Category: Pondering Peace
It’s the Pits!
The first protest march I ever participated in was the June 1982 Rally for Nuclear Disarmament in New York City. Terry and I took time out from our seminary studies to travel there and join an estimated million other people to march from Central Park to the United Nations, calling for a nuclear freeze on testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons. It was considered a landmark event for nuclear abolition efforts, although it still took another five years for the United States and the USSR to sign their first disarmament treaty and begin to reduce their nuclear weapons.
With the dissolution of the USSR and ending of the Cold War, a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) was established between the United States and Russia, restricting the number of deployed nuclear warheads and enacting verification. Unfortunately, these two major nuclear powers allowed the last extension of the New START treaty to expire a couple months ago in February 2026, resulting in the possibility of both countries increasing their nuclear arsenals without restraint for the first time in decades and accelerating the nuclear arms race. An issue that felt somewhat controlled, although still frighteningly dangerous, now seems to have been unleashed again on the world. When on April 7th, President Trump wrote on social media that a “”whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” if Iran did not meet a deadline, it was surely a threat to use nuclear weapons. With a capricious, vengeful, short-sighted, and egocentric president having the full authority to order a nuclear weapon strike, we live in very perilous times.
Despite the fact that in signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the United States agreed to be working toward complete nuclear disarmament, there is evidence that the United States is moving forward with plans to develop and produce more nuclear weapons as part of a congressionally authorized plan to spend $1.7 trillion to “upgrade” the nuclear weapons arsenal. One aspect of this is the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) beginning efforts to build a significant number of new plutonium pits, each of which is basically the “trigger” that sets off a nuclear weapon’s explosion. Scientists tell us that new plutonium pits are not needed to maintain the safety and reliability of current nuclear weapons because they are only about 40 years old and can last 80-100 years. Furthermore,15,000 plutonium pits are in storage for future use, if needed. New plutonium pits would only be required for new designs of nuclear weapons.
Having stopped the building of plutonium pits several times before, nuclear activists are trying once again to hold our government’s nuclear ambitions in check, although they indicate the situation this time is much more difficult. They sued the NNSA to force them to do an environmental impact statement of their plan, which is actually required by law, and they are encouraging public involvement at hearings that are scheduled in several places around the country. One of those occurred in Kansas City recently, since Kansas City hosts a plant that produces 80% of all the non-nuclear electrical and mechanical parts that go into nuclear weapons. The NNSA campus in southern Kansas City is currently undergoing a rapid expansion for increased production.
Deeply concerned about all of this, I found myself listening carefully to the public hearing in Kansas City on May 7. The room was crowded with people eager to speak their opposition to developing more plutonium pits, questioning the adequacy of the environmental impact statement and raising their concerns. Workers at the NNSA’s previous Kansas City campus on Bannister Road had not been adequately informed about and protected from toxic chemicals, and the result has been significantly high levels of cancer. One speaker had an uncle die of cancer. Another was currently caring for her mother with lung cancer as she suffered and labored to breathe.
Plutonium is highly toxic and radioactive, and some questioned the safety of transporting plutonium pits on our highways to Texas where they would be assembled into nuclear weapons. There was restrained but obvious anger in many of the young people who spoke with cold and sometimes accusing voices. One young man questioned this expansion of nuclear weapons, seeing it as genocidal and fearing that it puts Kansas City in harm’s way for retaliation. He ended his comment by saying, “With all the other crises going on, how dare you add one more?!”
The very first person to speak during the two hour public comment period was a young woman who is the pastor of a Lutheran church in the area. It felt like an appropriate beginning to me, for surely the development and possession of nuclear weapons kept at a state of readiness for use in massive civilian and environmental destruction is much more than a national security issue. It is a deeply moral and spiritual issue. Over 150,000 people were killed by the two atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the nuclear weapons we have now are dramatically larger and more lethal.
Since the World Council of Churches formed in 1948, it has categorically opposed nuclear weapons. It continues to urge churches to work toward prohibiting the development, testing, and use of nuclear weapons, stressing the immorality of nuclear weapons and advocating for their total elimination. In a pontifical message in 2022, Pope Francis wrote, “Nuclear weapons are a costly and dangerous liability. They represent a “risk multiplier” that provides only an illusion of a ‘peace of sorts’… the use of nuclear weapons, as well as their mere possession, is immoral.” Pope Leo has continued that call to abolish nuclear weapons and has urged a rejection of “the illusory security based on the threat of mutual destruction.” He writes, “True peace demands the courageous laying down of weapons — especially those with the power to cause an indescribable catastrophe.”
It is clearly morally reprehensible to even consider using weapons that will incinerate hundreds of thousands of people on impact and cause the suffering and later death of millions more. What could possibly justify this? The rationale of mutually assured destruction should one nation use nuclear weapons creates the tension of a “balance of terror,” with the significant potential for a catastrophe due to human error or accident, as has almost already occurred. It is also morally unjustifiable to be spending billions of dollars every year to maintain this nuclear arsenal, and now upgrade it, when that money could go toward helping people who are hungry, homeless, and in need of medical care, and fund programs to address the climate crisis and other social needs.
Awake in the early hours of the morning, I felt the heaviness of the situation we are in. And then in the darkness, the words came to me, “Be still and know that I am God.” The context for those words in Psalm 46 is the earth changing and the nations in an uproar. There we are assured that God is in our midst as our refuge, strength, and ever present help. There is also expressed the hope that God will make all wars to cease. This is surely what God desires.
As I began work, I ran across a recent Sojourners article entitled “People of faith helped stop nukes once; Let’s do it again.” I agree with that young man who decried having to deal with another crisis. It’s the pits! Yes, literally, plutonium pits. Nevertheless, as I now turn to write and submit my public comment on the plutonium pit production environmental impact statement (PEIS), I also agree with the Sojourners authors. As people of faith, let’s join the effort to stop nukes again!
Rev. Ruth Rosell, Ph.D.
Director of the Buttry Center for Peace and Nonviolence
Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology Emerita
Central Seminary, Overland Park, KS
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
Further information:
“Plutonium Pit Production: The Risks and Costs of US Plans to Build New Nuclear Weapons” (Union of Concerned Scientists)
“Plutonium hearings come to Kansas City as U.S. ramps up production for nuclear weapons” (KCUR/NPR)
“Your chance to say NO to Plutonium Pits in Kansas City!” (PeaceWorks)
Visit https://pitpeis.com/ for more information on how to make a written public comment.