor Itoh campaigned tirelessly for the abolition of nuclear weapons, but his life was cut short by a bullet. Whether from small arms or nuclear weapons, the threat and use of violence to solve problems is untenable. The very best way for us to honor the victims and survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is to work for a world without nuclear weapons and war.

Rule of Power or Rule of Law?

Today there are nine nuclear weapon states. The original five, the U.S., U.K., Russia, France, and China, in the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) promised in Article VI to give up their nuclear weapons in return for a promise from all the other countries of the world not to acquire them. To sweeten the deal, in Article IV of the NPT, the nuclear weapon states promised the other countries an "inalienable right" to "peaceful" nuclear technology, "without discrimination," a right Iran claims as a member of the treaty. Since the NPT entered into force, India, Pakistan, Israel, and now North Korea, have joined the nuclear club, India arguing that the NPT is discriminatory. It has been noted by several distinguished international Commissions that so long as any one country has nuclear weapons, others will want them, and as long as nuclear weapons exist, there is a danger that they will be used again.

It is estimated that there are 27,000 nuclear bombs on the planet today, 26,000 of them in the U.S. and Russian arsenals, with the remaining 1,000 located in the seven other nuclear weapon states. To make progress on nuclear abolition, the U.S. and Russia will have to drastically cut their enormous stockpiles and call all the other nations to the table to negotiate a treaty for nuclear disarmament. The U.S. turned a deaf ear to Russia's offer in 2001 too discuss deep cuts in their respective nuclear arsenals, with Russian President Vladimir Putin suggesting that each country go down to 1500 warheads or less if the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was preserved. Instead, the U.S. withdrew from the ABM Treaty, and is now provoking Russia by making plans to build missile defense plants in Poland and the Czech Republic. However, there is every reason to believe that the other nuclear weapon states are ready to enter disarmament negotiations if the U.S. and Russia get serious.

Who is Threatening Whom?

More than 35 years after the NPT entered info force, the threatened first use of nuclear weapons remains the "cornerstone" of U.S. national security policy. While observing a moratorium on full-scale underground nuclear weapon tests, the U.S. has rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The U.S. retains some 10,000 nuclear weapons, and with 400 bombs at eight bases in six NATO countries, is the only nation with its nuclear weapons deployed on foreign soil. The U.S. keeps about 1,700 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, on 14 Trident submarines, patrolling the world's oceans at Cold War levels, and in silos in Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska. The U.S. is pouring billions of dollars into modernizing its nuclear weapons facilities and looking for new ways to make nuclear weapons more useable in ordinary warfare. At the Livermore, California and Los Alamos, New Mexico nuclear weapons labs, new hydrogen bombs - Strangeloveingly called "Reliable Replacement Warheads" - are being designed, and research is continuing on the effects of nuclear weapons and how they can be used to destroy underground targets. In addition, existing nuclear-capable missiles and other delivery systems are being upgraded to increase their accuracy.

With the Bush Administration and most of the Presidential candidates from both parties warning Iran that "all options are on the table," who is threatening whom?

A Plan for Ending Nuclear Proliferation

Civil Society has produced a Model Nuclear Weapons Convention (treaty), which is now an official United Nations (UN) document. [http://www.icanw.org/securing-our-survival] Drafted by lawyers, scientists and policy makers in the Abolition 2000 Global Network for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, it lays out all the steps for disarmament, including how to proceed with dismantlement, verification, guarding and monitoring the disassembled arsenals and missiles to insure that we will all be secure from nuclear break-out. Congressman Dennis Kucinich has cited the Model Nuclear Weapons Convention in a Resolution calling on the President to initiate multilateral negotiations for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Congresswoman Lynne Woolsey has introduced a comprehensive Resolution calling on the President to implement and observe all NPT disarmament obligations and commitments and to revise national nuclear weapons policies accordingly, including negotiating a treaty to ban the bomb.

As citizens of the only country that has used nuclear weapons in war, we have a special responsibility to hold our government accountable to its legal, moral, and practical obligations to lead the way to the global abolition of nuclear weapons. The United States should make nuclear disarmament the leading edge of a global trend towards demilitarization and redirection of miltitary expeditures to meet human and environmental needs, at home and abroad.

Here are some key elements of a plan for nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament:

• All nuclear weapon states must honor their NPT obligation to nuclear disarmament by putting an immediate halt to all new weapons development. To ensure compliance, nuclear weapons research and production facilities must be subject to an intrusive verification regime.

• The U.S. must ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and close the Nevada Test Site, as France and China have closed theirs in the South Pacific and Gobi Desert.

• The U.S. and Russia must take immediate steps to de-alert their deployed nuclear weapons and make deep reductions in their respective arsenals. Once the U.S. and Russia agree to go below 1,000 bombs, they must take up China's offer to negotiate a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons and call all the nuclear weapon states to the table.

• As part of the negotiations, the U.S. must agree to Russia and China's annual proposal in the UN to ban all weapons in space. Other countries will not be willing to give up their nuclear "deterrent" so long as the US continues its massive military drive to achieve "full spectrum dominance" of the planet from or through space.

• All states must support a call for a global moratorium on any further uranium mining and nuclear materials production.

• Rather than placing our hopes on international "control" of the civilian nuclear fuel cycle, to prevent proliferation and the possibility of nuclear war as well as fossil-fuel driven climate catastrophes, we must phase out nuclear power and mobilize for safe, clean, sustainable energy and bring an end to the nuclear age.

• The international community must establish an International Sustainable Energy Agency, which would supercede the NPT's promise of an "inalienable right" to "peaceful" nuclear technology as we phase out nuclear power.

• The international community must fund the International Sustainable Energy Agency with the $250 billion in tax breaks and subsidies now going to the fossil, nuclear, and industrial biomass industries, and tackle global warming by jump-starting a 21st Century sustainable energy future.

• The international community must establish a "Bronx Project" to clean up the mess that is the legacy of the Manhattan Project, by isolating nuclear materials from the environment and developing a responsible containment system to be passed on to future generations.