Town Meetings will be asked to take stand against nuclear war

To The Daily Sun,

My town of Sanbornton and other New Hampshire towns will have a ramp-down-nuclear-war-potential question for voters at Town Meeting in March. I've been getting signatures for this petition and now have enough to give them to our town clerk. The questions have been interesting, prompting good discussion, as I have stood outside our transfer station for signers/voters and checked in with friends/voters. I thank all who have signed.

Five points line up to potentially prevent nuclear war, if the towns vote positively and if, then, our U.S. senators and president agree, by: renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first; ending the sole, unchecked authority of any president to launch a nuclear attack; taking U.S. nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert; canceling the plan to replace our entire arsenal with enhanced weapons; and actively pursuing a verifiable agreement among nuclear-armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

Collectively nine nations now have 15,000 nuclear weapons, far more destructive than what we launched to kill hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. Very recently, July 2017, 122 nations approved The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons "which makes it illegal under international law to develop, test, produce, manufacture, or otherwise acquire, possess, or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices." The world wants to live.

The petition language asks for our United States to lead in this global effort. As a grandmother wanting life on this planet "normal" for my grandkids and their world-wide peers, and knowing others feel this way too — I urge all who get the opportunity to vote for this sanity to do it.

Lynn Rudmin Chong

Sanbornton