Letter to the Editor

Below is a letter to the editor I wrote that was printed in the Santa Fe New Mexican on Aug. 17. The important thing is to get people across the country thinking about nuclear weapons and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM). ICBM’s contain nuclear bombs and ours are being upgraded (new missiles and new bombs). Many of the bomb pits, the part that ignites the bomb, will be made in Los Alamos, not far from Santa Fe, where I live. I’m hoping that across the country even people who believe in nuclear weapons as an effective deterrent to nuclear war could come to support the dismantling of our ICBMs. Hence, my letter, written in the hope of starting conversations about these topics. Please use it, talk about it, modify it, pass it on.

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Nuclear weapons are a threat to humanity, and to all life on our planet. They are so deadly that Pope Francis has said even the possession of nuclear weapons is immoral. We are the only country to have used, not just possessed, nuclear weapons. In 1945 with two atomic bombs, we killed around 215,000 Japanese. More died later from radiation sickness and cancers. We now have over 5,000 nuclear warheads, some that can kill over 500,000 people. More are soon to be built at Los Alamos and in South Carolina. Why are we doing this? 

Reagan and Gorbachev said in 1985, “A nuclear war cannot be won and should never be fought.” We are told our bombs will never be used; they are just for deterrence. That deterrence has prevented nuclear war until now is an unverifiable proposition. It is more likely pure luck that has saved us. The only certain way to prevent nuclear war is to abolish nuclear weapons.

We cannot abolish nuclear weapons without international cooperation. But we can decide, unilaterally, not to build more ICBM’s. They are the most dangerous part of our nuclear defense system — not just to our enemies, but to ourselves! They must be fired within minutes of a perceived attack, meaning that a false alarm could set off a nuclear war almost instantaneously. Being in fixed silos across the U.S., whose locations are known, they are vulnerable to an enemy attack. Nuclear submarines, on the other hand, move around and their locations are not known. We and the world would be safer if we abolished our ICBMs; other countries, seeing the threat of an accidental war decrease, would follow suit 

The plutonium pits to be built at Los Alamos will be used as nuclear triggers on the Sentinel missiles, our newest ICBM’s. The cost of building these pits, not including the cost of producing the missiles is over $30 billion. We are spending this money on something immoral and that we claim we will never use — money that could be spent on something moral and usable, such as health care, education, good public transportation and affordable housing. In the process, we are endangering the health of New Mexicans by potentially exposing our air, land and water to radioactive plutonium from accidental spills either at the Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) or on the routes leading to and from the Lab. 

With this new project at LANL, we are starting a new nuclear arms race and are increasing the likelihood of a nuclear war. Remembering the horror we unleashed 79 years ago on August 6 and 9, let us resolve to never use nuclear weapons again, and to act morally and courageously to make the world safer by decreasing, rather than enhancing, our nuclear arsenal.