The Vision: Voices for a World Free of Nuclear Weapons

26 July 2010

A global network is being established that will encourage your voice to be heard, and added to a multitude of voices until a worldwide chorus is born thereby giving grassroots people of the world a vote for elimination of all nuclear weapons.

The network will operate daily, will be ongoing, will partner with networks of common cause, will engage in forums, and will advocate for the long, complicated process of getting to zero nuclear weapons.

URI, the bridge-building organization creating Voices for a World Free of Nuclear Weapons is an organization with a ten-year history of calling out and coordinating local groups in promoting interfaith cooperation, ending religiously motivated violence, and creating cultures of peace, justice and healing for the Earth and all living beings.  Humanists and Muslims, Jews and tribal people, spiritualists, Hindus and agnostics, and many more have come together in 73 countries to make URI’s purpose a reality.  Therefore with over a million participants and a world of experience behind this network at its beginning, there is reason to suspect that it will have staying power and will mobilize a voice that will be heard by the governments which make the ultimate nuclear decisions and are responsible for nuclear safeguards for the world.

The urgency comes from missiles that have gone missing, the proliferation of countries with nuclear weapons, the buying and selling of nuclear materials and knowledge, the nuclear intentions of belligerent nations and rogue groups, the monumental nuclear arsenals of cold war adversaries.  All of these hang by the fragile hope that everyone will do the right thing with the calamitous power and there will be no mistakes.  We are gambling on perfection in a world of radically mixed motives and a history of horrific exterminations.  We either trust that perfect human beings will handle Earth-devastating weapons perfectly or we work to make certain that human nature is never given the opportunity to destroy Nature.  We can no longer wait for nuclear calamity to light the fires of urgency.  The only deterrent that works in the long run is not the proliferation but the dismantlement of nuclear weapons.  Dismantlement is the only deterrent that will work over time.