Testimony to the New York City Council Hearing on Resolution 0976 – 2019 and INT 1621 – 2019,
January 28, 2019.

Dear Esteemed New York City Council

Thank you. Deepest gratitude for your hearing the urgent call. These bills direct action, being watched around the world, are helping to awaken our City and the world in turning around our extremely costly, illegal, immoral, and incalculably catastrophic man made disaster.

MLK, Jr asked us, “How long?!” You join our NY Catholic Worker family members who are being imprisoned for non violent civil disobedience entering one of our hidden nuclear weapon submarine bases, which alone is capable of destroying every major city, and all human life, painting “Love One Another”, and placing there Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine, and the UN’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. One is Martha Hennessy, grand daughter of Dorothy Day, who 65 years ago just outside City Hall was arrested doing penance for this industry and resisting as David McReynolds described, the pathological absurdity of our government thinking we could prepare for a nuclear detonation.

96 yr. old Professor Freeman Dyson, colleague of both Oppenheimer and Einstein, recently said to us, “Look, these things can do only one thing. They murder millions of people. Is that what you want? The answer should be quite clear.” It is. Over the previous decades millions of NYC residents voted with their feet.

Here in the home of Wall Street, you, our representatives, especially by the act of divestment, are sending a clear directive to stop this renewed insane nuclear arms race, vast waste of needed resources, and most grave danger to humanity, to move us toward what is needed to save this planet, climate and civilization.

New Yorker Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ in his Plowshares trial of 1980 said of these weapons, “Call them by their right name. Which is: Murder. Death. Genocide.”

Your esteemed predecessors, via uncovered 15 previous NYC Council Resolutions dating from 1963, speak to stopping the vast spending on this omnicidal industry and re-direct it to the underfunded, dire needs of the city, it’s education, health care, housing, infrastructure, transportation, reforms and social services.

From the UN podium in 1960 until his death, a constant champion of nuclear disarmament and international security, Amb. Zenon Rossides of Cyprus guides us, “It is not the power of weapons, but the power of this Spirit that can save the world.”

Onward together, in gratitude,

Anthony Donovan