Tag: No Nukes!

Peace & Justice History for 4/3

April 3, 1958
10,000 British joined a rally in advance of a three-day, fifty-mile peace march from Trafalgar Square, London, to Aldermaston, Berkshire. Berkshire was the site of the AWRE (Atomic Weapons Research Establishment). This march marked the beginning of many protests against Britain’s development of nuclear weaponry. Thousands made the march along the same route for many years.

Some 10,000 people joined the 1958 rally.

David and Renee Gill at the first Altermaston march 1958

and at the April 2004 march…still protesting fornuclear disarmament.
Their story
April 3, 1963
Black residents of Birmingham, Alabama, sat in at several lunch counters seeking to be served as customers. It was part of “Project C” (for Confrontation) on “B Day” (for Birmingham) organized by Reverends Fred Shuttlesworth of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). They issued a Birmingham Manifesto: “. . . the patience of an oppressed people cannot endure forever.”
April 3, 1968

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech in Memphis, Tennessee. King was there to support sanitation workers striking to protest low wages and poor working conditions.
“. . . I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!And so I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”
King was assassinated the next day.
Read the speech  …or listen 
Watch an excerpt of his final and prophetic speech 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryapril.htm#april3

Peace & Justice History for 1/21

January 21, 1661

King Charles II
The Quaker (Society of Friends) Peace Testimony was presented to King Charles II of England. The testimony begins: “We utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretence whatsoever. And this is our testimony to the whole world….”
Why are Quakers pacifists 
January 21, 1954
The first atomic-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, built by Electric Boat Company, was launched at Groton, Connecticut. All previous submarines were powered by batteries which had to be periodically recharged by diesel-powered generators which could only run if the sub surfaced.The nuclear power plant, developed under the leadership of Captain Hyman Rickover, and its ability to produce its own fresh water, allowed Nautilus and its successors to remain underwater and undetectable for weeks rather than hours. It carried only conventional torpedoes.
It has been completely restored and can be seen at the Submarine Force Museum in Groton.

nautilus submarine launch
January 21, 1977
The day after his inauguration President Jimmy Carter declared an unconditional amnesty for draft resisters, both the accused and those who might have faced possible prosecution.
Carter’s pardon 
January 21, 1984
A Women’s Peace Camp was set up near Volkel Airbase in The Netherlands to protest siting of U.S. nuclear weapons there.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjanuary.htm#january21

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.

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 8/11

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august111894

August 11, 1894
Federal troops forced some 1,200 jobless workers across the Potomac River and out of Washington, D.C.
  Jack London
Led by an unemployed activist, “General” Charles “Hobo” Kelly, the jobless group’s “soldiers” included young journalist Jack London, known for writing about social issues, and miner/cowboy William ”Big Bill” Haywood who later organized western miners and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). “Big Bill” Haywood 
Read about “Big Bill”: https://apwu.org/news/big-bill-haywood-wobbly-giant
August 11, 1958
A drugstore chain in Wichita, Kansas, agreed to serve all its customers after weeks of sit-ins at Dockum’s lunch counter by local African-Americans who wanted an end to segregation. On this day, as several black Wichitans were sitting at the counter even though the store refused to serve them, a white man around 40 walked in and looked at them for several minutes. Then he looked at the store manager and said, simply, “Serve them. I’m losing too much money.” He was the owner, Robert Dockum. That day the lawyer for the local NAACP branch called the company and was told by the a vice president ”he had instructed all of his managers, clerks, etc., to serve all people without regard to race, creed or color,” statewide. This was the first success of the sit-in movement which soon spread to Oklahoma City and other towns in Kansas, but is often thought to have started in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960.
August 11, 1984 

Prior to his weekly radio address, unaware that the microphone was open and he was broadcasting, President Ronald Reagan joked, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” Many Americans and others throughout the world were concerned about the President’s apparently flippant attitude towards nuclear war at a time of increasing tension between the two major nuclear powers.Among other things, the U.S. had begun a major strategic arms buildup, adding many thousands of additional nuclear warheads along with a broad range of new delivery systems: long-range bombers including 100 B-1B stealth bombers and MX (10-warhead) ICBMs, considered first-strike weapons; intermediate-range missiles to be deployed in Europe; 3000 cruise missiles; and Trident nuclear submarines with sea-launched cruise missiles.
Additionally, Reagan had proposed building the space-based Strategic Defense Initiative of anti-ballistic missiles, a destabilizing influence on the nuclear balance. The Nuclear Arms Control Legacy of Ronald Reagan: https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004-07/arms-control-today/looking-back-nuclear-arms-control-legacy-ronald-reagan