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New York Moves Closer to Nuclear Divestment

January 31, 2020 By Bob Kinsey

Don’t try to hold your breath till Colorado Springs City Council takes similar action. They won’t even hear a presentation on support for the ban treaty from the nuns who Suthers put in jail.

January 29, 2020
By Timmon Wallis and Vicki Elson, NuclearBan.US

January 29, 2020: New York City moved one step closer to divesting from nuclear weapons yesterday, after a joint committee hearing in City Hall. The only opposition was from the Mayor’s Office on a technicality, and the committee was still one vote short of a veto-proof majority.

But after about 60 people testified at the public hearing, the Mayor’s Office moved quickly to announce they would “find a way” to resolve the technicality, and Council Member Fernando Cabrera announced his support for divestment. With Cabrera’s support, these two resolutions now have a veto-proof majority of support on the New York City Council, and with withdrawal of opposition from the Mayor’s office they are almost certain to go through sometime in the coming weeks.

The first of the two bills, introduced by Council Member Daniel Dromm, is INT 1621, which calls for the establishment of an Advisory Committee to investigate and report on New York City’s status as a “nuclear weapons-free zone,” a status New York City has had since 1983. The second, RES 976, calls on the City Comptroller to divest the pension funds of public employees in New York City “to avoid any financial exposure to companies involved in the production and maintenance of nuclear weapons.” It also calls on the federal government to support and join the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Council Member Dromm said he was “energized” by the testimony coming from wide range of organizations and from people ranging in age from 19 to 90, from descendants of the original Lanape Nation inhabitants of Manhattan to Nobel Peace Prize-winning members of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

Other speakers ranged from proud New Yorkers to survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from a soldier involved in numerous nuclear bomb tests in Nevada to a relative of Mikhail Gorbachev, from elderly activists who repeatedly spend years in jail for protesting nuclear weapons to bankers and investment experts explaining why divestment from nuclear weapons is actually beneficial to their portfolios.

Manhattan, epicenter of the invention of nuclear weapons, is still suffering from radioactive contamination from those days. A Teamster recalled working in a warehouse where the High Line is now, where barrels were radiating heat and melting the asphalt on the floor. There were multiple mentions of the Doomsday Clock, started in 1947 by guilt-wracked Manhattan Project scientists, which is now “set” closer to “midnight” that at any time in history.

Manhattan has been home to human life for 3,000 years. But expert testimony made clear that one nuclear weapon could erase all the people, animals, art and architecture, and that the radioactivity would last for way more than 3,000 years into the future. New York City, of course, is a prime target for nuclear attack.¦nbsp;

Written testimony was also submitted by people from all over the world, including from the Office of the Dalai Lama, and from Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-CA), whose bill H.R. 2419 would de-fund US nuclear weapons and shift the taxpayer dollars to green technologies, jobs, and alleviation of poverty.

Although New York City pensions have less than $500 million invested in the nuclear weapons industry, one-tenth its level of investments in fossil fuels, divestment by New York would be hugely significant to the global movement to abolish nuclear weapons and put financial pressure on the companies responsible.

New York City oversees five pension funds, which between them represent the fourth largest public pension program in the country, with over $200 billion worth of investments. In 2018, the City Comptroller announced that the city had begun a five-year process of divesting the pension funds of more than $5 billion from the fossil fuel industry. Nuclear weapons divestment is a more recent phenomenon, boosted by the adoption in 2017 of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

So far, two of the largest pension funds in the world, the Norwegian Sovereign Fund and ABP of the Netherlands, have committed to divesting from the nuclear weapons industry. Other financial institutions in Europe and Japan, including Deutchebank and Resona Holdings have joined more than 36 others who have decided to divest from nuclear weapons. In the US, cities like Berkeley, CA, Takoma Park, MD and Northampton, MA, have divested, along with Amalgamated Bank of New York and Green Century Fund in Boston.

Vicki Elson, MA, CCE, CD

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Disarmament Quotes

[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

5-Star Admiral William D. Leahy Chief of Staff to President's Roosevelt and Truman, leader of Combined US-UK Chiefs of Staff during WWII

We seek the elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. 

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight Eisenhower US President 1953-1961

It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason. 

Mikhail Gorbachev, 1995

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee Butler Former Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

Over the past 15 years, the goal of elimination of nuclear weapons has been so much on the back burner that it will take a true political breakthrough and a major intellectual effort to achieve success in this endeavor.

Mikhail Gorbachev, January 31, 2007

There are still thousands of warheads loaded on operational systems and standing on high states of alert on virtually hair-trigger posture. And you have to ask yourself: Why is that? Who is the enemy? What is the threat? 

U.S. General Lee Butler Former Commander in Chief, U.S. Strategic Air Command in 1991-92

We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal ... 

George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, January 4, 2007

Now, understand, this matters to people everywhere. One nuclear weapon exploded in one city -– be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague –- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences might be -– for our global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate survival. 

Former President Barack Obama, April 5, 2009

Viewing Trinity Test July 16,1945: "Now we are all Sons of Bitches"

Kenneth Bainbridge Deputy Director

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlister Kings Bay Protestor 2019

So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained for ages. There used to be so-called laws of war, which made it tolerable. Now we know the truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atomic bomb brought an empty victory but it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see... 

Mahatma Gandhi from The Essential Gandhi, Louis Fisher, ed.

Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not. 

Robert McNamara Former U.S. Secretary of Defense

Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. We scientists recognise our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of atomic energy and its implication for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope - we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death. 

Albert Einstein, January 22, 1947

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford "The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

It is my fervent goal and hope…that we will some day no longer have to rely on nuclear weapons to deter aggression and assure world peace. To that end the United States is now engaged in a serious and sustained effort to negotiate major reductions in levels of offensive nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal of eliminating these weapons from the face of the earth. 

Ronald Reagan, October 20, 1986

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