Nuclear Detonations would Not be Good for Montgomery County, MD

Today I’ll scoop the cat litter, then call my two US senators (main desk 202-224-3121, or find your senators here) to ask them please to halt the countdown to nuclear war. In Ukraine, in Palestine/Israel, on the Korean Peninsula, there is no military solution, only military escalation. The only path to survival–for hostages, for all of us–is negotiation. On Saturday September 20, 2024, we came within 72 minutes of a strategic nuclear war, according to Scott Ritter.

You might remember Ritter, the former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties and who warned that there was NO evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before G.W. Bush/Dick Cheney invaded Iraq anyway to destroy the (fictitious) WMD. Today, Ritter’s warning seems equally credible, and equally ignored by legacy media. We are kept in the dark.

We who live near targets (e.g., Washington, DC) will die quickly from the effects of the nuclear blasts, but most of the human race will die by starvation, as Carl Sagan and his team described in a research article in the journal SCIENCE. “Nuclear winter" will be a period of darkness, famine, toxic gases, and subzero cold. (I was a lowly assistant letters editor at SCIENCE when Sagan et al.’s paper was published in 1983). Nuclear blasts will create firestorms that will send soot into the atmosphere, blotting out the sun, thus ending human agriculture. Experts now quibble about whether that darkness will last for 20, or 40, or 100 years.

We are all hostages to the nuclear-war industry. “We who believe in peace cannot rest.” That’s not quite true. Sleep deprivation is a social justice issue. So I’ll rest, take a walk, do some yoga, take out the recycling for pickup. Losing sleep over the problem is not recommended. Persistent resistance to war and genocide is recommended. I’ll call and write to my senators, and ask for their written response to my plea.

Steven Sellers Lapham, Gaithersburg, Maryland

P.S. The Washington Post, for three days, digs its hole of deep denial, Sept 24, 25, 26, with "analysis" such as, "There is a growing understanding globally that these ['calls from inside Russia for nuclear strikes on Europe and Ukraine'] amount to little more than intimidation and threats" (page A12, Sept 26, 2024).
So The Post is following the end of the world like a sportscaster on the radio: Today, Putin did not start a nuclear war, even though the U.S. and Ukraine crossed another "red line" in the never-ending war. And hey! Again today! Putin did not start a nuclear war, even though the U.S. and Ukraine crossed yet another "red line" in the never-ending war. Wow, and again today! We are so lucky! No nuclear war yet! There's a general understanding, all over the world, that this is just a game. Right?

The insanity is revealed by the headline of the news item on Sept. 26: "Russia Alters Nuclear Doctrine to be 'More Flexible.'" That is not good news. This is not a sport.