On Thu, 6 Aug 2020 08:19:25 -0700 (PDT), GM
> wrote:

>John Kuthe wrote:
>
>> https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/na...3-7acc8564eaab
>>
>> :-(
>>
>> John Kuthe...
>
>
>From John's link above:
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>"...U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said there is nothing in between.
>
>”The only way to totally eliminate nuclear risk is to totally eliminate nuclear weapons,” he said in his video message from New York for the occasion.
>
>“Seventy-five years is far too long not to have learned that the possession of nuclear weapons diminishes, rather than reinforces, security,” he said. "Today, a world without nuclear weapons seems to be slipping further from our grasp...”
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>BTW the only US leader whose goal was to *totally* eliminate nuclear weapons worldwide was Ronald Reagan. He had such an abhorrence of nuclear war (and especially the concept of "MAD aka Mutually Assured Destruction" which he described as "appalling") that in one National Security meeting, he said that he would be very reluctant to retaliate even in the case of a Soviet nuclear first strike on the US - some of his advisors thought he was nuts, basically...
>
>More he
>
>https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/b...y-paul-lettow/
>
>ABOUT RONALD REAGAN AND HIS QUEST TO ABOLISH NUCLEAR WEAPONS
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>"In Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Paul Lettow explores the depth and sophistication of President Ronald Reagan’s commitment to ridding humankind permanently of the threat of nuclear war.
>Lettow’s narrative spans the start of Reagan’s presidency and the 1986 Reykjavík summit between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, during which America’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a defining issue. Lettow reveals SDI for what it was: a full-on assault against nuclear weapons waged as much through policy as through ideology. While cabinet members and advisers played significant roles in guiding American defense policy, it was Reagan himself who presided over every element, large and small, of this paradigm shift in U.S. diplomacy.
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>Lettow conducted interviews with several former Reagan administration officials, and he draws upon the vast body of declassified security documents from the Reagan presidency; much of what he quotes from these documents appears publicly here for the first time. The result is the first major work to apply such evidence to the study of SDI and superpower diplomacy. This is a survey that doesn’t merely add nuance to the existing record, but revises our
>very understanding of the Reagan presidency..."
>
>
>Excerpt:
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>"...it will be shown that Reagan never abandoned his hatred of nuclear weapons and his desire to eliminate them. Reagan’s “dream”—as he himself described it—was “a world free of nuclear weapons.” “[F]or the eight years I was president,” he wrote in his memoirs, “I never let my dream of a nuclear-free world fade from my mind.”Reagan pursued that dream as a personal religious mission...
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>Despite overwhelming primary and interview-based evidence, historians and international relations scholars have thus far neglected to investigate the impact of Reagan’s nuclear abolitionism on his presidency. In fact, the impact of that “dream” was direct and significant. For example, Reagan’s nuclear abolitionism contributed greatly to his determination to engage in a U.S. arms buildup that he believed the USSR could neither afford economically nor keep up with technologically; he intended that the Soviets would thus be forced to agree to vast reductions in the two countries’ stockpiles of nuclear arms. It led to SDI, one of the most important and least understood of Reagan’s Cold War policies. To Reagan, SDI served as a catalyst for—the enabler of—his “world free of nuclear weapons.” Reagan’s nuclear abolitionism also pervaded his administration’s approach to arms control, and his interactions with Soviet leaders..."
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We lived in Japan immediately following the end of the war and as late
as 1962 when I was home again visiting my parents my mother had a maid
who she allowed to go back to Hiroshima regularly to take care of
relatives who had been on the outskirts of Hiroshima when the bomb
dropped, who had radiation sickness and were then in the process of
dying finally.

We went to Japan by sea from Hong Kong and even as a child used to
seeing bombed buildings in the war years in Plymouth, UK even I could
see the momentous damage done to Hiroshima as we passed in the train
(our ship had docked in Shimonoseki)

Recently I felt quite depressed that in my callow youth I marched for
Ban the Bomb and now here we are, still with the bombs and a nutbar
capable of feeling spiteful and launching one. No progress.