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Empire, The Bomb, and Common Security

I want to thank Rev. Brooks, Larry Miller, and Maryjane Halliday for this opportunity to return to your congregation.

In preparing I looked over the speech that I gave here five years ago. As I re-read it, I could identify with what the prophet Cassandra must have felt, her warnings unheeded, as she looked out over the death and ruins of Troy. Five years ago, it didn't take a rocket scientist to know that, with a President who didn't know the difference between Shia and Sunni Muslims and a Vice President who boasted of imposing the "arrangement for the 21^st century," would pitch our nation and much of the world into brutal and self-destructive wars. In the late 1990s, European diplomats warned me that the United States was becoming increasingly similar to 1930s Germany, and unfortunately they were right.

Tragically, it seems that our Congressional leaders and media learned nothing from these last seven brutal and nationally self-destructive years. With the vilification of Iran's unpopular and pathetic president and the manipulation of our nuclear fears, the media and Congress are again playing their roles as frictionless conveyor belts for the President and the Pentagon. This past week, with the adoption of the Lieberman-Kyl amendment, Congress may have functionally approved the second U.S. Declaration of War in our still young 21^st century.

There has, however, been resistance, a resistance which has turned 70% of the nation against the Iraq war. But this is not my subject today. I have been invited to speak about Empire and the Bomb: How the U.S. Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World.

The journalist Chris Hedges wrote that "War is a force that gives us meaning." The sad truth is that our nation goes to war so often - usually against very weak states and societies - that it has become possible to discern patterns of U.S. war fighting. On the positive side, as Colin Powell learned in Vietnam, if the U.S. people are given enough time to learn what is being done in our name, we retain sufficient decency to turn against imperial wars. We can make it difficult - even impossible - for presidents and generals to fight their wars without end.

"MEANINGFUL INSTRUMENTS"

But there are other patterns. During the Cold War, President Carter's Secretary of Defense/War Harold Brown informed Congress, that the U.S. first-strike nuclear arsenal makes U.S. conventional military forces "meaningful instruments of military and political power." Noam Chomsky explained that this means that "Our strategic nuclear weapons system provides us with a kind of umbrella within which we can carry out conventional actions, meaning aggression and subversion without any concern that it will be impeded in any fashion….so if we want to overthrow the government of Guatemala…or send a Rapid Deployment force into the Middle East…if we want to invade Vietnam…we can do this without too much concern that we'll be deterred because we have this intimidating power that will threaten anyone who might get in our way."

Post-Cold War U.S. presidents have improved upon the models of their predecessors who threatened nuclear attacks against North Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon and other Third World nations as well as the Soviet Union. Thus, in the run up to the 1991 war against Iraq - a war fought to reconsolidate U.S. control over Middle East oil in the first years of the Post-Cold War era, President Bush, Vice President Quayle, then Secretary of War Cheney, Secretary of State Baker and British Prime Minister Major each threatened that if Saddam Hussein dared to use chemical or biological weapons to defend his forces, the U.S. would annihilate Iraq with nuclear weapons. To make these threats credible, as many as 700 nuclear weapons were redeployed to encircle Iraq.

Today we think nostalgically about the comparatively benign rule of Bill Clinton, but the sanctions that he enforced, which claimed an estimated one million Iraqi lives - half of them children, (a toll that Madeline Albright said was "worth the price") have been largely forgotten. So, too, his repeated his first term threats to "annihilate" North Korea. Few understand how close his clumsy threats against Pyongyang brought us to nuclear war in 1994 or how bold, courageous, and unauthorized diplomacy by Jimmy Carter was required to bring both sides back from the brink. Similarly, Clinton's 1996 nuclear threats against Libya and 1998 nuclear threats against Iraq have become forgotten footnotes to history. And, who here remembers his response to the International Court of Justice's 1996 ruling that the threat and use of nuclear weapons violate international law? He said that nuclear weapons are the "cornerstone of our policies."

Think about that for a moment. The average U.S. strategic nuclear weapon is twenty times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in nine seconds. Clinton was reiterating that the "cornerstone of our policies" is preparations and threats to inflict nuclear genocide and potentially omnicide.

Now we have George W. Bush, a self-described "war president." His administration's National Strategy Statement declared that the first priority of U.S. foreign and military policy is to prevent the emergence of regional or global rivals, and that the U.S. would use preventive first strike attacks to ensure that such rivals do not emerge. This is unprecedented. It is a total violation of the United Nations Charter and of the centuries of suffering and struggle that produced our near sacred inheritance of international law. By such logic, the British should have reinvaded and destroyed the United States in the 1880s.

Bush's Nuclear Posture Review, released in 2002 - just months before the invasion of Iraq, reiterated the U.S. first strike policy, called for the development and deployment of a new generation of nuclear weapons and so-called "missile defenses" which the Chinese experience as the shield to reinforce U.S. first strike nuclear swords, the abandonment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a commitment to accelerate preparations to resume nuclear weapons testing, and named seven nations as primary U.S. nuclear targets.

Like his father, in the weeks preceding the U.S. wars against the Taliban and Iraq, W. threatened nuclear annihilation if chemical or biological weapons were used to protect those he was determined to attack. 2003 was a banner year for Bush. In addition to invading Iraq, his nuclear threats against North Korea panicked senior South Korean leaders and many of its people.

Today W. continues to press Congress to authorize hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons, which are being advertised as Reliable Replacement Warheads so as not to upset us and members of Congress. They will be "reliable" in their ability to inflict new genocides, and we should be reassured that they are only "replacements." President Bush is also pressing Congress to authorize spending $150 billion for the expansion of the U.S. nuclear weapons production infrastructure. Think about that: $150 billion for genocidal weapons for generations to come at the same time that he is preparing to veto legislation to fund health care for U.S. children.

Then there is Iran, against which President Bush has repeatedly warned that "all options are on the table" - including nuclear attack. We've just been through a week of Ahmadinejad bashing, with U.S. officials, radio talk show posses, and the President of Columbia University transforming this relatively insignificant official of a still non-nuclear nation into yet another Middle East Hitler who must be taken down for the sake of humankind and U.S. oil companies. Recall that Ahmadinejad is neither the head of state nor Iran's supreme leader of Iran. Similarly, he did not initiate, nor does he call the shots for, Iran's nuclear program.

Remember too that, along with the Versailles Treaty and the Yalta Agreement, the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty was one of the central bargains of the 20^th century. It has three primary elements, only one of which we hear about in U.S. political discourse: With the exception of a very few countries, including Israel and India, the nonnuclear nations foreswore becoming nuclear powers. In return, these nations were accorded the right to develop nuclear power to generate energy under the illusions that it would be safe and too cheap to meter. Finally, in Article VI the nuclear powers committed to negotiate the complete elimination of ALL of their nuclear weapons. Thirty-five years later, the world is still waiting for this treaty commitment to be fulfilled.

It is not primarily the malign intentions of impoverished third-world nations that are driving nuclear weapons proliferation. Rather, it is the reality that on more than 40 occasions since the Nagasaki A-bombing, U.S. leaders have prepared and threatened initiate nuclear wars. This, combined with the nuclear powers' hypocritical double standards, is the primary force behind nuclear weapons proliferation. You hear this not only from Iranian and North Korean officials, but also from Mexican, Swedish, Malaysian, Egyptian and other nations' leaders and diplomats.

Bush's nuclear threats against Iran are not empty ones. For months, the U.S. has been deploying nuclear capable fleets in the Persian Gulf. Some of you have read that in late August a nuclear weapons accident that was supposed to be impossible occurred. Unauthorized, six nuclear armed missiles were flown aboard a B-52 bomber across the country from North Dakota to Louisiana. Such flights have long been outlawed because of possible nuclear accidents. There were initial rumors that movement of weapons may have been a stage in preparations for the threatened attack against Iran. This was credible given the Bush Administration's embrace of "usable" nuclear weapons. And last week, Wayne Madsen, a former intelligence officer, wrote that these W-80-1 nuclear warheads were indeed destined for the Middle East," that "elements of the Air Force supported by U.S. intelligence agency personnel revealed their ultimate destination, and that the mission was aborted due to internal opposition within the Air Force and U.S. Intelligence Community."

With information about the "accident" shrouded in secrecy, we are left to conclude that it was either: a manifestation of the rot within the U.S. culture and military systems, another manifestation of U.S. nuclear brutality, or mirrors within mirrors operation designed to send a terrifying message.

"HELP IS ON THE WAY?"

In 2004, John Kerry campaigned with the false promise that help was "on its way." It's been a long wait, but even if Democrats retake the White House, I'm afraid that what the political philosopher Hannah Arendt called Dark Times will still lie before us for years to come. I am sorry to be a gloomy prophet, but if we are to change reality we must first understand it.

With the exceptions of John Edwards and the more marginal Democratic aspirants for the U.S. presidency, the Democratic presidential candidates are not calling for complete U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. They are calling for "redeployment," would leave tens of thousands of U.S. troops, and "enduring" military bases in Iraq for years to come. Why? In 1945, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the State Department advised Truman that the U.S. had won "one of the greatest material prizes in world history." That "prize," which former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Maxwell Taylor called the "jugular vein of Western capitalism" has been essential to U.S. global power and to prosperity at home.

One of Hilary Clinton's backers, retired General Wesley Clark, explained why most leading Democrats oppose immediate and total withdrawal and why Senators Clinton, Obama and Edwards have joined our tyrant in insisting that "all options must be on the table" to counter Iran. As Clark explained, Bush's strategic blunder in Iraq put the question of which nation will exercise Middle East hegemony in the coming years up for grabs. The Bush invasion of Iraq opened the way for Iran to exercise enormous influence across much of that country, including at the highest levels of what Bush and Cheney anticipated would be a U.S. puppet government. And, beyond Iraq, Iran has growing influence among Shiites in Lebanon, Bahrain, the eastern oil-rich provinces of Saudi Arabia, and the Sunnis of Gaza. In fact, the U.S. has so alienated the Arab and Islamic "worlds,: that Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's National Security Advisor, has warned that unless the U.S. takes corrective action, China may soon have more influence with the oil monarchies than Washington has.

An incident on the day that Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign in New Hampshire illuminates why many Democrats have been so silent about Bush's threats against Iran and why many of them voted for the Lieberman-Kyl amendment.

Hillary's launch at the Concord High school was carefully staged and almost completely controlled. Supporters with vetted questions were seated in the front of the auditorium, and they were the people she called upon during the question and answer session. But, as the Senator was preparing to leave the High School, Anne Miller of New Hampshire Peace Action caught her at the front door. She asked Senator Clinton if, when she said that all options should be on the table with Iran, she really meant that we should be threatening all of that nation's women and children with genocide. The Senator responded, and I quote, "I meant what I said."

We have, since, been able to win Hillary's opposition to the Reliable Replacement Warheads, but the same cannot be said about her embrace of genocidal nuclear threats.

IMPERIAL FOUNDATIONS

The roots of our current crises lie in our political culture's dream and will to Empire and its need to dominate. Dominate? Remember that, since the Clinton years, the Pentagon's declared doctrine has been "Full Spectrum Dominance" - the ability to dominate any nation, at any time, anywhere in the world, at any level of power.

With limited time, I can only sketch a rough outline of how this came to be: The colonists who first settled this country brought more than their need for freedom. They also brought the belief that they were God's Chosen people and white colonial racism. As the historian William Appleman Williams and others have documented, when the Constitutional Convention convened in Philadelphia a century and a half later, it was about more than creating the system of checks and balances that the Bush Administration has been ravaging. With the Greek, Roman, British, French and Spanish empires as their models, they also debated and the agreed how best to create a new American Empire.

Within a generation Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Purchase - a significant chunk of the French imperium - opening the way for the conquest and colonization of the U.S. continental Empire - the half of Mexico that "we" conquered and annexed. By the 1850s, William Seward saw that the U.S. could eventually replace Britain as the world's dominant power. To do so, he advised, the U.S. would first have to control Asia. There were two routes to Asia. The southern route went through Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines - which were already occupied by European colonial powers. The northern route - "Seward's Folly" - was via Alaska, was purchased from Russia. In the 1870s, desperate farmers facing the loss of their lands resulting from gluts in production of wheat and corn demanded the conquest of Latin American and Asian markets to bolster prices. By the time of the Great Depression in the 1890s, China's markets were seen as the source of economic salvation. They could keep U.S. factories running, U.S. workers employed, and factory owners fattening their profits. The China market became the holy grail of capitalism. By then, Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Admiral Mahan had built the imperial Navy needed to challenge Britain's mastery of the seas, and it was put to use. We still don't know what cause the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor, but in what we call the "Spanish-American War" that followed, the U.S. conquered Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, The Philippines and annexed Hawaii. The U.S. now controlled access to Central and much of South America, and it had secured its stepping stones to East Asia and China. The foundations of a global empire, which within a half century would exceed anything envisioned by Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar, had been laid.

THE NUCLEAR ENFORCER

How does this relate to nuclear weapons? Teddy Roosevelt advised the U.S. to speak quietly and to carry a Big Stick. Franklin Roosevelt got the message and created the most terrifying stick imaginable. Initially envisioned as a deterrent against a possible Nazi nuclear bomb, by 1943 Roosevelt knew that Hitler's bomb project had failed. The Manhattan Project was not shut down; instead, the pace of its labors was accelerated. As General Leslie Groves who oversaw the Manhattan Project told senior scientist Joseph Rotblat that year, the U.S. A-bomb was not about Germany, not about Japan, but about the Soviet Union. By 1944, seeing that its defeat was inevitable, Hirohito began suing for peace, offering terms that President Truman accepted after the A-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Unknown to most U.S. Americans, by July 1945 Japan was a defeated nation. Remarkably, nearly all senior U.S. military leaders opposed the A-bombings. Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Leahy later testified that "The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance to our war against Japan." General Eisenhower was clear that "The Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." Gen. Curtis LeMay, who by then had burned all but five major Japanese cities to the ground with his firebombing campaign argued that Japan would surrender no later than September, 1945 without an invasion or A-bombs. And, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey prepared by the Cold Warrior Paul Nitze reported that: "certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

Why then were Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed in what the courageous A-bomb survivor Senji Yamaguchi called the "worst act(s) of terrorism in human history?" The reasons were many, including Truman's political ambitious, vengeance, and bureaucratic momentum. But, Secretary of State Byrnes explained the determinative reason: "We wanted to get through with the Japanese phase of the war before the Russians came in."

After having made a secret pact with Stalin for the Soviets to join the war against Japan three months after Hitler's final defeat, U.S. leaders had second thoughts. Because the Soviets had fought the Nazis across Eastern Europe to Berlin, the U.S. was forced to share influence in Europe with the Soviets. U.S. leaders came to fear that if the Red Army joined the war against Japan, as agreed on August 15, 1945, that they would have to share influence with Moscow in northern China, Manchuria, and Korea. Truman's circle mistakenly believed this could be avoided if the war was brought to an end before the Soviets marched east.

There was a second determinative reason for the A-bombings: terrorism. As Truman put it, with the atomic bomb, he would have "a hammer over those boys", meaning Stalin and his comrades. The criteria for the nuclear targets were that they be Japanese cities with military functions and "densely packed workers homes." With the A-bombings of the two cities, Truman demonstrated that the U.S. had the atomic bomb, what it could do - killing 100,000 people in nine seconds, and that U.S. leaders had the will to use it, even against defenseless citizens.

We are taught that Nagasaki was the last time that nuclear weapons were used and that the U.S. nuclear arsenal exists only to deter nuclear attacks by other nations. Unfortunately, as I describe at length in my book, this is not true. During international crises and conflicts, every U.S. president since Truman has prepared and threatened to initiate nuclear war. It began with a 1946 crisis over Iran, when the Soviets didn't have an A-bomb. Such preparations and threats were made at least a dozen times to maintain U.S. hegemony in the oil-rich Middle East: during Israeli-Arab Wars: revolutions in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Iran; and most recently to discipline Iraqi and Iranian leaders who dared to challenge U.S. dominance. Korea has been threatened with nuclear attack at least nine times, Vietnam four, and China at least six times, most recently in 1996. It is fear of such nuclear attacks that has driven nations to consider, and in some cases to become nuclear powers. For the most part, they have sought to deter our threats, not vise versa.

DIRGRESSION ON THE DECLINE OF THE U.S.EMPIRE

Permit me a digression to say a few words about U.S. imperial decline. It is no secret that every empire rises and falls, and now it's our turn. As AFSC's travel agent told me on Friday, "Our country is broken." If we are "lucky," and don't wreak further damage to the world, the tragedy of U.S. imperial decline will be limited to its severe impacts on the vast majority of U.S. people who don't know that the U.S. is an empire or that their standard of living has been artificially subsidized by the benefits of empire. The super rich have been heavily insulated from what will be coming by the Bush Administration which has jerry rigged the tax code and other laws to reinforce their privilege for the tough times ahead.

We should have learned that the colonial era ended with Vietnam. The limits of U.S. military power and the dangers of asymmetrical warfare, as we see in Iraq, Afghanistan and non-state terrorist attacks, have become all too apparent. The U.S. military may be able to destroy anything in the world, but it can no longer hold, govern, and transform nations it attacks.

The biggest threat to U.S. Empire is economic, self-inflicted, and referred to as the "twin towers of debt." With unprecedented military spending - U.S. military spending now equals that of the rest of the world combined! - our national deficit is nearly nine trillion dollars, and it is subsidized by foreign nations - especially China, Japan and Arab nations who buy U.S. Treasury bonds. With the Iraq war and the current weakness of the U.S. economy, those bond sales are not going so well. Worse, in an intimation of our future, during the run up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq the former head of the Dutch Foreign Ministry told me that he was considering calling on European nations to dump their U.S. bonds. That would have severely weakened the U.S. dollar in a powerful signal the U.S. elite that it should not go to war. This summer, a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences sent shock waves through the global economic system when he advised that it was time for China to dump its U.S. bonds.

The second tower is the U.S. trade imbalance. For years we have imported far more than we export, sending more than 800 billion dollars abroad each year. If these dollars are dumped on global currency markets, they will severely undermine the value of the dollar. With the dollar already having lost 1/3 of its value against the Euro over the past five years, U.S. companies and properties are being bought up by Europeans, and U.S. tourists, whose dollars buy less and less, are getting a painful glimpse of the future.

Let me add a third economic tower: What will happen if and when Iran and the Arab oil states begin to trade petroleum in Euros or yen, as President Ahmadinejad has threatened? For six decades the petrodollars sent overseas to buy oil have come back to the U.S. as bond purchases and stock and bank investments, subsidizing the U.S. Treasury and providing capital to the banks to which we turn for mortgages, business and corporate loans. If oil money goes, instead, to London, Geneva, Tokyo or Beijing, we won't have it to rebuild the nation's infrastructure - remember that bridge in Minneapolis? to invest in anti-global warming technologies, to defend our cities against the rising tides, or to care for our rapidly aging population. Sometimes I think that when I am about to die, I want to be carried onto the steps of the Pentagon to breathe my last breaths there was a way to protest our government's commitment to military spending while refusing to provide affordable health care for all.

SOME WAY OUT OF HERE

Friends, Bob Dylan once sang that "There must be somewhere out of here", and the novelist Ralph Ellison wrote that "All roads lead to the Golden Day." Ellison was having a little fun at our expense, because his Golden Day was a bar. But the truth is that there are many paths toward greater security. They come to us from many traditions, and they include the simple insistence that democracy should be honored and practiced.

Let me point to a few of those paths:

In these dark times, and with the distractions of our consumer culture, one of our tasks is simply to keep hope alive. Others have been here before us, and like the monks in Burma have faced greater obstacles. I take strength from remembering a song I was taught in elementary school Donna Nobis Pacem: "Give us peace." As I was taught back in elementary school, people have sung it through the centuries as an expression of hope and will.

The Book of Proverbs tells us that "a people without a vision will perish." From the beginning of our country's history the vision of human freedom and democracy has vied with the distortions of racism, domination, profit and empire. Nuclear Empire and the worship of purchases, profit, and power have brought us to a literal dead end. On the one hand, we face the rising threat of global warming, and as Joseph Rotblat warned - the human species faces a stark choice: either we completely eliminate all nuclear weapons, or we will see their global proliferation and the genocidal and omnicidal wars that will follow.

We need an alternate framework, an alternate vision, to understand ourselves in the world. George Kennan's dictum that "Our real task…is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain [our] position of disparity" and that we must deal "in straight power concepts" has proven to be dangerous crackpot realism. The vision of "Common Security," which draws on the insights of all great religious traditions, and which - with the help of the Palme Commission - served as intellectual foundation for the end of the Cold War is no less true now than it was a generation ago. I cannot be secure, if my neighbor feels insecure. If the U.S. threatens to build weapons that can neutralize all of China's missiles, which is something the Clinton and W. Bush Administrations have sought to achieve, China will simply build more missiles, and we descend into the spiral of an arms race. If we insist that Middle East, African, and Venezuelan oil is ours, and if we allow our leaders to speak of a "crusade," we should not be surprised when we suffer future 9-11s or our economy collapses under the weight of military spending.

Common Security means doing the difficult work of identifying the very real sources of insecurity that we, our allies and our enemies are experiencing and then doing the hard and patient bargaining needed to remove those dangers and threats and to ensure our individual, national, and collective futures.

Speaking truth to power - regardless of the social consequences - has also become essential to security and survival. Instead of honoring the taboo against mentioning Empire and talking about why the U.S. has become a pariah nation, it is time to cry out that the Empire is in decline and that we need policies that will provide us all a soft landing. If we are to be trusted by other nations, we must first acknowledge the wrongs we have committed. I am not particularly impressed by him, but it is time to praise former Senator John Edwards for embracing Henry Kissinger's concession that the nuclear double standard has become a losing proposition, and for vowing to become the president who launches the initiative to finally eliminate all of the world's nuclear weapons. In whatever ways we can, we need to press other presidential candidates to match Edwards' promise.**

We need to be doing all that we can to bring all U.S. troops home from Iraq and to prevent a disastrous attack against Iran. The vast majority of Iraqis want U.S. troops to leave. They see the U.S. military occupation as the primary source of continuing violence, not its resolution. The way forward is for the U.S. to cease seeking imperial advantage and control of more to oil by supporting the separatists of the Maliki government. Instead, we need to announce that U.S. forces will be withdrawn within 6 to 9 months and to call on all Iraqi political forces, separatists and nationalists alike, to negotiate Iraq's future. We should also turn to the United Nations to organize a parallel conference of Arab and Islamic states, the European Union, the U.S., China and Russia to identify and commit to ways of contributing to Iraqi security rather than undermining it.

And, Congress should not authorize another penny to continue the war, but only to bring U.S. troops home.

In relation to Iran, in addition to the religious leaders who met with President Ahmadinejad at the United Nations, Senator Dodd has surprisingly been pointing the way forward: dialog and diplomacy, not war. There are lessons to be learned from the calamities of the Iraq war, from the apparent resolution of the nuclear confrontation with North Korea. Let Mohammed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency do their work. ElBaradei has announced Iran's agreement to provide all of the information that has long been demanded, and he warned the U.S. against resorting to a military attack. The Bush Administration got a deal with North Korea, when it finally agreed to do what had been long demanded, and we should do the same with Iran: engage in direct one on one diplomacy, offer a non-aggression pledge after years of military threats, and provide the incentives of formal diplomatic recognition and economic investment in exchange for commitments to strictly adhere to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Finally there is what the French philosopher Albert Camus called common decency. Devoting our lives' energies to erecting a meaningful barrier against nuclear and other plagues of our era.

And, as I wrote today's sermon, I also found myself thinking of a Lina Cahuasqui, an Ecuadoran activist who is a descendent of Native Andean people who were there before the Inca conquest. Having been part of a movement that overcame generations of political corruption, oligarchies and U.S. sponsored dictatorships she has struggled to understand the timidity of many U.S. Americans. Don't they know, she asks, that "we are the power?"

* Joseph Gerson is Director of Programs of the American Friends Service Committee in New England and author of Empire and the Bomb: How the U.S. Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World.

** Two days after this sermon was delivered, in large measure as a response to demands by voters in New Hampshire, Senator Barak Obama also pledged that if elected he would work to eliminate all nuclear weapons from the world.

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