Who has time to think about nuclear weapons?

This article Who has time to think about nuclear weapons? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

“Pretty far from the pulse.” That was the comment someone on social media wrote below a photo of me getting arrested at an anti-nuclear protest near the United Nations earlier this month.

Despite being strangely immune to my winning smile and poo poo-ing someone else’s work and passion to perhaps feel a bit superior, that person wasn’t wrong.

After all, who has time to think about nuclear weapons when there’s so much else to worry about: Trump-Musk’s kleptocracy and government-busting, the daily fresh hell of Trump-Vance’s war on woke, the rise of white nationalists or even the price of eggs?

Nuclear weapons — the most powerful and destructive weapon in the world — are not even on most Americans’ list of top 10 fears or top 10 causes they care about. That is a shift from the height of the Cold War when kids in middle America cowered under their desks in nuclear attack drills and had nightmares about nuclear destruction. 

Unfortunately, this lack of interest doesn’t mean that nuclear weapons have somehow auto-disarmed or rehabilitated themselves like some has-been TikTok-famous person. Quite the contrary: There are more nuclear powers, more nuclear weapons and more national resources devoted to nuclear weapons than ever before.

Thankfully, there is a serious, militant and ever burgeoning international movement — mostly from the Global South — that is working toward nuclear abolition. Long at the forefront have been Japan’s hibakusha, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic survivors and their children. There are only a handful of them left, but the organization that unites them and their clarion call for nuclear abolition, Nihon Hidankyo, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024 for “demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.”

More than a dozen other Nobel Peace Prizes have been awarded to organizations and individuals committed to the work of nuclear abolition over the years. The most recent recipient was the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, which received the award in 2017 for its work developing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It’s a clear, smart and achievable international treaty that prohibits nations from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, transferring, possession, stockpiling, using or threatening to use nuclear weapons. Seems pretty comprehensive, right? It goes even further, prohibiting nations from allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory. It also prohibits nations from assisting, encouraging or inducing anyone to engage in any of these activities.

The treaty is so comprehensive, in part, because earlier efforts to curb or reduce nuclear weapons were couched in strategic ambiguity, which has been exploited by the nuclear powers and the nations that enjoy their protection. This treaty is smarter because it did not come from the nuclear hegemons or the U.N. Security Council, which replicates the nuclear hierarchy power dynamics by giving the permanent five members veto power.

Instead the treaty came out of grassroots organizing initiated by the nations most affected by nuclear weapons every day. These activists know all too well that even if another bomb is never detonated, people living where uranium and plutonium is mined, people living where the nuclear powers tested their devices and people living where the nuclear powers dump the nuclear waste are also the people who suffer the illnesses, deaths, the degradation of land and water, as well as the theft of their way of life and livelihoods. It should come as no surprise that all over the world these are Indigenous communities, pushed to the margins by colonialism and forced to contend with nuclear waste and wanton disregard. It should come as no surprise that many of these nations are also suffering the consequences of a rapidly warming planet, with sea level rises, uber-storms, protracted droughts and species extinction.

These are powerful, resilient, creative people networking, weaving their stories and experiences together, sharing their Indigenous knowledge, and using the United Nations framework to create something new out of decades of big power entrenchment on nuclear abolition. It is no small feat that the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has now been signed and ratified by half the world’s population. Sadly (but not surprisingly), the United States — the world’s largest nuclear power and only country to use nuclear weapons in war — has yet to sign on.

And that’s the reason I was in New York City on March 5, standing on First Avenue and 45th Street, with my hands behind my back in metal handcuffs. While parties to the treaty were meeting inside the United Nations, protesters convened by the Atlantic Life Community and War Resisters League were standing outside, calling on a recalcitrant United States to send someone from the U.S. Mission to attend.

The picture that caught me smiling was taken at a moment of genuine happiness. It hadn’t been the easiest action to pull off — and yet, we had mostly succeeded. The goal was to block traffic in front of the United Nations, ostensibly making it easier for the U.S. delegation to get to the meeting. 

At our planning session the day before, however, we were too focused on getting all the banners and props finished to spend much time on the flow of the action. The long banners — which we were to carry into the street with us — were too big to practice with inside our meeting space. It was hard to see how all the pieces were going to fit together, and that made me hold off on deciding whether to participate in the blockade. 

Then, we got a late start the morning of the action. It being the holy day of Ash Wednesday, we waited for Archbishop John Wester, of Santa Fe, New Mexico, to bless our group with ashes — the symbol of our commitment to atone through the 40 days of Lent. It was worth waiting for — Archbishop Wester authored a singularly important 2022 “Pastoral Letter on Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace” in which he called for serious work to chart a “new path to nuclear disarmament.” Feeling the ashes on my forehead, I decided to risk arrest.

As we prepared to block traffic, I grabbed onto the banner imploring the U.S. to join the treaty. It was 40 feet long, made of taped strips of paper, and extremely fragile and slippery. Holding onto it in the late winter wind took so much concentration that I forgot to be fearful as I stepped into traffic. A block away, another team carried a banner saying “Ban nuclear weapons which are illegal and immoral.”

In the end, 17 of us were arrested. Although we didn’t convince the U.S. to send anyone to the treaty meeting, we did make a pretty big stink  — and a team from our group wheatpasted the text of the treaty onto the ground in front of the U.S. Mission.

As an American, as a white person, as someone from the nuclear-dependent community of New London, Connecticut, and as a Catholic, this Lenten action seemed like one small way to signal my atonement for the sin of nuclearism — and to announce that I am fasting from nuclear weapons for the next 40 days. In this fast, I align myself with all the economic boycotts that are seeking to counter the Trump regime’s slash and burn of every aspect of American governance.

So, going back to that person who commented “pretty far from the pulse” on the photo of my arrest, I’ll say this: The pulse is the resistance — and it is inside the resister. It gets bigger when we resist together, it helps us overcome fear and stay connected. In actions large or small, individual acts or mass movements, photographed or unnoticed, the pulse is there in the resistance. We couldn’t be closer to the pulse, because it is inside of us! 

This article Who has time to think about nuclear weapons? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/03/who-has-time-to-think-about-nuclear-weapons/