Community of Christ President Steve Veazey has a new blog and has been posting reflections on his experiences visiting the city of Hiroshima:
The scenes at the Peace Memorial Museum will haunt me for the rest of my life, as they certainly should. May I never forget them. If enough people could see what we saw and feel what we felt our mindset would change. We would do whatever is necessary to ensure that nuclear weapons (which a many, many times more powerful today) would never be used again for the sakes of all of our children and grandchildren.
The first article in the series is here. Click here for the second.
Veazey’s thoughts remind me of the following comments made by the late Charles D. Neff in a 1982 World Conference sermon, in which he called on the church to take a courageous stand against nuclear weapons:
My friends, I was in Hiroshima just a few weeks after an atomic bomb was dropped from an American military airplane onto that city. What I saw and felt there is indelibly etched into my mind, my heart, my soul. The stark reality of death and despair everywhere in Hiroshima in 1945 is indescribable.
Readers may also be interested to know that a retired Community of Christ minister and former editor of the church’s magazine, The Herald, Jim Hannah, was arrested at an anti-nuclear weapons demonstration in September this year. The charges against him were recently dropped and spoke at an anti-nuclear weapons rally earlier this month. To read Hannah’s justification for his participation in non-violent direct action against nuclear armament, click here.
For a previous discussion on this blog of the Community of Christ and nuclear weapons, click here.
Saints Herald 
My objection to President Veazey’s blog is that he doesn’t allow comment. The purpose of a blog is not just to read but to also hear comment.
I understand what you are saying Margie, but perhaps there is concern about what types of comments some may make. I don’t know a lot about the ins and outs of blogs, but perhaps there are ways to edit or censor if some comments are too far off color(?)
My objections to the content is the fact that at this last world conference, 2010, the resolution which spoke to this issue was not supported by the presidency and in fact was referred by the conference – in other words “death by committee.” Not coincidentally, the resolution was authored by Jim Hannah.
The complete incongruence which keeps being demonstrated by this presidency is completely unacceptable.
(And, yes, there is a way to accept comments on the blog, but to not publish those which are offensive – that option was shut off on this blog.)
One reason why antinuclear protesters don’t like comments on their activities is this:
In the late 1940’s, when Cousin Josif had no atomic weapons, he correctly perceived the atomic weapons held by the U.S. as a threat, not to world peace, but to the Communist Party’s agenda for world domination through military aggression.
The original antinuclear movement was founded by Stalin to stir up civil unrest in nonCommunist countries possessing nuclear weapons to attempt to force those countries into abandoning their weapons programs.
The well-known “peace sign” was cobbled together from the two semaphore signals for “N” and “D,” i.e., “Nuclear Disarmament.” However, the term actually unspoken was “unilateral” nuclear disarmament by the Western powers.
Even today, we see Hollywood celebrities and clergy going out of their way to get arrested protesting against nuclear weapons possessed by the United States. It is more like a fraternity prank than anything else. None of these folks would dare travel to North Korea or Iran and tell the merciless antiChristian, antidemocratic dictators there that nuclear weapons are dangerous and should be abolished.
In short, anything that might accomplish anything other than get publicity and increase celebrity status is off the table from the get go.
Regardless of how the antinuclear came into being, or for what purpose, the fact remains that the continued development of nuclear technology (regardless of who is developing the technology) is a real and potentially devistaging threat to all of life on earth…even to the complete destruction of the earth itself. I would encourage anyone who has interest in this issue to read Dr Helen Caldecott’s books on the subject. Her work is quite eye-opening.
My father served as a Navy gunner’s mate in WW II. He shared with me several times that the two bombs saved many more Japanese lives that if there had been the full invasion into Japan. In Okinawa they fraught to almost the last man, civilians included. If the emperor hadn’t told his subjects to surrender, the deaths would have gone into the millions. It comes down to if there wasn’t a Pearl Harbor, there wouldn’t have been a Hiroshima.