Jill Stein, who is seeking the Green Party nomination for President, said that President Obama should apologize during his trip to Hiroshima for the use of nuclear weapons against Japan by pledging nuclear disarmament.
Dr. Stein also urged Obama to listen to the testimony of the survivors of the nuclear attack, who have dedicated their lives to the elimination of nuclear weapons so that no one else should ever experience the hell on earth they survived.
“The existence of nuclear weapons threatens the survival of humanity. I pledge to eliminate all such weapons as an urgent priority,” stated Stein.
Despite his pledge 7 years ago in Prague that the US will “seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” Obama has supported spending $1 trillion over the next 3 decades to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Stein said she would cancel this program and instead dedicate those funds to meeting human needs and preventing catastrophic climate change.
Stein said that as President she would forego new missile bases in Japan and the Asia pivot, ask Japan to uphold their peace constitution (article 9), and would take Russia up on its previous offer to reduce nuclear weapons to 1000 each, followed by comprehensive talks for all nuclear nations to abolish all nuclear weapons..
The U.S nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 indiscriminately incinerated tens of thousands of non-combatant children, women and men. By the end of the year more than 210,000 people – mainly civilians, were dead.
Today there are more than 15,000 nuclear weapons, most far more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan. 94% are held by the U.S. and Russia, Last year The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its Doomsday Clock to three minutes to midnight citing the “extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity” posed by “unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear arsenals.”