>> From WXXI News.

This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made on November 20th, 1983 when a made for TV movie called The Day After aired on ABC.

The reaction was hard to imagine.

Today, 100 million people watched this made for TV film.

The Day After told the story of a conflict between NATO and the Soviet Union, culminating in a full scale nuclear exchange of hundreds of bombs following the nuclear devastation.

The film depicted chaos, suffering, looting, murder and the beginning of societal collapse.

Before the film aired, the network warned viewers that it would be hard to watch and that young children should watch with parents or guardians and then discuss the issue of nuclear warfare.

ABC famously opened hotlines with counselors that night, and immediately following the film, ABC's Nightline aired a debate that included the scientist Carl Sagan and political commentator William F Buckley Jr.. Buckley argued that deterrence was the safest path forward, noting the idea of mutually assured destruction.

Sagan disagreed.

He called for nuclear nonproliferation because, as he put it, it only takes one tense moment or a mistake for everything to explode.

Sagan described the arms race like this quote imagine a room, a wash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room.

One of them has 9000 matches, the other has 7000 matches.

Each of them is concerned about who's ahead and who is stronger.

End quote.

In the 1980s, it seemed like everyone was talking about nuclear war.

Everyone was thinking about it.

Now, by then, as some listeners have already pointed out to me, there were still some kids engaging in classroom drills, diving under desks.

But that was mostly in the 1960s or so.

That was waning by then.

But there were still all kinds of demonstrations and protest movements, not just in the United States, but in European capitals.

Well, 40 years later, there are now nine countries with nuclear weapons.

Several more are actively trying to join the so-called nuclear club.

Russia's leadership is threatening nuclear annihilation routinely.

And yet there are no mass protests that I have seen.

There is not the same heightened public consciousness.

Why is that?

Earlier this month, Russian drones breached Polish airspace, and for a few hours, it looked like a possible attack on a NATO country.

Nuclear alerts went out.

The leaders of Denmark have pledged to expand their own military arsenal because they believe Russia, they say, will be an existential threat for everyone for years to come.

The reaction has mostly been, though, a collective shrug.

Yes, there are people and leaders concerned with the prospect of nuclear war, but the public shows really nothing close to the intensity of those past decades.

Why is that?

Are we numb to it?

I said at the beginning of this hour that when I was growing up and going to summer camp, we often listened to and sang a song that asked, where have all the flowers gone?

Well, where have all the nuclear demonstrations gone?

We're going to welcome members of our community who have not let up their campaign to keep the public engaged on this subject, and I want to welcome them now, in the studio with us is Holly Adams, a member of Genesee Valley Citizens for peace, a member of the Steering Committee for Peace Action, New York State, among other titles.

It's nice to have you, Holly.

Thank you for being with us.

>> Thank you for having me.

>> Next to Holly is Reverend James Swarts, and Jim is president of veterans for peace.

Might have heard him on this program a number of times over the years.

And it's nice to have you back, Reverend.

Thank you for being with us.

>> Oh, thank you for inviting us out.

>> And on the line with us is Timmon Wallis.

Timmon is executive director of Nuclear Ban U.S., is the author of a number of books, including Nuclear Abolition, a scenario published just this past May.

Tim and welcome.

Thank you for being with us.

>> Thank you for having me.

>> I'll start in studio, and I know our guests are eager to hear what Tim has to say about a lot of these issues.

but I'll just start with this.

Reverend, not to date us here, but I was a young boy in the 80s.

I was born at the end of the 70s.

and so I did not grow up with, really, as a boy with any day to day, month to month concern about this issue.

There were no classroom drills.

There was very little discussion.

By the time I was in my teenage years, Soviet Union was collapsing, Fukuyama said.

We were in the holiday from history.

It seemed like everything had changed and the consciousness wasn't there for me.

What do you remember about the Cold War days that were tense and the public consciousness consciousness about nuclear weapons?

>> Well, well, first, thank you, Evan, for inviting us on to your show today to discuss the threat of nuclear war.

And if you'll permit me a few minutes to reflect on some of my own background and experience I hate to admit it, but I'm an octogenarian.

I grew up in the height of the Cold War, watching TV shows such as I LED Three Lives.

This was an incredible TV show.

It was supposedly the true story of Herbert Philbrick, a Boston advertising executive who infiltrated the U.S.

Communist Party on behalf of the FBI in the 1940s and wrote a bestselling book on the topic, I LED Three Lives, Citizen Communist Counterspy, published in 1952.

According to Wikipedia, the program lasted 117 episodes over a period of four years.

But looking back on what I remember of those programs was how unhinged they became over time.

but at the same time, making its American audience increasingly paranoid that there is a communist spy lurking in every corner of our world.

And we're going to be blowing up in no time at all.

the in fact, there was one program that was so ridiculous, it was your vacuum cleaner was a spy machine for the communists.

I mean, it was, only about five episodes.

Really reflected any of Philbrick's actual writings.

And his experience.

They went really off the wall.

and like all of the survivors of my generation, we continuously had these ridiculous duck and cover drills in grade school and high school, as well as movies that we now recognize as pure propaganda.

which did nothing more than to render a whole generation of young people so paranoid that we believed we were going to be incinerated by a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.

I used the term survivor here as a loose connection to the psychological effect that these exercises had upon us, and that we carried for the rest of our lives.

The in the same sense, I feel sorry for the young students today who will be forever scarred by the active shooter drills that they are going through in school today, but in their case, it's a real threat, as we know.

But I see a parallel between the effects of both types of drills, and that's not to undermine the use of the term survivors as it relates to those who have survived the nuclear attack, such as the.

Which means explosion affected person.

And as the term the Japanese applied to the survivors of the nuclear bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the late Dr.

John Jay Lifton conducted a penetrating study of 90,000 people who survived the explosion of the first atomic bomb dropped on a human population.

Excuse me?

Hiroshima.

And he wrote the psychological effect of the bombs and how they fundamentally changed the way people thought about death.

His study was published in the book Death in Life Survivors of Hiroshima, which was published in 68 1968.

Lifton delves into the various ways survivors struggled to come to terms with their experience, including feelings of isolation, the constant reminder of death and their effects to establish new meanings and connections to life after the disaster by providing a detailed, emphatic account of the survivors psychological burdens.

Lifton intended the book to serve as a stark warning against the horror of nuclear conflict, and a final opportunity to learn from the event, and I believe that that study, that study, as well as other studies such as Dr.

Lifton's, helped to propel the anti-nuclear demonstrations of the late 70s and 1980s, or at least they were contributing factors.

and this is personal to me.

as I was mentioning to you earlier, my own family, my Aunt Betty was in the United States Marine Corps during World War II, and she and another female marine were sent as part of a detachment to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

She and her friend were in Hiroshima to search for any documents that might have survived the devastation of the atomic bombs.

They had no special hazardous clothing at all.

They simply wore their military fatigues as they were sifting through the ashes of Hiroshima.

Unfortunately, both women died very painful deaths from cancer related to radiation poisoning.

And I'm sure, I'm sure, you know, from your research that thousands of servicemen and women and some civilian employees were affected by exposure to radiation from those two bombs and from the subsequent above nuclear explosion tests.

And while our government eventually acknowledged responsibility for what happened to all those individuals, by the time Congress authorized compensation, most of the servicemen had died.

At the same time, the government still to this day, refuses to recognize or compensate those people living downwind from the above ground nuclear tests in the 40s and 1940s and 1950s in New Mexico and Nevada.

Again, according to Wikipedia, there were about 210 above ground nuclear tests in the United States from July 1945 to November 1962, primarily at the Nevada Test Site and the Pacific Proving Grounds.

worldwide.

Between the Trinity test nuclear test in July of 1945 and the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, 499 nuclear tests were conducted, and notably the most extensive one was the Castle Bravo test of 1st March 1954.

In particularly attracted significant attention as the detonation.

This was the hydrogen bomb resulted in the fallout that spread over inhabited areas of the Pacific Ocean, and even sickened the crew of a Japanese fishing boat.

the yield of that hydrogen bomb was over 250 times what the scientists who developed it had expected, and it was over 2000 times the magnitude of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So just think for a minute about the effect of such a bomb on one of our major cities in the United States.

Like, like, say, it hit New York City, it would wipe out all Manhattan.

It would.

The blast zone would be as far as Yonkers or above.

it's frightening when you think about it.

And from my own time, I think the closest we ever came to an all out nuclear war was 1962.

And during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I remember being in college at the time in West Virginia, and almost everybody in my dorm piled into the student lounge to watch the one television in the dorm.

This was 1962. and the excitement of a possibility of going to war with the Soviet Union over the missiles in Cuba.

We can be thankful that President Kennedy and his brother Robert, among other civilian officials, utilized back channel communications to arrive at a peaceful settlement much over the objection of General Curtis LeMay.

Of course, it was decades later that we learned it was only because of a level headedness of one submarine.

Soviet submarine commander, that prevented the use of nuclear torpedoes being launched against the United States aircraft carrier.

During that conflict.

Since then, as you know, the world's nuclear arsenal has increased greatly, only making the world less safe.

So with so many unstable actors throughout the world and I would include some of our own leaders that I wouldn't trust with the football including there is such a heightened threat that we must pray that level heads prevailed in every country that has nuclear weapons.

And I'll stop there.

>> Well, I appreciate that perspective.

Let me ask Holly Adams for your own recollections and maybe how you see the moment today compared to some of the previous eras of of protest and demonstration.

>> Sure.

well, for starters, I don't think that the world is numb to nuclear weapons.

I think you're tuned in or you're not.

there are anti-nuclear activists all over the world speaking out, and they're taking bold, powerful action, and they're demanding their governments do their part to get rid of nuclear weapons once and for all anti-nuclear groups and peace groups hold regular events concerning nuclear weapons.

There's films and vigils and protests and letters and visits to representatives, to name a few.

I myself have attended both the two MSP and three MSP, which were the meetings of states parties to the treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons held at the UN in New York City, with people from all over the world.

this past year there were delegates from 94 countries, including 59 states parties and 35 observer states, 700 civil society representatives, as well as representatives from international agencies, affected communities, youth, parliamentarians and financial institutions, all at the third meeting of States parties.

To the treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

The treaty continues to grow.

and the countries that are supporting the treaty banning nuclear weapons, they now represent half of the world's nations.

Indonesia, Sierra Leone, the Solomon Islands became the most recent to ratify the UN treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or Tpnw.

It's a mouthful.

it's a clear signal of global support to the total elimination of these weapons and the bans.

The way to get there.

so to me and press in Central Africa ratified at the beginning of 2024 with these latest ratifications, there are now 73 state parties who have actually made it the law of their land.

And there's another 25 signatories that have signed the treaty but have not yet gotten it through their parliament.

but have signed the treaty.

there are other nations that have supported it.

So the bulk of nations are in support of abolishing nuclear weapons.

I would like to to speak a little bit to the 80s versus now.

I was around in the 80s.

and I did not get to attend the, the concert in Central Park in New York City.

I wish I had because we had we had Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Joan Baez and Linda Ronstadt all in Central Park.

But, this massive demonstration coincided with the un second special session on disarmament, and it was the largest anti-nuclear protest and political demonstration in American history calling for an end to the arms race to promote nuclear disarmament and express hope for a world without nukes.

it did occur during the Cold War with the Soviet Union and a heightened arms race during Reagan's first term Reagan had increased the Pentagon budget 50% between 1980 and 1984.

He called the Soviet Union the evil Empire.

there were a lot more nukes in the 80s than there are today.

although today's are incredibly and disastrously powerful.

the rally called for abolishing nukes, freezing the arms race, and transferring military budgets to human needs.

Wouldn't that be nice?

>> But some things about the 80s.

I mean, first of all, the 70s under Carter was kind of a period of détente.

one of the things that happened in the 80s was a a serious Soviet nuclear false alarm incident.

And there have been many false alarms.

but the Soviet early warning system incorrectly reported the launch of a ballistic missile from the U.S., a Soviet marine submarine wisely decided to wait.

It was a very close call, 1986 saw the Chernobyl explosion.

the concept of nuclear winter became known in the 80s.

One of the scientists was Carl Sagan.

there were fewer countries with nukes in the 80s.

the Soviets had significantly more nukes in the 80s.

But I think that one of the big differences is in the 80s, we knew that protests could change things.

it stopped the war in Vietnam.

It prior to that, it got rid of Jim Crow in the 60s.

Protest hasn't worked in the 21st century.

It didn't stop the war in Iraq.

It hasn't changed climate change.

Occupy Wall Street changed nothing in our economic system.

Obama sent in troops to tear down the encampments, including the one in Zuccotti Park in New York City, where my son was.

And I was for a short time the majority of Americans oppose sending money and weapons to Israel.

For genocide in Palestine, our Congress and representatives collect AIPAC money and don't respond to the will of the people.

They don't listen to us.

Our protest is not being impactful.

we are also less fragmented.

In the 80s, there were only three TV stations.

So of course everyone saw the day after finally in the 80s, we only had one existential crisis.

It was nukes.

Today we have twin crises, nukes and climate change.

The terror of the Cold War has passed.

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a long time ago, 80 years, amazingly, not many hibakusha are still alive.

They're all in their 80s now.

There are fewer nukes, but there are hundreds of times more lethal.

And as Jim said today, the number one killer of children is gunshot.

School shootings are commonplace.

Instead of air raids.

Today, we practice active shooter drills.

I know how that feels.

I was a teacher for 27 years.

it's awful, it's awful.

And the questions that the children ask, we can't answer.

so I think that we have met the enemy, and he is us, as my father used to say.

taking it from Pogo, our best shot, I believe, is the treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

I think that abolishing nuclear weapons is really the only way forward, and and I think that there is precedent for that.

I just have to find where it,, because we have banned weapons, the world has eliminated lots of weapons.

We've eliminated poison bullets in 1675, we eliminated biological weapons that spread disease.

In 1972, we eliminated incendiary weapons, napalm.

In 1980, we eliminated chemical weapons gases.

In 1993, we eliminated blinding laser weapons.

In 1995, we eliminated landmines.

In 1997, we eliminated cluster munitions.

Munitions that break apart and release projectiles.

In 2008, we can't uninvent nukes, but we can dismantle them, agree never to use them again.

Never recreate them.

We can repurpose them.

out of 193 member states in the United Nations, only nine have nuclear weapons, 184 nations do not.

the complete and total elimination of nuclear weapons is the only way to be certain that nuclear weapons will not be used.

>> Let me turn to Timmon Wallis, executive director of Nuclear Ban U.S., author of the new book Nuclear Abolition A scenario.

So, Tim, and why don't you take us through what the actual mechanism to abolish nuclear weapons is?

I asked that because inevitably, in this kind of conversation, what we will hear is someone will say, well, if we give up ours, they won't give up theirs.

And now we are vulnerable to, you know, rule by, you know, sort of the brutal threats of, of a nuclear power.

And so everyone's afraid to give up theirs until everyone else gives them up.

Take us through what you think is plausible.

Tymon.

>> sure.

I'll do my best.

as you heard from the reverend and from Holly.

you know, half the world has already signed this treaty, the treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

And that treaty, like other treaties that Holly mentioned just now that have that have banned other kinds of weapons.

I mean, the treaty sets out a process for countries to get rid of their weapons and for it to be monitored and verified and fair for all the countries involved.

I mean, it's not it's not about, you know, us just giving up our weapons by ourselves and being vulnerable to the Russians or whoever.

it's about, you know, a process, a legal process which which is well established and and has a long history, actually, of, of other weapons as, as Holly mentioned in the case of nuclear weapons, I mean, unlike weapons like landmines or cluster munitions, these are tiny weapons.

They're mass produced all over the world.

They were.

And it's very difficult to to know whether someone's cheating or, you know, rebuilding them.

And as, as as, you know, you know, countries are now pulling out of that treaty because of the Ukraine war.

But when it comes to nuclear weapons, I mean, we're talking about the biggest weapons in the world.

they're very difficult to hide.

They're very, very expensive, which is one reason why only nine countries have ever developed them.

I mean, many, many other countries could have nuclear weapons if they wanted to, but they they don't, mainly because of the money, but also because these weapons are useless in warfare.

They haven't been used since 1945. not because they're so great at defending ourselves, you know, but because they're useless.

We're blowing up whole cities, doesn't doesn't win wars, for a start.

But anyway the the treaty sets out a pathway and you know, it involves having a time, a timeline.

So every country has to come up with a timeline in these other treaties.

And we've done this with nuclear weapons as well with the INF treaty in the 1980s, which dismantled a whole class of nuclear weapons and with the the new start treaties and so on, which, which have been in the past have got rid of certain nuclear weapons already.

And we know how that works.

I was saying, you know, nuclear weapons are huge and expensive, but they're also impossible to hide.

We know every country that has nuclear weapons because we can see them.

building them.

We can see them testing them.

you know, every, every corner of the earth is now covered by satellite surveillance.

We know when a nuclear weapon goes off or or a missile goes off, and we have I'm I'm forgetting the word, but, you know seismographic equipment all over the world for, for measuring earthquakes and so on.

These also pick up earthquakes, nuclear tests.

So it's impossible to hide building a nuclear weapon.

It's impossible.

Literally.

And we have the mechanisms in the, in the at the end of the Cold War, when they dismantled all the intermediate range missiles, they, they had inspectors.

I mean, I, I was living in England during that time, I was, I was like, like holly and and Reverend Schwartz, I was, I was campaigning at the time, and I was actually based at a, at a U.S.

nuclear missile base in England called Molesworth.

in 1987 when they signed the INF treaty.

And what they did in the treaty, they agreed that both sides would have inspectors.

So I watched them build a brick building on this U.S.

missile base, and Soviet soldiers arrived.

They flew the Soviet flag inside this U.S.

missile base.

The soldiers would come out in the morning.

They would salute each other and and raise their two flags, the U.S.

flag and the Soviet flag and the, the Soviet inspectors were right there on the missile base to monitor the verification of the of the treaty agreement.

And the same thing was happening in Russia.

You know, U.S.

soldiers were were standing inside you.

USSR missile bases and monitoring what they were doing.

Now, that's hard to conceive right now in the current climate, but it's not impossible.

It's been done before.

We have these mechanisms and, it's simply as as Holly said, I mean, you know, you started out by saying, you know, we have this collective shrug here in the U.S., but that's not happening in the rest of the world.

People are very, very concerned about this issue.

It's been going on all this time.

It's not any safer than it was back in the 1980s.

It's actually more dangerous now than it was.

And people are very concerned and they're they're rising up and, and you know, demonstrations are maybe not the most effective thing.

So there's lots of other things which I've been been looking at in terms of, you know, how to put pressure, how these countries, whole countries are putting pressure on the the companies that make the nuclear weapons and the countries that are still holding out.

But sooner or later we've got to address this or we're all done for.

So I'm confident that we can you know use, use treaty mechanisms like this and build the structures to make it totally possible for everyone to fairly and, and, and verifiably get rid of these weapons.

And everybody will be better off.

>> Tim.

Let me just follow that with one question for you.

You say here in 2025, it is not safer than it was a generation ago.

It is more dangerous now than perhaps ever.

but it doesn't have to be.

And I note some of what our guests in studio have pointed out that with the Cuban Missile Crisis, that the president of the United States and his team decided to back channel, they didn't listen to all of the the people around them in their circle.

They were they were determined that they could find a way through that without aggression, if possible.

Different leadership might have gone a different way.

There might have been an exchange had the leadership been differently.

In 1983, the now famous incident in which Soviet personnel was told that the system had been triggered for an incoming American attack, it turned out it was a basically a weather phenomenon, the way the sun was glancing off the clouds had set off the system, and his instinct was to wait and probably save to the world.

In doing so.

But these incidents tell you how close we are, how little it might take if the wrong person is in charge at that time, whether it's 1983 or 1962, or people in positions of power who don't have that level of restraint or prudence, and I wonder what it is that you think, Tim, and is most likely, if we do see an exchange in the future, you know, is there a source that you're more concerned about?

Is there a scenario that you are more concerned about?

>> Well, there's so many right now.

I mean, you know, we just saw a few months ago all out war between India and Pakistan, two nuclear armed countries and if if they started using nuclear weapons in that part of the world, you know, that wouldn't just affect India and Pakistan.

That would affect all of us.

And so that's that's a hot spot.

It's not been resolved.

There's very, very dangerous, you know situation there.

Same with, you know, Israel right now.

I mean, Israel is a nuclear power.

they're they're getting everything they want right now from from the U.S.

and, and Europe to, to prosecute their genocide in Gaza and so on.

But I mean, that's a, that's a very volatile situation.

And again, Israel is surrounded by enemies and has nuclear weapons and will use them if they feel threatened.

So that's another very worrying situation, especially with regard to the, the, Iran potentially getting nuclear weapons.

And, and Israel is absolutely determined to prevent that.

North Korea is another situation.

I mean, we had that you know, whole thing with the, you know, who's who's buttons bigger, you know.

>> Yeah.

>> Trump in his first term and he's now back again.

And you know, we haven't had that on the top of the agenda.

But that's still there.

There's a very volatile dangerous situation.

And of course Ukraine I mean you know we have the situation where at the moment Russia is, is, is pushing forward in, in eastern Ukraine and Ukraine, even with all the NATO and U.S.

support, you know, can't stop them.

But, you know, if that if that you know, drone issue in Poland or whatever, you know, whatever else, you know, could, could bring in other European countries in NATO that that would be a very volatile and dangerous situation.

and the same would happen if, if Ukraine suddenly, you know, went on the offensive and was really pushing back against Russia and Russia, you know, isn't going to just stand by and, and be run over either.

So, you know, all these situations are hugely dangerous.

And and, you know, that's that's one of the reasons why we're in such a dangerous situation now.

But it's also just the fact that we have so little as you said, you know, the people in positions of power who are willing to, you know, make behind the scenes deals and so on, and who have a solid, you know, head on their shoulders and, you know, know the dangers.

You know, those people are gone.

And we have a whole generation of leaders, not just in this country, but or Russia, but, I mean, in all these countries, there are people that are with hotheads think they can, you know, get away with things and, and don't don't have the same level attention to diplomacy and to negotiations and to, you know, backing off and, you know, keeping the world safe.

And so not only is that raise the risk of them doing something stupid, but it just raises the the risk of an accident or a mistake.

Like you mentioned, there have been several of these.

I mean you know, we talked about just now the Cuban Missile crisis and the, the, the two actually incidents in the 80s, both were one was a submarine and one was a radar commander.

But there's been 12 of these incidents recorded where we came, you know, within inches or minutes from a nuclear war.

And we can't afford that kind of risk.

And sooner or later, you know, our luck is going to going to run out.

>> Talking to Timmon Wallis, executive director of Nuclear Ban U.S.

and the author of Nuclear Abolition A scenario in studio with us.

Reverend James Schwartz is president of veterans for peace.

Holly Adams is with the Genesee Valley Citizens for Peace and member of the Steering Committee for Peace Action in New York State.

We've got to take our only break of the hour, going to come back and talk about another aspect of Timman's book, which is private U.S.

companies that are contracted to develop, build and maintain these weapons and maybe the role that they play in how Timman sees that.

and we'll come right back here after this very short break on Connections.

Coming up in our second hour, we dig into the films that will be showing during the next month for the present film series.

The Latin film series at the Dryden, at the George Eastman Museum.

We're going to talk about what films are on display.

We'll talk about Latin contributions to the arts, to movies, and why some of those contributions are overlooked or whitewashed.

It's all coming up next hour.

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>> This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson Timmon Wallis, executive Director of Nuclear Ban U.S.

Your new book doesn't just talk about the treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Tpnw, but also the role that American companies play in this.

And I want you to tell listeners a little bit about how you see that.

>> Sure.

well, there's only there's only two dozen companies that make nuclear weapons for the United States.

And they they, they reap literally billions of dollars in contracts from making these weapons.

And they use a small amount of that money to lobby Congress, lobby The White House, produce documents, fund think tanks and so on to keep this, this gravy train going.

I mean, it's, you know, these companies are hugely responsible for the fact that we have nuclear weapons still to this day.

And the fact that Congress won't do anything about it.

And so you know, I did my, my PhD research back in the 1980s.

Well, in the 90s, about the 1980s and you know, you mentioned the day after movie Holly mentioned the, the, the million people in Central Park in New York City and so on.

And you were saying, you know, where are all the people there are, you know, the demonstrations.

Well, one of the factors that had an impact in the 1980s was pressure on these companies that were making nuclear weapons.

There were a lot more companies in that in those days.

One of them, General Electric, was the largest corporation in America.

In 1985, it was the largest nuclear weapons contractor in those days.

And they faced a national boycott of GE products, including light bulbs, but also million dollar, you know, MRI machines and so on.

I mean, there were there was a massive boycott and General Electric pulled out of the nuclear weapons business and they, you know, they made no, no bones about it.

You know, they didn't like the pressure and the, you know, being called out as a, you know, evil company making nuclear weapons and making the world, you know, unsafe.

And they pulled out.

And if you go to their website today, you'll see a page if you Google General Electric nuclear weapons, you'll find the page on their website that says, we have nothing to do with nuclear weapons.

They still today insist on letting people know that they do not have anything to do with nuclear weapons.

Now we have that kind of pressure available to us all, to all of us right now with these companies that are still making them.

And, the countries that are joining this treaty are taking steps to put pressure on these companies.

Ireland, for example has a law which makes it illegal to have anything to do with nuclear weapons in Ireland, and the penalty is up to life in prison.

Well, I like to think that, you know, the CEO of General Dynamics, you know, wants to go on on a golfing holiday to Ireland and ends up in prison because General Dynamics is a major nuclear weapons producer.

It hasn't happened yet.

But I mean, you know, this is the kind of pressure that's being put and cities, I mean, you you're your listeners may, may or may not know that New York City the City Council of New York passed a resolution a couple of years ago to divest the, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of the New York City pension funds from the nuclear weapons companies.

That was happening in the 1980s.

And it's now happening again.

we have more and more cities, you know, passing resolutions, passing divestment bills and so on.

And divestment, boycotts, stigmatizing of these companies.

is is is certainly a tool that we have that we can all be using at the, you know, whether it's your faith community, your city, the state of New York, whatever, we can be putting pressure on these companies.

And that is ultimately the the tool that we have to get rid of these weapons.

>> Well, and so let me read a little bit of feedback from listeners here.

Joel says, my college students in the spring of 2024 were the most concerned about nuclear war above any other issue.

And yet when pressed, they were not doing anything about it and had no plans to do anything about it.

Dell says.

I think it's less that we as a society are not concerned about nuclear proliferation, but more that since the 1980s there have been so many more proximate existential threats to our way of living that we need to triage in our minds.

It's hard to prioritize concerns about nuclear war when our kids have been having active shooter drills in school for the past decade or so.

Dell, I take the point.

I think our guests in studio and Jim made that point and understands that I do understand it.

We're just trying to understand the difference in past generations.

And now, are you as concerned about nuclear war?

Is there something that you feel can be done?

So Holly Adams said, you feel like one of the big differences in past generations today is that protest movements bear less fruit today.

So what do you want people to do about this?

>> Well, Tim and I already spoke to it, but boycotts and divestment we need to boycott companies that that that support nuclear weapons.

We need to divest our own monies from companies that invest in nuclear weapons.

I mean, I did that in my in my own meager investments.

Made sure that you know, I mean, I could make probably more money investing in nuclear weapons, but I refuse to I value my safety.

so I think that's, you know part of it, and I, and I believe that that will have an impact.

you know, if the if, if people are boycotting and divesting and they're boycotting corporations in countries that have joined the tpnw corporations exist to make a profit if we boycott them, they'll change.

I would think in order to survive.

and then, you know, corporations could turn in, turn, put pressure on U.S.

Congress to to cancel nuclear contracts.

So it's it's possible to backward chain it.

I think.

>> Reverend, what would you want people to do?

>> You know, that's a really tough question at this time, because having seen where some protests worked, like the protests against the Vietnam War actually worked in the end, but I'm having attended and spoken at the Hands Off rally here in Rochester, the No Kings rally.

I'm beginning to wonder if the impact of these rallies is having any effect.

I agree with Holly.

I think that if we could, if we could inspire the population to understand what the threat is and start boycotting these companies, that might have some effect.

the my concern more is how we can affect change in Congress as, as, you know, as year Congress authorized the update of the nuclear of our nuclear arsenal and spending more than $1 trillion over the next 30 years to upgrade that arsenal.

And, you know, think about $1 trillion.

What that could do in health care, education, infrastructure instead of wasting it.

upgrading our nuclear arsenal.

But we have to get we'd have to get the Congress.

And I would like to know myself how we could pressure Congress, who has been pointed out, are all in the pockets of contributors there being bought and sold literally by all of these companies and their finances into their supposed campaigns and so forth.

So it your question is excellent, Evan.

And to be honest, I don't know what the answer is.

I wish I did.

>> Chris emails to say, Evan, your guest is dodging your very good question.

Russia would laugh at us if we gave up our weapons.

They will never do that.

That is from Chris.

So, Tim, Chris says we're not going to get to a point of giving up weapons because Russia's in the nuclear family.

They have several thousand weapons, I think.

And he says they would laugh at anybody who wanted to give up their weapons.

What do you think?

>> Well, that's Chris's opinion.

And you know, lots of people believe that, but we don't know until we try it.

And it hasn't been tried.

And you know, personally, I don't think he's correct.

I think that if the United States actually showed an interest in getting rid of nuclear weapons, Russia, along with China and all the other countries would jump at it because as I said, these weapons are too expensive to maintain.

we just heard, you know, trillions of dollars are being poured into just upgrading them at the moment.

That's happening in Russia and China as well.

And they don't have the money for that either.

you know, we need that money for other things.

And, and the bottom line is these weapons are useless.

They're militarily useless.

All they can do is destroy entire cities.

And we know from studies of, you know, bombing of World War II that bombing cities does not win wars.

I mean, it's it doesn't it's it doesn't, doesn't damage morale of the people.

I mean, you look at the bombing of London with the Blitz that didn't that didn't damage morale, that just strengthened morale.

I mean, these you know, we're now at the we're now at the point of military hardware where we're talking about, you know, pinpoint strikes, you know, targeting a single person.

And that is where that is where warfare is going.

It's not going in the direction of, you know, let's destroy entire cities and blocks of neighborhoods as if that's going to somehow, you know, advance the war aims.

So I, I mean, it's a matter of opinion.

I don't agree with Chris's evaluation, but I mean, lots of people do.

So who knows?

We got to try.

>> Yeah.

Chris, thank you for the email.

And I would just say as well, one one thing that strikes me as a journalist is I don't think the term nuclear war is helpful.

We think of war as this protracted back and forth, perhaps nuclear war is really just nuclear annihilation.

You know, a one strike almost certainly leads to possibly dozens or hundreds and worldwide devastation.

We ought to be thinking of it as annihilation and not war.

Go ahead.

>> Yeah.

Can I can I just jump in with, with to give your audience an idea?

You mentioned at the beginning of the program that there are nine countries in the world that possess nuclear weapons?

>> Yeah.

>> The two leading, of course, are Russia and the United States.

There are, according to ICANN, there are roughly 12,331 nuclear warheads with over 9600 and active military stockpiles, according to the Federation of Atomic Scientists.

The Soviet Union has over 5400 nuclear weapons.

The United States has 5277.

The.

These numbers are staggering.

China was 600.

France with approximately 290.

The United Kingdom with approximately 225.

India with 180, Pakistan 170, Israel 90.

And North Korea approximately 50.

These numbers are staggering to me when you think about how dangerous this is and how it would only take one simple mistake.

>> That's.

>> It with, you know.

>> 12,000, 12,300.

>> Yeah.

So in our last minute, Tim and I just want to ask you, having written about this and doing the work, are you optimistic that we could see this in any of our lifetimes, that we could see the end of the existence of nuclear weapons?

>> Well, as the head of ICAN, Beatrice Finn, said when, when when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a few years ago.

We're going to see the end of the nuclear era in our lifetimes, either because we got rid of the weapons, or because the weapons get rid of us.

Either way, you know, this can't go on for much longer.

So.

So yes, I do have hope that we will get rid of these weapons.

It may it may be before a major disaster or after one.

But I mean, this can't go on.

This simply can't go on.

>> Tim.

And where would you want people to learn more about this issue if they want to get more involved?

>> Well, both veterans for peace the Genesee Valley Citizens for peace and many other groups are part of a national network called the Warheads to Windmills Coalition, which is working on both the nuclear weapons issue and the climate issue.

And, you can get more information at warheads to windmills.

Org.

you can you can find my book Nuclear Abolition A Scenario in from Amazon or books, bookshop.org or any local bookshop or library.

and there's lots of other online resources about this from, from the, you know, Union of Concerned Scientists to Physicians for Social Responsibility, Peace Action, veterans for peace.

World Beyond War CodePink they all have websites with information about nuclear weapons.

There's lots of places to go.

>> All right.

>> And, Tim, I've just got a because we're going to lose the hour.

And I want to thank you for your generous time, Reverend Swartz.

Thank you for your time, Holly Adams.

Thank you.

Thank you everyone.

>> Thank you.

>> peace to all of you.

More coming up here.

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