Military

-In 1995, the (then) Labour government of Australia established the Canberra Commission, a group of seventeen distinguished world figures, to develop ideas and proposals for a concrete and realistic program to achieve a world totally free of nuclear weapons. Among the Commissioners: General Butler, former Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Strategic Air Command (1991–1992) and the U.S. Strategic Command (1992–94) who was responsible for all the nuclear forces of the American Air Force and Navy

-“Despite all the evidence, we have yet to fully grasp the monstrous effect of these weapons, that the consequences of their use defy reason, transcending time and space, poisoning the Earth and deforming its inhabitants.” Nuclear weapons are “inherently dangerous, hugely expensive and militarily inefficient.” General Butler stated that “accepting nuclear weapons as the ultimate arbiter of conflict condemns the world to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety. Worse, it codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts as an acceptable resort when other options for resolving conflict fail.” He added, “I have spent years studying nuclear weapons effects…have investigated a distressing array of accidents and incidents involving strategic weapons and forces… I came away from that experience deeply troubled by what I see as the burden of building and maintaining nuclear arsenals … the grotesquely destructive war plans, the daily operational risks, and the constant prospect of a crisis that would hold the fate of entire societies at risk.”

-Common sense tells us that 27,000 nuclear warheads, let alone the peak of 32,500, far exceeded any conceivable need the United States could possibly have had. How unrealistic were such numbers? It would take 55 billion aircraft bombs, each bomb containing 500 pounds of TNT, to unleash as much energy as 32,500 nuclear warheads. To put this in perspective, each state in the union could be carpeted with 1 billion bombs with 5 billion to spare – something quite beyond imagination.

(Admiral Stansfield Turner, former Director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, describes his astonishment at a 1971 briefing in which it was argued that the United states needed to go from 27,000 nuclear warheads to 32,000)

-We, military professionals, who have devoted our lives to the national security of our countries and our peoples, are convinced that the continuing existence of nuclear weapons in the armories of nuclear powers, and the ever present threat of acquisition of these weapons by others, constitute a peril to global peace and security and to the safety and survival of the people we are dedicated to protect.

(A group of sixty one former generals and admirals from seventeen countries, including United States and Russia, declared in December, 1996)

 

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