Abolish Nuclear Weapons!
The 80th Anniversary of Hiroshima/Nagasaki Rally at Vandenberg Space Force Base, CA, Aug. 9, 2025
Thank you, dear friends for gathering today and coming here regularly. When I think of 80 years under the nuclear threat, I reflect that we’ve never known anything but a world of nuclear weapons, where we could vaporize one another in a flash, and say to God, what it took you 15 billion years to make, we can destroy in 15 minutes.
As we remember the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the lie that the bombings saved lives, we see a trail of death and destruction since then, with the Korean war, the Cold war, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam war, the US wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, Grenada, Libya, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and the U.S. funded Israeli war on Palestine, now with full on genocide–a world of permanent war, war on the poor, war on the children, war on Mother Earth and the creatures, full on systemic evil which has brought us to this midnight hour, the insanity of Donald Trump and the Republican party and a new level of collective insanity.
Eighty years ago, Gandhi said the atomic bombings would have spiritual consequences upon the people who built and dropped them, that they would destroy the soul of the people who did it. I think that’s what we’re seeing today–not only the collapse of empire but the spiritual consequences of our idolatry, our collective spiritual death.
What do we do? In the Sermon on the Mount, the nonviolent Jesus urges us to renounce all fear, worry, anger, and anxiety, to surrender ourselves to the God of peace, to do only God’s will, and focus solely on God’s reign of peace and love. He says we can cultivate two emotions: grief and joy in response to the persecution we receive for our nonviolent resistance. So we grieve our collective insanity, and all those we’ve killed; we weep with the nonviolent Jesus over our refusal to learn the things that make for peace; and like Jesus, we go forward and take nonviolent direct action in permanent nonviolent resistance to the empire. Together, in a community of peacemaking friends, we take heart and find joy in one another and in the resurrection of our beloved nonviolent Jesus.
Today, we hear the cry of the Hibakasha, the atomic survivors who never gave up, who kept crying out publicly in the nuclear wilderness, No more Hiroshimas! No more Nagasakis! Today, we claim them as our mentors and teachers; and carry on as American hibakasha who keep coming here to the gates of hell to cry out across the American nuclear wilderness: No more Hiroshimas! No more Nagasakis!
So our message and prayer is the proclamation of the nonviolent Jesus: brothers and sisters of Vandenberg and America, Repent of the mortal sin of war and nuclear weapons. The kingdom of God, God’s reign of universal love, universal compassion, universal life and universal peace is at hand. Together, let us quit our violence, dismantle our weapons, renounce our insanity, and welcome the sanity of Jesus’ nonviolence and God’s reign of universal love. God bless everyone. Thank you.