The Holland Sentinel
Letter: Lessons to be learned from Ukraine tragedy
Peter Turner – March 29, 2022
The horrifying circumstances we see from Russia’s blatant attack on Ukraine has been heartbreaking to watch. This tragedy is ongoing and may well bring the entire world into a dark period that is beyond any event in human history.
One potentially unstable human being appears to control close to half the world’s nuclear capability. If he’s backed into a corner what will he do? Putin has the power to end human civilization as we’ve known it.
Before 1994, an independent Ukraine owned a sizable chunk of what is now Putin’s nuclear weapons capability. In exchange for promises from the U.S., Britain and Putin himself that they would protect Ukraine and honor its territorial borders, Ukraine turned over its nuclear weapons to Russia. We are seeing how that promise turned out. Clearly if the world survives this crisis all of us will want every country on earth to have nuclear weapons so they won’t be destroyed by a despotic bully.
Who would disagree with that?
The clear precedent is “to stop a bad guy with a gun you need more good guys with a gun.” Unfortunately, the more privately owned guns there are, the more dead and wounded people you get. For the person shot dead, it’s no different than human civilization ending.
No matter how the Ukraine nightmare ends, if you’re a citizen of Iran, Taiwan, Brazil, Mexico, Turkey and all the rest of the 187 non-nuclear armed countries in the world, you’re going to want some nukes. How would you tell them they don’t need them?
When will we act like we know we are all God’s children instead of just saying it and “beat our swords into ploughshares.” Imagine a world where 25 percent of all of human history’s productive capacity went to improving lives instead of weapons of war. Where would we be now compared to seeing Ukraine’s nightmare unfold?
It can’t be soon enough.