Friends met us for dinner at one of our favorite East Hampton restaurants last week, and handed us a surprising small gift: a copy of an outlandish million-dollar bill. The bill — faux, obviously — had skulls in the front upper corners and a red, yellow, and cream nuclear explosion where George Washington is supposed to be. On the other side, along with an image of some children, was the message: “Let us spend this money on a sustainable world for all of our kids.”
The million-dollar bill was part of a “Count the Nuclear Weapons Money” initiative that was organized during a larger event called United Nations Disarmament Week.
Fliers and talks took place in front of the New York City Hall, among many other places. The idea was to count as many $100-million bills by hand per minute to reach $1 trillion, which, we are told, is the amount being spent to modernize the nuclear arsenals of nine countries over the next 10 years. Symbolically, the organizers then reallocate the money toward more peaceful aims: climate protection, poverty alleviation, and sustainable development. The counting was to take place for seven days and nights, with the main counting at 504 West 22nd Street in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.
The Count the Money organizers say $1 trillion could cover three million home solar systems, one million electric cars, and food for 780 million malnourished people around the world.
It is time — don’t you agree? — that we all, in this “best of all possible worlds” in which we are fortunate to live, look deeply at how so much of our nation’s resources are being spent. Schoolchildren, here on Long Island as well as around the world, have been leading the charge to focus the world’s attention on the climate emergency, but I wonder if schoolkids these days are as worried about nuclear disaster as their predecessors were in the 1980s? How have we escaped nuclear catastrophe so far? It seems almost beyond our willingness to contemplate.
As for the million-dollar bill given to us by our friends, it was the brainchild of Alyn Ware of New Zealand, the coordinator of Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament. Mr. Ware helped inaugurate the International Court of Justice in 1996 and continues to work for women’s, children’s, and indigenous peoples’ rights. That he is from a far-flung place few of our readers have visited, and that the bill surfaced here, underscores the truth that we are all in this together.