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This Review begins with “[m]any hoped conditions had been set for deep reductions in global nuclear arsenals, and, perhaps, for their elimination. These aspirations have not been realized. America’s strategic competitors have not followed our example. The world is more dangerous, not less.” The NPR then points to Russia and China’s ongoing nuclear weapons modernization programs and North Korea’s “nuclear provocations.” It concludes, “We must look reality in the eye and see the world as it is, not as we wish it be.”

If the United States government were to really “look reality in the eye and see the world as it is”, it would recognize that it is failing miserably to lead the world toward the abolition of the only class of weapons that is a true existential threat to our country. As an obvious historic matter, the U.S. is the first and only country to use nuclear weapons. Since WWII the U.S. has threatened to use nuclear weapons in the Korean and Viet Nam wars, and on many other occasions.

Further, it is hypocritical to point to Russia and China’s “modernization” programs as if they are taking place in a vacuum. The U.S. has been upgrading its nuclear arsenal all along. In the last few years our country has embarked on a $1.7 trillion modernization program to completely rebuild its nuclear weapons production complex and all three legs of its nuclear triad.

Moreover, Russia and China’s modernization programs are driven in large part by their perceived need to preserve strategic stability and deterrence by having the ability to overwhelm the U.S.’ growing ballistic missile defenses. Ronald Reagan’s pursuit of “Star Wars” (fed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s false promises of success) blocked a nuclear weapons abolition agreement in 1988 with the soon-to-collapse Soviet Union. In 2002 George W. Bush unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which has been a source of constant friction with the Russian government ever since.

More recently, at Israel’s request, the U.S. blocked the 2015 NonProliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference at the United Nations from agreeing to an international conference on a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East (Israel, an undeclared nuclear weapons power, has never signed the NPT). As an overarching matter, the U.S. and other nuclear-armed NPT signatories have never honored the Treaty’s Article VI mandate “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament…”, in effect since 1970. As a consequence, last year more than 120 countries at the UN passed a nuclear weapons ban treaty which the U.S. vehemently denounced, despite the fact that there have long been ban treaties on chemical and biological weapons which the U.S. has not only supported but also sought to enforce.[1]

With respect to North Korea’s nuclear provocations, that repressive regime is clearly seeking deterrence against the U.S. (North Korea’s infrastructure was nearly completely destroyed during the Korean War, and it witnessed the destruction of the Iraqi regime that did not have nuclear weapons). The bombastic statements of “fire and fury” and who has the bigger “nuclear button” from two unpredictable heads of state (Trump and Kim Jong Un) have put the entire world on edge, given the highest chance of nuclear war since the mid-1980’s.

Finally, the Nuclear Posture Review purports to be all about “deterrence” against hostile threats. However, the U.S’ true nuclear posture has never been just deterrence, but rather the ability to wage nuclear war, including possible preemptive first strikes. This is the reason why the U.S. (and Russia) keep thousands of nuclear weapons instead of the few hundred needed for just deterrence.[2] And keeping and improving the ability to wage a nuclear war is the underlying reason for the $1.7 trillion “modernization” program that is giving nuclear weapons new military capabilities, instead of prudently maintaining a few hundred existing nuclear weapons.

In addition to fully preserving and improving the enormous land, sea and air-based Triad, the new NPR calls for:

1) Near-term development of a low-yield nuclear warhead for existing Trident missiles launched from new strategic submarines.

2) New sub-launched nuclear-armed cruise missiles.

3) Keeping the 1.2 megaton B83-1 nuclear gravity bomb “until a suitable replacement is identified.”

4) “Provid[ing] the enduring capability and capacity to produce plutonium pits at a rate of no fewer than 80 pits per year by 2030.”

5) “Advancing the W78 warhead replacement to FY19… and investigating the feasibility of fielding the nuclear explosives package in a Navy flight vehicle.”

Obvious problems are:
1) An adversary won’t know whether a Trident sub-launched nuclear warhead is a new low-yield or an existing high-yield warhead. In any event, any belief in a “limited’ nuclear war is a fallacy that shouldn’t be tested – – once the nuclear threshold is crossed at any level, it is crossed, and lower-yield nuclear weapons are all the more dangerous for being potentially more usable.

2) Sub-launched nuclear-armed cruise missiles are inherently destabilizing as the proverbial “bolt out of the blue,” and can be the perfect weapon for a nuclear first-strike. Moreover, this is redundant to nuclear-armed cruise missiles that are already being developed for heavy bombers.

3) The National Nuclear Security Administration largely justified the ongoing program to create the B61-12 (the world’s first “smart” nuclear gravity bomb) by being a replacement for the 1.2 megaton B83-1 bomb. Does this indicate doubts in the ~$13 billion B61-12 program? And will it lead to a bump up in the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S.’ arsenal?

4) To date, the talk has been up to 80 pits per year, not “no fewer than.” Also, the 2015 Defense Authorization Act required that the capability to produce up to 80 pits per year be demonstrated by 2027. The NPR’s later date of 2030 could be indicative of longstanding plutonium pit production problems at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. That delay and hints of higher than 80 pits per year could also point to the pit production mission being relocated at the Savannah River Site, which is under active consideration. In any event, future plutonium pit production pit production is not needed for the existing nuclear weapons stockpile, but is instead for future new-design nuclear weapons.

5) “W78 warhead replacement… in a Navy flight vehicle” is code for so-called Interoperable Warheads, whose planned three versions together could cost around $50 billion. These are arguably huge make work projects for the nuclear weapons labs (particularly Livermore), which ironically the Navy doesn’t even want.[3] It is also the driving reason for unnecessary future production of more than 80 pits per year.

Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch commented,

“This Nuclear Posture Review does not even begin to meet our long-term need to eliminate the one class of weapons of mass destruction that can truly destroy our country. It will instead set back nonproliferation and arms control efforts across the globe, and further hollow out our country by diverting yet more huge sums of money to the usual fat defense contractors at the expense of public education, environmental protection, natural disaster recovery, etc. Under the Trump Administration, expect medicare and social security to be attacked to help pay for a false sense of military security, and this Nuclear Posture Review is part and parcel of that.”

[1] Since then the U.S. has reportedly used strong arm tactics to discourage individual countries from ratifying the nuclear weapons ban treaty. See http://www.businessinsider.com/mattis-threatened-sweden-over-a-nuclear-weapons-ban-treaty-2017-9

[2] This was explicitly stated in a Department of Defense follow-on to the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). It states: “The new guidance requires the United States to maintain significant counterforce capabilities against potential adversaries. The new guidance does not rely on a “counter-value’ or “minimum deterrence” strategy.”

Report on Nuclear Implementation Strategy of the United States

Specified in Section 491 of 10. U.S.C.

Department of Defense, June 2013, page 4 (quotation marks in the original)

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/policy/dod/us-nuclear-employment-strategy.pdf

[3] See https://www.nukewatch.org/importantdocs/resources/Navy-Memo-W87W88.pdf

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President Trump, January 2, Twitter: “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works! “

President Trump doesn’t really have a “Nuclear Button” on his desk. According to Esquire.com, “If the president were to order a strike, he would identify himself to military officials at the Pentagon with codes unique to him. He would then transmit the launch order to the Pentagon and Strategic Command.” The U.S. has roughly 6,800 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert status. Presumably, the next step would be to deploy them. (God forbid.)

Hair-trigger means nuclear missiles may be launched within 15 minutes–either from land, air or sea. For example, thousands of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear warheads are on hair-trigger alert.

Forty-nine of these missiles are sitting nearby on the windswept plains of north-eastern Colorado. There are 400 more scattered over Nebraska, Wyoming, North Dakota and Montana.

Each missile has one nuclear bomb, with a blast capacity equivalent to 12 to 18 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb. The orders to launch would come from the president and go down through the chain of command to the crews ready to turn their keys.
A 2002 study by the Federation of American Scientists showed that if just 300 Russian warheads (North Korea may have 60) got through to targets in the United States, 75 million to 100 million people would die from the blast and heat effects in the first half hour. In addition, the public health system, the communications network, the electric grid, the banking system, the food distribution system — all would be gone. In the months after such an attack, the vast majority of Americans not killed in the initial attack would die from starvation, radiation sickness, epidemic disease, or exposure to the elements. A corresponding U.S. attack would create the same devastation in Russia or the Korean Peninsula.

This is insane. We need to abolish all nuclear weapons. Start by getting Colorado’s weapons off hair-trigger alert and passing Senator Markey/Representative Lieu’s bill to limit the President’s first strike capabilities; only Congress could authorize a strike.

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https://washingtonspectator.org/alvarez-nuclear-cleanup/

High-level radioactive waste pose threats to environment around nuclear management facilities December 20, 2017 By Robert Alvarez
With its $1.2 trillion price tag for the modernization of the U.S.
nuclear weapons arsenal and production complex, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office has induced “sticker shock” on Capitol Hill. Yet despite this enormous projected cost for rebuilding the U.S. triad of land, submarine, and bomber nuclear forces, the CBO has in fact lowballed its estimate by excluding the costs for environmental restoration and waste management of the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons complex.

Even though the cleanup of nuclear weapons sites comes from the same congressional spending account as DOE nuclear weapons modernization, the CBO chose to exclude an additional $541 billion in legacy costs.
If these costs are included, the total price tag goes to $1.74 trillion over three decades.

The largest of these cleanup costs, at $179.5 billion, is attributed to the stabilization and disposal of high-level radioactive wastes generated from the production of plutonium. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) informed Congress in 2013 that these wastes are “considered one of the most hazardous substances on earth.”

About 100 million gallons are stored in 227 underground tanks, many larger than state capitol domes and ranging in age from 43 to 73 years. Over 1 million gallons of these contaminants have leaked at the DOE’s Hanford site in Washington state, threatening the Columbia River.

The removal and stabilization of these wastes at Hanford by mixing them with molten glass, at an estimated cost of as much as $72.3 billion, represents the single largest, most expensive, and potentially riskiest nuclear cleanup project ever undertaken by the United States. It’s roughly comparable to the Apollo moon program in cost and risk, except there’s no moon.

Even without factoring in cleanup, an analysis of the DOE costs for the nuclear warheads program shows that while the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile has shrunk by 56 percent since 2003, the annual per-warhead cost has increased by about 422 percent. This huge cost growth in the nuclear stockpile budget is largely due to ever-growing overhead expenses for abandoned and antiquated structures not formally part of the DOE cleanup program. Many of these facilities contain hazardous materials and have been ignored for several decades.

To keep the lights on, the DOE weapons complex must pay for things like collapses, flooding, fires, and preventing roofs from falling in.
In 2015, the DOE Inspector General warned that, “delays in the cleanup and disposition of contaminated excess facilities expose the Department, its employees, and the public to ever-increasing levels of risk [and] lead to escalating disposition costs.”

The Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for instance, has a high-risk “footprint” of abandoned contaminated structures, mostly built in the 1940s, that is 2.5 times larger than the Pentagon building. Although Y-12 has not produced weapons for more than 25 years, its annual budgets have increased by nearly 50 percent since 1997, to more than $1 billion a year.

Over the past 20 years, there have been dozens of fires and explosions at Y-12 involving electrical equipment, glove boxes, pumps, waste containers, and nuclear and hazardous chemicals. Several of these incidents resulted in worker injuries and destruction of property.

As late as September of this year, unstable amounts of highly enriched uranium, called “material at risk” have spontaneously combusted. For more than 20 years, Y-12 has not been able to stabilize its backlog of “materials at risk.”

In a December 2016 DOE report to Congress, the unaccounted-for liability of getting rid of 2,349 of the DOE’s abandoned facilities over the next 10 years was roughly estimated at $32 billion. The DOE finds that among those are 203 unattended “high-risk” facilities and estimates a cost of $11.6 billion to close them down safely.

The most recent high-profile examples of aging-infrastructure risks include the collapse, last May, of a section of tunnel at the Plutonium and Uranium Extraction Facility, known as PUREX, a long-idle component of the sprawling Hanford nuclear site, 200 miles east of Seattle. The tunnel holds an enormous amount of radioactive wastes, and hundreds of workers were forced to seek cover.

And in June of this year, during the process of tearing down a building that was known to contain countless respirable plutonium particles, 31 workers inhaled or ingested plutonium during a work shift, after failing to take necessary precautions. It took four months for the DOE’s contractor to inform the public about the mishap and to tell the workers about their doses.

It took four months for the DOE’s contractor to inform the public about the mishap and to tell the workers about their doses.

The costs for the disposition of excess plutonium from the nuclear weapons programs is pegged by GAO at $56 billion. In 2012, the U.S.
Government determined that it no longer needed 43.4 metric tons of plutonium for military needs.

The majority of that plutonium is stored in facilities at the DOE’s Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, that were built in the 1940s. The plutonium is densely packed in special containers that are only meant for “interim” storage.

In 2010 and 2017, unexpected 2,000-year rains flooded a major plutonium storage area with several inches of water, which shut down the plant and impacted about 1,000 containers at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars in recovery funds.

Because plutonium weapon components can become dangerous if mishandled or improperly stored, a Pantex worker told me, while I was working for the DOE’s Secretary, that it was like “having a zoo full of wild animals.”

Because the plutonium disposition program is way over budget and is stalled without a credible path forward, tens of tons of plutonium are likely to remain in these 70-plus-year-old structures awaiting further floods and additional threats to their safety and integrity.

While an ever-growing amount of plutonium will be stored in antiquated structures at the Pantex plant, another 1,000 abandoned facilities will be added to the list of sites requiring specialized disposition over the coming decade. Costs for the disposal of large amounts of hazardous wastes in the abandoned structures are not included in the DOE’s 2016 estimate and are likely to add several billions of dollars more.

When the DOE cleanup program was created in 1990, Congress made sure that it would be paid for from the same pot of money designated for the U.S. arsenal of nuclear warheads. These legacy costs should not be isolated from estimates of the nation’s nuclear weapons budget.

The need to protect the safety and health of workers and the American public from the mess produced by the current and previous nuclear weapons stockpiles should not be ignored as we proceed to deal with the future of nuclear weapons in the 21st century. As former Senator John Glenn of Ohio, a staunch supporter of the Cold War, would often say, “What good is it to protect our nation with nuclear weapons if we poison our people in the process?”

A senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, Robert Alvarez served as senior policy adviser to the Energy Department’s secretary and deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment from 1993 to 1999. During this tenure, he coordinated the Energy Department’s nuclear material strategic planning and established the department’s first asset management program.

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ICAN Nobel Peace PrizeOn December 10, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway. The Nobel Committee awarded ICAN “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1daV8n6fTY

ICAN is made up of over 450 Partner Organizations, including the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, from 101 countries. On Sunday, ICAN’s Executive Director Beatrice Fihn will accept the prize together with Setsuko Thurlow, a survivor of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

ICAN stands in stark contrast with those national leaders and their allies who possess nuclear weapons and have been unwilling to give up their claim on them for their own perceived national security. But ICAN is on the right side of history, because those with nuclear weapons threaten the future of civilization, including their own populations.

ICAN well deserves the Nobel Peace prize. The campaign is effective. It is youthful. It is hopeful. It is necessary. May the Nobel Peace Prize propel it to even greater accomplishments. And may it awaken people everywhere to the threat posed by nuclear weapons, and the need to ban and eliminate them.

Please join us in congratulating ICAN on this historic achievement!

Take Action

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Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/245838745
YouTube: https://youtu.be/i9c6_qobMko

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Trespassers’ trial drags Pine Gap spy base into spotlight
By Jackie Dent
Updated25 November 2017 – 01:04pmfirst published at 08:31am

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Alice Springs: Margaret Pestorius arrived at the Alice Springs court last week in her wedding dress, a bright orange-and-cream creation painted with doves, peace signs and suns with faces.

“It’s the colours of Easter, so I always think of it as being a resurrection dress,” said Pestorius, a 53-year-old anti-war activist and devout Catholic, who on Friday was convicted of trespassing at Pine Gap, the top-secret military base operated by the United States in the Northern Territory.
Defendants accused of trespassing on a top-secret military base operated by the US protest with supporters in Alice Springs last week.

Defendants accused of trespassing on a top-secret military base operated by the US protest with supporters in Alice Springs last week.
Photo: New York Times

From the base, known as the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap, the US controls satellites that gather information used to pinpoint airstrikes around the world and target nuclear weapons, among other military and intelligence tasks, according to experts and leaked National Security Agency documents.

As a result, the facility, dotted with satellite dishes and isolated in the desert, has become a magnet for Australian anti-war protesters. Over the past two weeks, Pestorius and five other Christian demonstrators were convicted in two separate trials of breaching the site’s security perimeter last year. They could face seven years in prison.
Pine Gap, the spy base in central Australia.

Pine Gap, the spy base in central Australia.
Photo: Felicity Ruby

“In terms of actions like this, it’s pretty basic: We are called to love our enemies,” said Jim Dowling, 62, a member of the pacifist Catholic Worker Movement who was one of the protesters. “Do good to those who persecute you. To turn the other cheek. Put up our swords. All the teachings of Jesus on nonviolence.”

The trials – and the Australian government’s uncompromising prosecution of the protesters – has put a spotlight on a facility that the US would prefer remain in the shadows.

Born at the height of the Cold War, Pine Gap was presented to the Australian public in 1966 as a space research facility. But behind the scenes, the station was run by the CIA to collect information from US spy satellites about the Soviet Union’s missile program.

Since then, US spies, engineers, cryptologists and linguists have flocked to Alice Springs, the small town closest to the base, to work at the facility. At least 599 Americans lived there in 2016, according to the latest census. Although their presence in town is low-key, there are some telltale signs: a baseball diamond at a local sports complex, Oreo cookies and Dr Pepper in the supermarket, beef brisket on sale at a butcher shop, and until recently an annual Australia v US camel race.
The finish line of the 400m Australia v The USA challenge, part of the Camel Cup in 2008.

The finish line of the 400m Australia v The USA challenge, part of the Camel Cup in 2008.
Photo: Glenn Campbell

“Americans, from the time they came here, have never been isolated from the rest of the community,” said Damien Ryan, the mayor of Alice Springs, who could remember a time when Americans in left-hand-drive cars were frequently seen on the town’s roads. “They’ve been part of the community the whole time.”

The base is reached by a dead-end road, marked with a sign warning away visitors. Without clearance, the only way to see Pine Gap is by air or by climbing the craggy ridges of the MacDonnell Ranges that surround the site.
Among the satellite antennas, the lights of Pine Gap multiply in the camera lenses at night.

Among the satellite antennas, the lights of Pine Gap multiply in the camera lenses at night.
Photo: Kristian Laemle-Ruff

Photos taken from the air show a sprawling campus punctuated by white geodesic domes that look like giant golf balls. Inside these spheres, called radomes, are antenna systems that send and receive information from satellites above the Earth.

The staff at Pine Gap was predominantly American until the 1980s, when the two governments, responding in part to public pressure here, made it about half Australian. Today, more than 800 people from both countries are believed to work at the base. But the United States is in control.

“Pine Gap has changed and developed enormously,” said Richard Tanter, a senior research associate at the Nautilus Institute and honorary Melbourne University professor who has investigated and criticised the base for years.

In documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the US intelligence contractor turned whistleblower, Pine Gap is described as playing “a significant role in supporting both intelligence activities and military operations.”

What that means, Tanter said, is that the station is involved in real-time contributions to American global military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

Pine Gap, he added, also “contributes data for CIA drone operations in countries in which the United States is not at war – Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and so forth. It is also critically important in whatever the United States is going to do on the Korean Peninsula.”

Tanter has gleaned information about the site from public records, including the LinkedIn profiles of Pine Gap contractors and satellite photos that reveal new construction.

Tanter, who is president of the Australian board of the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons, said he wanted the government to “make a very clear-headed assessment” of whether it is in Australia’s best interest to contribute data for drone assassinations and targeting nuclear weapons.

Other experts, however, said that hosting a base like Pine Gap helps maintain the country’s alliance with the US and that other partners of the Americans carry considerably larger burdens.

Australians are “not doing a lot of things that our allies are doing,” including permanently hosting US nuclear weapons and soldiers, said Stephan Fruhling, a professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre of the Australian National University.

Last year, early on a cold, dark September morning, Pestorius, Dowling and three other “peace pilgrims”, as they call themselves, breached Pine Gap’s security perimeter.

As the activists scrambled up a rocky hill to get closer to the base, and with the police moving in, Pestorius picked up her viola. Another protester strummed his guitar. As they played a lament for those killed in war, Dowling held up a large, laminated photograph showing a bloodied young woman with her foot missing.

A sixth activist, Paul Christie, 44, carried out his own protest at Pine Gap days later; he was tried separately and convicted last week, charged, like the others, with entering a prohibited area.

During the activists’ back-to-back trials this month, a modest band of supporters gathered at the courthouse. Many were members of an anti-war movement, parts of which are religion-infused.

A Quaker knitted flower brooches. A Buddhist brewed coffee from the back of his van. A collection of colourful banners tied to fences read “Close Pine Gap” and “End the US Alliance and Pine Gap Terror Base.”

Dowling, who said he had been arrested between 50 and 100 times, was found guilty once before of trespassing at Pine Gap, in 2005. The conviction was later overturned.

One of his co-defendants this time was his 20-year-old son Franz, the guitar player at the protest last year. The younger Dowling and two other defendants – Andrew Paine, 31, and Timothy Webb, 23- live together in a Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Brisbane, where they regularly take in homeless people.

All five were found guilty of entering a prohibited area, and Paine was convicted of an additional charge of possessing a photographic device.

During their trial, the five – who acted as their own attorneys – tried to argue they had acted in the defence of others, but Justice John Reeves did not allow it.

Pine Gap has “to bear a big responsibility for all the murder and mayhem that has taken place in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Jim Dowling, who appeared in court barefoot.

Dowling seemed unperturbed by how few activists had travelled to Alice Springs to support him and the other defendants.

“There’s not a huge number engaged in nonviolent resistance in the name of their faith, but numbers don’t matter, do they?” he said. “Just follow your conscience, you know?”

The post Pine Gap US Spy Base — Protestors on Trial appeared first on The Colorado Coalition.

By Judith Mohling

The country is reeling with the daily blows of a sexual counter-revolution. With accusations of sexual assaults that are finally out in the open and being believed, the careers and reputations of accused men are in jeopardy. Can there be a parallel nuclear/sexual counter-revolution?

Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Love the Bomb) is filled with sexual innuendo. “The erect warheads and the cascading mushroom clouds are perceived to signify male penetration and ejaculation,” according to Dr. Kathleen Sullivan, nuclear academic.

Tony Macklin wrote in Film Comment that “the picture opens with two planes refueling in the sky in great metal coitus as the sound track croons Try A Little Tenderness. The film ends with the mushroom clouds of orgiastic world destruction as the track croons, We’ll Meet Again. The purgation is thorough and devastating.”

Eighty-two percent of women oppose the design and development of new nuclear weapons (61 percent strongly oppose) according to a poll by Lake Sosin Snell & Associates for Abolition 2000. When it comes to actual use of nuclear weapons we are all women being harmed against our will. In the event of a nuclear war, the earth itself would be a woman being penetrated and harmed against her will.

Beyond Nuclear has joined Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Union of Concerned Scientists and other national, regional, and faith-based peace and disarmament organizations including the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center right here in Boulder, asking the United States to make nuclear disarmament the centerpiece of national security policy. In a joint resolution — Back from the Brink: A Call to Prevent Nuclear War — the groups call on the United States to lead a global effort to prevent nuclear war by:

renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first

ending the president’s sole, unchecked authority to launch a nuclear attack

taking US nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert

cancelling the plan to replace its entire arsenal with enhanced weapons;

actively pursuing a verifiable agreement among nuclear armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

Additionally, the world now has a treaty being signed and ratified at the United Nations by a majority of the world’s nations—with the sad exception of nuclear weapons states—banning nuclear weapons and when 50 nations have ratified the treaty it will be international law. Spread the word.

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Why the UN Nuclear Weapons Ban? Why today?
On July 7, 2017, 122 nations in the UN General Assembly signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. While this document bans nuclear weapons in theory, the U.S. and the other nuclear weapons states refused to sign, and many of the signatories are hesitating on ratifying this important treaty. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN –www.icanw.org), which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize Oct. 6, is urging citizens worldwide to collect signatures to share with their governments, to indicate support for this treaty and push for its ratification.
We in the local peace community are collecting signatures on the day originally designated as Armistice Day, when governments at the close of World War I hoped to put an end to war. The holiday was re-christened Veterans Day in 1954, but we hope to revitalize some of its earlier intent. Many peace groups are planning special activities for 11 a.m. on 11/11, and we say there’s no better effort than to help ICAN abolish nuclear weapons. Interested in learning more? Give us a call at (719) 389-0644.

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