Tag: Linus Pauling

Treaties, Illegal Weapons Sales, & More In Peace & Justice History for 10/10:

October 10, 1699
The Spanish issued a royal decree which stated that every African-American who came to St. Augustine, Florida, and adopted Catholicism would be free and protected from the English.
October 10, 1963
The Limited Test Ban Treaty—banning nuclear tests in the oceans, in the atmosphere, and in outer space—went into effect. The nuclear powers of the time—the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—had signed the treaty earlier in the year.
In 1957, Nobel Prize-winner (Chemistry) Linus Pauling drafted the Scientists’ Bomb-Test Appeal with two colleagues, Barry Commoner and Ted Condon, eventually gaining the support of 11,000 scientists from 49 countries for an end to the testing of nuclear weapons. These included Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and Albert Schweitzer.

Linus Pauling
Pauling then took the resolution to Dag Hammarskjöld, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, and sent copies to both President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev. The final treaty had many similarities to Pauling’s draft. It went into effect the same day as the announcement of Pauling’s second Nobel Prize, this time for Peace.
October 10, 1967
The Outer Space Treaty (Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies) demilitarizing outer space went into force.It sought to avoid “a new form of colonial competition” as in the Antarctic Treaty, and the possible damage that self-seeking exploitation might cause. Discussions on banning weapons of mass destruction in orbit had begun among the major powers ten years earlier.

1949 painting by Frank Tinsley of the infamous “Military Space Platform” proposed by then Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in the December 1948 military budget.
The text of the treaty 
Read more 
October 10, 1986
Elliott Abrams, then assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (in closed executive session) that he did not know that Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, a White House employee in the Reagan administration, was directing illegal arms sales to Iran and diverting the proceeds to assist the Nicaraguan contras.
Abrams pled guilty in 1991 to withholding information on the Iran-contra affair during that congressional testimony, but was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush.  
   
Elliott Abrams

Presidents George W. Bush & George H.W. Bush

Oliver North 
Read more about the pardons  
October 10, 1987
Thirty thousand Germans demonstrated against construction of a large-scale nuclear reprocessing installation at Wackersdorf in mostly rural northern Bavaria.
October 10, 2002 
The House voted 296-133 to pass the “Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq,” giving President George W. Bush broad authority to use military force against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, with or without U.N. support. 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october10

Peace & Justice History for 6/3

June 3, 1900

The International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), a consolidation of seven smaller east coast needle trades unions, was founded.
Read more
 
Herman Grossman, ILGWU president
June 3, 1946
In Irene Morgan v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in interstate travel was unconstitutional as “an undue burden on commerce.”

The southern states refused to enforce it, however, and Jim Crow (the term for laws, local and state, that enforced segregation) continued as the way of life in the South.
Eleven years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, a young woman named Irene Morgan rejected that same demand on an interstate bus headed to Maryland from Gloucester, Virginia.
Read more about Irene Morgan 
Recovering from surgery and already sitting far in the back, she defied the driver’s order to surrender her seat to a white couple. Like Parks, Morgan was arrested and jailed. But her action caught the attention of lawyers from the NAACP, led by (future Supreme Court justice) Thurgood Marshall, and two years later her case reached the Court.

Headlines when Irene Morgan won out over Jim Crow (JC) segregation law
June 3, 1957
Thousands of scientists, led by Barry Commoner and Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, issued a call for banning nuclear weapons testing: “As scientists we have knowledge of the dangers involved and therefore a special responsibility to make those dangers known.”
“…Then on May 15, 1957, with the help of some of the scientists in Washington University, St. Louis, I wrote the Scientists’ Bomb Test Appeal, which within two weeks was signed by over two thousand American scientists and within a few months by 11,021 scientists, of forty-nine countries….” –Linus Pauling
 
Linus Pauling at a disarmament demonstration photo: Robert Carl Cohen

Read “An Appeal by American Scientists to the Governments and People of the World.”

Pauling is the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes, for Chemistry in 1954; for Peace in 1962. Read his acceptance speech, “Science and Peace”
June 3, 1964
Conscientious objection, the refusal to bear arms in time of war on the grounds of moral or religious principles, became legally recognized in Belgium.
A history of European conscientious objection 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjune.htm#june3

Peace & Justice History for 1/13

January 13, 1874
The depression of 1873-1877 left 3 million people unemployed. The depression began when railroad owner Jay Cooke was found to have issued millions of dollars of worthless stock. Investors panicked and banks closed. The unbalanced, overextended new economy collapsed.
In the winter of 1873, 900 people starved to death, and 3,000 deserted their infants on doorsteps. A public meeting was called in New York City’s Tompkins Square Park to lobby for public works projects to provide jobs; the city’s unemployment rate was approaching 25% at the time.

The Tompkins Park Massacre
The night before, the City secretly voided the permit for the gathering. The next morning, mounted police charged into the crowd of 10,000, indiscriminately clubbing adults and children, leaving hundreds of casualties.
Police commissioner Abram Duryee commented, “It was the most glorious sight I have ever seen . . . .”
The Tompkins Square event was part of a wave of parades of the unemployed and bread riots across the nation. In Chicago, 20,000 people marched. Even under police attack, workers in New York, Omaha, and Cincinnati refused to disperse.
January 13, 1958
Linus Pauling presented the “Scientists’s Test Ban Petition”
to the United Nations, signed by over 11,000 scientists (including 36 Nobel laureates) from 49 countries. It called for an end to nuclear weapons testing for its detrimental health, especially genetic, and ecological effects, among other reasons. In reaction to his efforts, Pauling was forced to resign as Chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech (California Institute of Technology) after having served in that role for 22 years.
The petition 
Background – Linus Pauling & The Bomb 
January 13, 1962
One hundred fifty members of the Scottish Committee of 100 (an anti-nuclear group) began a sit-down protest at the U.S. consulate in Glasgow, Scotland.
January 13, 1993
A vigil was held opposing the arrival of a ship bringing nearly two metric tons of plutonium for a pilot fuel reprocessing plant in Tokai, Japan. The specially constructed ship, the Akatsuki Maru, had carried it 25,000 km (15,500 miles) from Cherbourg, France.

Akatsuki Maru

The Voyage Of The Akatsuki Maru by Mario Uribe
Many objected to the maritime transport of the highly radioactive material due to the risk of sinking, hijacking and the resultant risk of further nuclear proliferation. The original plan called for air transport over the United States. 
The Hottest Import To Hit Japan 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjanuary.htm#january13