'Keep Strong, My Friend'

Excerpts from a letter to Mordechai Vanunu from David Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Santa Barbara, California, sometime in the year 2000.

…I continue to be appalled at the treatment you have received at the hands of the Israeli government. The truth seems always to be a difficult thing for the governments of national security states to accept, and you have continued the apparently unpardonable sin of challenging the barriers of secrecy and deceit that surround your government. It is these barriers of secrecy and deceit that have been so detrimental to democracy in our time.

What irony it is that Israel has released hundreds of terrorists from its prisons, but it cannot pardon one man willing to speak the truth. You indeed suffer for us all by the loss of your liberty. At least, though, your life is an honest one and has a decent purpose-not at all like the lives of the scientists and bureaucrats who live behind the lie that nuclear weapons can bring us security. It shocks me every day that our societies continue to threaten the murder of millions of innocent people with our nuclear devices and that we can still consider ourselves to be decent human beings. In the United States, in Israel, and in other nuclear weapons states, we have truly lost our bearings and, blinded by the power of scientific and technological devices, we have lost touch with what it means to be human. We put it all at risk for what is ironically referred to as "national security."

Your good deed has been severely punished, but in the end it is you who will triumph over all the judges, the politicians, the bureaucrats and the scientists who have sold their souls to the national security state. Keep strong, my friend….

--David Krieger