We protest nuclear weapons in Kansas City for our faith and morality | Opinion

Don’t you know nuclear weapons put us on the eve of destruction? I asked that in my April 13 letter to Eric Wollerman, president of Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies, LLC. He directs the Kansas City National Security Campus on Botts Road in south Kansas City. I discussed the Midwest Catholic Worker Retreat and Resistance, which will take place April 24 through 27. We are nonviolent, concerned people who pray that nuclear weapons be abolished from Earth. We do not accept that weapons of mass destruction are necessary, for the indiscriminate and massive deaths and damages of these weapons make them evil and totally un-Christian.

These weapons of mass destruction could cause genocide and ecocide to our entire planet. I cannot not protest. We will conduct our protest action at Honeywell early in the morning of April 27.

Here are key points I made in my letter to Mr. Wollerman:

In a joint statement issued in January 2022, the leaders of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council pledged to avoid using nuclear weapons, stating, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” The five leaders, representing five nations with nuclear weapons, who signed this pledge were U.S. President Joe Biden, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron.

Each year, when I come to the National Security Campus, I say to the people I meet that more and more weapons of mass destruction are being built here — and I ask where will it all end. I saw before the opening of this plant in 2014 that the fields were used for soybean and wheat production. Urban blight funds were misused to construct this deadly facility. My mind is drawn to Psalm 23: “I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”

While once the annual budget for Kansas City National Security Complex was $1 billion, it has now grown to more than $2 billion for 2027. I am shocked that the plant’s budget includes $442 million for the W80-4 LEP warhead, $180 million for the W87-1 warhead and $144 million for the W93 ballistic missile. Total stockpile modernization is $783 million and plutonium modernization is $55 million. That is enormous killing power. God forgive us.

For her book “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” Annie Jacobsen interviewed 47 people: former Secretaries of Defense William J. Perry and Leon Panetta, who also served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency; nuclear weapons designers; General C. Robert Kehler, former commander of U.S. Strategic Command; many generals; Nobel Prize winners in physics and others. Jacobsen begins her book saying that a nuclear exchange would be “hell on Earth.”

We who will gather in Kansas City on April 27 take to heart the strong words of Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV, who implore war nevermore. They urge the abolition of all nuclear weapons and preach that all people are made in the image and likeness of God. The Catholic Church no longer supports St. Augustine’s just war theory when it applies to nuclear warfare. The Catholic Worker Movement has had a long history of involvement in peacemaking.

Those crossing the plant’s property line will be totally unarmed, bearing in mind the witness of Jesus, who crossed the line and who was crucified. As a Catholic, I participate in weekday Mass, which recalls the crucifixion and death of Jesus. In my mind, I believe that all of society is being crucified today, by massive armaments that deprive the needy of adequate food, shelter, medical care, education, housing and more.

President Dwight Eisenhower stated in his farewell address: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” He added that great minds work on weapons of war when they should work to solve the problems of humankind. We have lost the moral way.

Respectfully, I offered to engage with Mr. Wollerman.

Henry M. Stoever is a retired attorney and board member of PeaceWorks Kansas City.