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Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the most inspiring and beloved Jewish teachers of the twentieth century, was also a regular participant in protests against racial segregation and the war in Vietnam. Asked once about the slim chances of actually influencing the course of events, he replied that when we protest, we do so not only to achieve certain results, but also to save our own souls. This collection of documents evolved out of my efforts to face my own responsibilities in regard to the nuclear weapons of my country, the United States, and to save my own heart from numbness and denial. For these weapons, in effect, belong to me. They have been created to defend me, and they have been created with my tax dollars and the assumption of my consent. My silence on this matter gradually becomes my consent to be "defended" in this way. I have decided to issue my own citizen's renunciation of the use of nuclear weapons in my name under any circumstances. This may seem like an extreme position. Here are the considerations that have driven me to it.

I have been jolted into renewed protest in recent weeks by President Bush's announcement that the United States intends to use nuclear weapons not only to deter nuclear attacks, but to deter any attack or even threat of attack. This represents an enormous widening of the scope of possible nuclear wars, regardless of the much-announced current plans to reduce the total number of nuclear bombs held by the United States and Russia. Official pronouncements that this has been U.S. policy for some time do not lessen the danger of a dangerous path.

One major problem with threatening to use nuclear weapons is that we have to be very ready to carry out the threat. That means we lose any moral credibility in trying to control the spread of nuclear weapons, or to persuade our opponents to negotiate rather than escalate. Unfortunately, when people make threats, they actually instruct and invite those threatened to make the same threats back. For half a century the United States has been asserting its will in world politics backed up by the threat of nuclear weapons. Now, every maniac on the planet wants to get his hands on some. I can't help thinking to myself, as an American: what lesson about power did we think we were teaching the world all those years?

And President Bush, like his predecessors of both parties, still does not seem to understand this process. That people watch what we do. By threatening to use nuclear weapons in a wider and wider range of circumstances, he is telling everyone how useful they are. More countries will make them, and they will get easier and easier to steal. (How confident are you that Pakistan can safeguard its nuclear weapons?) Eventually someone who hates us will get one and use it on us. Or we will end up living in a computerized security state in order to try to avoid that fate. Or we will have to carry out our threat and then have to cope with new waves of hatred against us. We have no way of knowing what our threats will provoke.

A balance of terror, or the threat of retaliation, can never bring us security. As the recent attacks on America demonstrate so tragically, overwhelming force will not keep us safe in a world where more than a billion people are angry, hungry and hopeless. If we want to be safe, it seems to me, we need to invest our resources in making a world in which peace is possible, a world that offers a better life for everyone. Instead, we are being invited to invest more and more heavily in the machinery of destruction. Since 1940 the United States has spent approximately six trillion dollars on nuclear weapons. And this investment is a seductive and addictive process. First there were the tremendously expensive nuclear weapons themselves, then there were the tremendously expensive missiles to deliver them, and now we are told we need to invest in expensive new missiles to shoot down other nations' missiles. Meanwhile, when we spend new hundreds of billions on military hardware, we do not spend those billions on schools and hospitals around the world. The global gap between the rich and the poor grows worse, resentment against America grows, we become more endangered and more in need, according to our experts, of new bombs and missiles. Some nations come to oppose us, like Iran or Libya, and I think because we imagine we could obliterate them with nuclear weapons if we chose, we do not really work very hard at healing the divisions in the world. Now, like gamblers who can't stand to face the money they have lost, our political leaders can't stand to face that our six trillion dollars spent on nuclear weapons has bought us only a world full of hatred, fear, poverty and violence.

I have come to believe that our own misplaced faith in weapons, our blindness to human needs, and our contemptuous dismissal of those whose guns are not as big as our guns, will be our undoing, more than any foreign enemy. This is one of many the reasons why I have decided to say no to the use of nuclear weapons on my behalf under any circumstances. Nuclear weapons are worsening the problems they were supposed to solve.

There are other serious problems with the mere possession of nuclear weapons, even before anybody uses them. One of them is that a person's character is defined not just by deeds after the fact, but largely by what a person is willing to do, plans to do, and will refrain from doing. If I am willing to infect a city with smallpox, or release nerve gas in a subway, and I plan to do so, I am morally depraved as a person, even if I have not yet gotten around to actually performing those actions. With a heavy heart I must confess that I have become convinced the same holds true for our planning to use nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons make it impossible to protect civilians from injury and death, as required by the Nuremberg Principles and any normal person's sense of restraint. Nuclear weapon explosions release massive amounts of radioactive poisons, which rain down on thousands of square miles of the surrounding land, cities, towns and people. Our readiness to use them is thus, God help us, our readiness to commit mass murder and poisoning. What is left of our character after that? This is another of the many reasons why I have decided to say no to the use of nuclear weapons on my behalf under any circumstances.

The moral issue just described points to the public side of character. There is also the subjective side of life. How do I feel about being alive? How do I feel about being me? How do I feel about people planning to commit mass murder on my behalf? If I have qualms of conscience, I am sure that I can blot them out of awareness with sufficient quantities of drugs, alcohol and/or violent entertainment. Or perhaps just get very buried in my work, buried enough that I don't feel much about the world around me. The question is, what is left of my life after I do that?

So, what is an ordinary citizen to do? Nuclear weapons programs began in secrecy and continue to this day to be shrouded in secrecy and far from citizen influence. And yet, as citizens in a democracy, we have an open-ended responsibility for all that is done in our names. It occurred to me that one beginning step I could take to fulfill that responsibility would be to very publicly withdraw my consent from this process, and to do this in a way that is consistent with the seriousness of the issue. Hence the documents on the following pages, and suggestions for signing them and sending them to your elected representatives. (Please feel free to compose your own.) I may not individually be able to stop the United States from its nuclear folly, but I can at least tell public officials not to invoke my name as a justification for it. Yes, I am trying to save my own soul, trying to hang on to some personal integrity as a citizen of a country that denounces weapons of mass destruction while secretly planning to use them in expanding ways. Perhaps if many people take this personal responsibility for what is being done in their name, the soul of our world might be saved.

I know one thing for sure. If I die in a mass murder attack on the United States, I do not want additional mass murders committed in my name. Someone, somewhere must say stop, turn, turn toward life, turn away from the instruments of death.  I invite you to study, reflect, pray and join me in making such a statement.