MLK and Nuclear Arms Control
Citizens of our country celebrated Martin Luther King’s birthday on Monday.
We were treated to media reports on MLK’s well-deserved reputation as a civil rights leader. His efforts led to the end of segregation in our country. However, there was more to his life than the short and sweet media reports we hear and see on the holiday named after him. His stance on nuclear arms control has much to teach us today.
King was an advocate of economic justice. One of MLK’s last acts of courage was supporting a group of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn. right before his assassination in April of 1968. He told the workers: “We’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point in Memphis. We’ve got to see it through.” King believed the struggle in Memphis exposed the need for economic equality and social justice that he hoped his Poor People’s Campaign would highlight.
He also had very strong opinions on the Cold War nuclear arms race between the United States and Soviet Russia. His views on this subject are relevant today when the worlds various power blocks – U.S., Russia, and China – are engaging in a balancing contest as to who can acquire the most nuclear arms. President Donald Trump has withdrawn from a key nuclear arms control treaty, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran, and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the New START Treaty are also on the table.
MLK’s ideas on nuclear arms control can teach us much in today’s challenges. In 1958, the U.S. and Soviet Russia were developing and testing nukes, and King received a letter from Norman Cousins and Clarence Pickett of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. He joined SANE right away and later that year signed an appeal by Protestant clergy on an end to nuclear tests.
In this instance, the consciousness raising drills of activists paid off and the public outcry against nuclear tests encouraged President Dwight Eisenhower to start negotiations with the Soviets on a test ban treaty in 1958. MLK joined in a statement to the U.S. and Soviet negotiators in Geneva that said: “an important beginning has to be made on one vital part of the problem of world peace, the permanent internationally inspected ending of nuclear weapons tests. Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, produced a limited treaty with the Soviets in 1963 banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, underwater, and in outer space.
King wrote in Ebony Magazine in 1957: “I definitely feel that the development and use of nuclear weapons of war should be banned. It cannot be disputed that a full scale nuclear war would be utterly catastrophic. Hundreds and millions of people would be killed outright by the blast and heat, and by the ionizing radiation produced at the instant of the explosion.” He also critiqued the amount being spent on nuclear armaments: “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”
There are still 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world, according to the Arms Control Association. The goal of abolishing nuclear weapons was held by Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. MLK wanted countries to come together to solve their problems. Is there an individual like MLK today? Where are high-profile organizations like SANE?
