Tri-Valley CAREs’ staff, board and members honor the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on his birthday, January 15. And, we celebrate his holiday on the third Monday of January each year.
Equally important, we strive to carry on his work every day. Dr. King spoke out against many important issues, most prominently racism, militarism and poverty. Dr. King understood them to be integrally related.
Few King celebrations delve into his critique of U.S. militarism and, in particular, his principled opposition to nuclear weapons. So, to honor Dr. King’s legacy, we offer for your reflection, two of Dr. King’s thoughts on nuclear disarmament.
In the last Sunday sermon he preached, days before his assassination in 1968, King said:
“It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence or nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence, and the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.”
As early as 1957, King spoke of banning the bomb:
“The development and use of nuclear weapons should be banned. It cannot be disputed that a full-scale nuclear war would be utterly catastrophic. Hundreds and millions of people would be killed outright by the blast and heat, and by the ionizing radiation produced at the instant of the explosion . . . Even countries not directly hit by bombs would suffer through global fall-outs. All of this leads me to say that the principal objective of all nations must be the total abolition of war. War must be finally eliminated or the whole of mankind will be plunged into the abyss of annihilation.”
This year on MLK Day, as part of Back from the Brink, we sent out a sign-on letter to local and state officials to urge House and Senate members to co-sponsor House Resolution 317 and Senate Resolution 323, resolutions urging the US to lead the world back from the brink of nuclear war and halt and reverse the nuclear arms race. We framed the correspondence in light of MLK Day as these resolutions are rooted in the values Dr. King stood for: moral courage, care for communities, and the responsibility of leaders to speak out in moments of great danger. Honoring Dr. King means choosing people over weapons and moral leadership over silence. We believe that asking government officials to sign this letter is one concrete way of doing so this MLK Day.
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