Boston Globe Calls on Americans To Mobilize against Nuclear War

April 12—“How is it that the most clear and present danger to humankind—a danger even more immediate than climate change and more devastating by magnitudes than mass migration, inflation, crime, or terrorism—is so completely out of sight and mind for the vast majority of Americans?”

That is the crucial question raised by the Editorial Board of the Boston Globe in an April 9 editorial, “Why We Need To Start Worrying about the Bomb.” The Globe, which calls itself the leading newspaper in New England, warns Americans that they had better wake up and get active to ensure that the U.S. government, Congress, and presidential candidates recognize the overwhelming danger of nuclear war and stop raising “the temperature on global tensions.” The editorial is in sharp contrast to those in other major U.S. newspapers such as The New York Times and Washington Post which have demanded escalating confrontation with the two nuclear superpowers Russia and China, to back equally insane geopolitical strategies.

“The horror of a nuclear attack would be unimaginable. The impact would last generations. And all of it is eminently feasible with only a fraction of the weapons that already exist in the world,” the editors warn. Yet when Gallup and Pew polling agencies asked Americans this year what their biggest concern was, nobody mentioned nuclear war. Nor did President Biden mention it in his State of the Union speech.

The American people must sound the alarm, "demanding attention to the threat of nuclear war with the same vigor it demands, rightfully, action on climate change. That kind of mass movement four decades ago probably helped push the consummate cold warrior, Ronald Reagan, to negotiate major arms control agreements with the Soviet Union. It isn’t crazy to think the same could happen again with a President Biden—or even Trump.

“What would be crazy is ignoring a threat that is so plainly in front of us,” the editors concluded. They ask readers to "consider the words of the late Daniel Ellsberg, who before he became famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers was a nuclear planner for the military.

“In 2017, he called all-out thermonuclear war ‘a catastrophe waiting to happen’ and ‘an irreversible, unprecedented, and almost unimaginable calamity for civilization’ ...

“‘No policies in human history,’ Ellsberg wrote, ‘have more deserved to be recognized as immoral. Or insane.’”