16th congressional district Green Party candidate write on nuclear disarmament today:

“Make the Rubble Bounce”

Yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates delivered a policy speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Here are excerpts of his remarks.

“(W)e must deal with the messy realities of the world in which we live. One of those realities is the existence of nuclear weapons.”

“Try as we might, and hope as we will, the power of nuclear weapons and their strategic impact is a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle – at least for a very long time. While we have a long-term goal of abolishing nuclear weapons once and for all, given the world in which we live, we have to be realistic about that proposition.”

“To be blunt, there is absolutely no way we can maintain a credible deterrent and reduce the number of weapons in our stockpile without either resorting to testing our stockpile or pursuing a modernization program.”

Mr. Gates, it seems, is intent on keeping our nuclear menace trigger-ready. For shame. For shame!

Not only that. He would have us spend new billions on refurbishing and retooling our fiendishly awful nuclear armament. And testing it!

For Secretary Gates, genie stuffing is just oh-too-much-trouble. Can’t-be-bothered. Let-somebody-else-do-it. “A very long time” from now.

Sorry, Mr. Gates. You have it precisely backwards. Horribly, awfully, appallingly, disgustingly backwards.

The “messy reality” you blithely overlook is the prospect of annihilation of the planet. The “messy reality” you cavalierly deny is the possible extermination of the human race.

And the time to deal with it is now. Now. NOW.

No more obfuscation. No more excuses. No more deferral. No more delays.

Rather than retool weapons — let us retool treaties and protocols.

And rid ourselves of the curse and scourge and fear and terror of nuclear weaponry.

Let us finally, finally lay claim — for ourselves, and for our children, and for generations yet unborn — to the stirring ancient prophecy of beating swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks.

And in so doing, may we avert the apocalypse foretold by Winston Churchill:

“If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.”