Common Security: no national boundaries

Common Security: no national boundaries

The Hiroshima/Nagasaki Accord San Francisco, July 15, 2020

Hiroshima after the bombing

The 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be commemorated on August 6, and 9, 2020 by four of the world’s leading interfaith/intercultural organizations, with a call for the abolition of all nuclear weapons.

The appeal will be part of an hour-long online video presentation with supporting statements from former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev, former US Secretary of State George Shultz, and other prominent voices. It will be held on August 6 and 9.

You can participate. Register here.

I have wondered at the wisdom of choosing Open Borders for the title of my memoir about the anti-nuclear war movement I participated in in the 1980s. When the book came out in the fall of 2018, people imagined the topic to be the wall between the US and Mexico or some such barrier between our country and others. They didn’t want to talk about it, especially in rural Washington state.

In just two years, with the commemoration of the destruction of two Japanese cities 75 years ago set for this August 6 – 9, strategic global thinkers are reminding us that there are no borders in this game. Common Security is the only way forward. That’s what I believed when my husband, daughter, and I joined thirty others on a trip behind the Iron Curtain at a time of grave nuclear danger. I envisioned a world with no borders to be defended with Mutually Assured Destructive weapons. Borders defining cultural heritage and ethnicity perhaps, but not to lock out the Other in fear and distrust.

1986 nuclear treaty Reykjavik
Meeting held in Reykjavík, Iceland, on October 11 and 12, 1986, between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

This essay by Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, brings us full circle. It is only through Common Security that can we save the world. It is hard to imagine the leaders of the nine nations who possess nuclear weapons seated in trust around a table to work this problem out to the mutual benefit of humanity and the planet. Let us not lose hope. Join me and thousands of others on August 6-9.

In Solidarity for a nuclear-free world, Betsy