By TCN News,
Chennai: The People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) commemorates the International Day Against Nuclear Tests on August 29, 2013 by demanding the government of India to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and to undertake a pledge not to conduct any more nuclear tests in India.
The PMANE also requests the people and government of Pakistan to do the same as India and prevent nuclear weapons proliferation and an atomic arms race in the subcontinent. Most of the people in India and Pakistan have been scarping along with so much poverty, misery, ill-health, and an utter lack of human security and dignity.
But the ruling elites in both the countries are squandering the scarce national resources on buying all kinds of conventional weapons, missiles and military hardware; procuring useless nuclear reactors from Russia, China, United States, France and other countries; and looting the poor people in the forms of contracts, commissions and kickbacks. This “leadership enrichment” proves to be more deadly and dangerous than Uranium enrichment. Their “harms’ race” has been more lethal and fatal than the actual arms race. Even after 66 years of independence, the people of India and Pakistan are still known around the world for poverty, belligerence and indignities, but all our elites are living like erstwhile Maharajahs and Maharanis.
The nuclear weapons of India and Pakistan have not helped us to deter the Kargil War and they have proved to be of no use in the wake of several military intrusions, border skirmishes, terrorist attacks and the loss of so many invaluable lives on both sides.
How long should we live like this? Like hunting dogs for the feudal lords in New Delhi and Islamabad? It is high time we, the ordinary people of India and Pakistan, start putting pressure on China and Russia to reduce their nuclear arms, limit them and eventually eliminate them with the full and complete adherence of the imperial masters of the world, the United States, Britain and France.
We, the seven billion citizens of the Earth, cannot and should not allow a small group of rich and powerful and immoral elites to hijack our common flying home, the Earth, and to hold the entire humanity as helpless hostages. We should not let the self-serving, profiteering and criminal corporate elements get away with their militaristic, nuclearistic and nihilistic crimes on the Earth.
Nuclear weapon and nuclear power are both sides of the same coin and we cannot eliminate the bomb project by keeping the power project. The United Nations should understand this simple nursery school knowledge, give up its hypocritical stand on nuclear power, learn the important lessons from history and close down the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) immediately.
The PMANE reasserts its determination to strive for a Nuclear-Free India, South Asia, and the World that has “No Deals, No Mines, No Reactors, No Dumps, No Tests and No Bombs.”