The Moral Issue
As people of faith, we affirm life and all that nurtures it. We abhor nuclear weapons and the destruction they portent. As people of faith, we choose life!

--For People of Faith: An Urgent Call to End the Nuclear Danger

Posted on Nuclear Reduction/Disarmament Initiative. www.nrdi.org

Nuclear weapons violate the moral law of every civilization since the Ten Commandments. No other weapon comes close to their power to incinerate hundreds of thousands of humans in minutes. No other weapon spreads radioactive carcinogens that shred the genes of life and transmit the defects to the children of those who survive. Both the Russian and American people are targeted by nuclear weapons, each one of which is seven to forty times as powerful as the Hiroshima weapon. With our abundance of conventional weapons, the U.S. has no need for nuclear deterrence, yet we continue to enhance their power, usability and longevity. By preserving a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons and threatening to use them preemptively, our government deters other nations from interfering in its actions. Our attachment to these horrible, suicidal weapons strongly suggests that many people in our government value power more than life itself.

Should people with such values be in a position to determine the future of the children and grandchildren around the world?

"No degree of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make safe and which remain an incalculable danger to the whole of creation for historical or even geological ages. To do such a thing is a transgression against life itself, a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime ever perpetrated by man. The idea that civilization could sustain itself on the basis of such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual, and metaphysical monstrosity. It means conducting the economic affairs of man as if people really did not matter at all." --E.F. Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful