On August 6, 2018, the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Baltimore became the first major city to endorse Back from the Brink: The Call to Prevent Nuclear War. The Baltimore Resolution, passed unanimously, asks Congress to make these changes to reduce the risk of nuclear war:
• Renounce the option of using nuclear weapons first.
• End the President’s sole, unchecked authority to launch a nuclear attack (the Markey-Lieu bill presently proposed in Congress).
• Take U.S. nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert.
• Cancel the 1.2 trillion-dollar plan over 30 years (1.7 trillion with inflation) to replace the entire U.S. arsenal with enhanced weapons.
• Require the U.S. to pursue a verifiable agreement among nuclear armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.
This resolution will be sent to the mayor and to the Maryland delegation of the 115th United States Congress.
Baltimore collectively paid over $107.5 million in taxes on the nuclear weapons enterprise for this past year. As president of the Chesapeake chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Dr. Gwen Dubois, states, “This is especially troubling for a city with major problems and limited funds: problems with crime, police corruption, aging infrastructure in constant need of repairs, a shortage of decent low-income housing, and shortfalls in funding for public education.”
The city council has a broad vision. Baltimore City Councilman Bill Henry, who cosponsored the bill, stated, “As the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. said ‘A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.’ We need to invest more of our resources in ourselves and in our children, striving for a future in which our efforts towards building a stronger society are no longer diminished by our efforts to mutually assure our own destruction.”
Read more about the resolution here, and see the full text of the resolution here.
