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Mankind crossed a dangerous threshold at the end of World War II, when the U.S. military dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a moral and conscious world there would have been a hue and cry protesting the use, indeed the invention, of such hideous weapons from every corner of the globe.
Instead the world rejoiced the end of the long war, and the new prosperity ushered in by the first new level of technology, which nuclear weapons were only a part. Television, jet propulsion aircraft, and satlelites made the entire planet accessible, opening whole new vistas of prosperity. Millions of people and markets were brought into the world economy.
The new prosperity from the new level of technology, in a moral and conscious world, would have been used to alleviate the suffering in the world caused by poverty and oppression. Peace and harmony would have been brought to the world at last.
The prosperity was squandered on, what President Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell speech, the military/industrial complex. The military and arms industry joined forces politically, built a network of military bases around the world, armed with inter continental ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads targeting major cities. This was purportedly to keep peace in the world, and was euphemistically called a nuclear umbrella.
All this was at a great expense to the American taxpayer. It absorbed the new prosperity that could have been used to bring loving solutions. Today nuclear weapons have proliferated beyond anyone’s imagination or expectations, and have become the single biggest threat to the survival of our planet.
The Cold War was fought at a great cost to the American taxpayers. The Nuclear Arms Race drove the Soviet Union to economic collapse, forcing them to spend more on guns than on butter.
There was also a conventional arms race; the U.S. armed rebel groups in countries with communist China or Soviet Union backed governments, and China and Russia armed rebel groups in countries with U.S. backed governments.
When the Cold War was over it left warlords and dictators in control of large caches of armaments. The result was civil war, oppression, refugees, and starvation; in Serbia, Bosnia, and Kosovo in the Balkans, in Cambodia in Southeast Asia, in Uganda, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Somalia in Africa, in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Chile in Central and South America, and Afghanistan in Asia.
ISRAEL: A nation with nuclear weapons that’s under siege and surrounded by enemies.
PAKISTAN: A very unstable government with nuclear weapons.
INDIA: A nation with nuclear weapons that has border skirmishes with its enemy Pakistan.
NORTH KOREA: A nation suffering starvation survives by selling nuclear weapons.
CHINA: A nation with nuclear weapons who has a history of human rights abuse.
TERRORISTS: Nuclear weapons on the black market are accessible to terrorist groups.
TACTICAL: Shoulder held nuclear weapons with a range of 100 miles.
ENVIRONMENT: Nuclear waste needs to be safely stored for 10,000 years.
spiritandpoverty.com