Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

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  • Freeze the Nukes, Fund the Future

    Click here to urge your Representative to sign on to this letter to the Super Committee.


    Dear Members of the Super Committee:


    The Berlin Wall fell.  The Soviet Union crumbled.  The Cold War ended.  Yet 20 years later, we continue to spend over $50 billion a year on the U.S. nuclear arsenal.  This makes no sense.  These funds are a drain on our budget and a disservice to the next generation of Americans.  We are robbing the future to pay for the unneeded weapons of the past.  Now is the time to stop fighting last century’s war.  Now is the time to reset our priorities.  Now is the time to invest in the people and the programs to get America back on track.


    The Super Committee is best positioned to cut this outdated radioactive relic.  The Soviets are long gone, yet the stockpiles remain.  The bombs collect dust, yet the bills are with us to this day.  We call on the Super Committee to cut $20 billion a year, or $200 billion over the next ten years, from the U.S. nuclear weapons budget.  This cut will enable us to stay safe without further straining our budget.  This cut will improve our security.  This cut will allow us to continue funding the national defense programs that matter most.


    Consider how this savings compares to vital programs on which Americans rely.  We spend approximately $20 billion per year on Pell Grants to help students pay for college.  We spend $5 billion to ensure that Americans do not freeze in their homes during the winter.  We need to freeze our nuclear weapons, and fuel our stalled economy.


    The Ploughshares Fund estimates that the U.S. will spend over $700 billion on nuclear weapons and related programs over the next ten years.  Nuclear weapons and missile defense alone will consume over $500 billion.  We can no longer justify spending at these levels.  We can save hundreds of billions of dollars by restructuring the U.S. nuclear program for the 21st century.    


    Our current arsenal totals approximately 5,000 nuclear warheads.  This enormous stockpile will allow us to annihilate our enemies countless times.  At any one time there are up to 12 Trident submarines cruising the world’s seas.  Each submarine carries an estimated 96 nuclear warheads.  Each submarine is capable of destroying all of Russia’s and China’s major cities.  Why then do we need all of these weapons?  There is no good reason.  America no longer needs, and cannot afford, this massive firepower.


    The Super Committee should not reduce funding to vital programs relied upon by millions of Americans.  Cut Minuteman missiles.  Do not cut Medicare and Medicaid.  Cut nuclear-armed B-52 and B-2 bombers.  Do not cut Social Security.  Invest in the future, don’t waste money on the past.


    We do not need to maintain our current level of nuclear weapons to secure our country.  The President agrees.  The Senate agrees.  The New START treaty will reduce our level of deployed strategic warheads to 1,550.  This is a 25 percent cut from today’s levels.  Fewer nuclear weapons should equal less funding.


    We should not cut entitlement programs first.  We should not target our seniors, our children, and our sick first.  Instead we should target outdated and unnecessary nuclear weapons.  Let’s freeze the nukes so we can fund the future.


    Sincerely,

  • CTBT Article XIV Conference

    This speech was delivered by Ellen Tauscher to the CTBT Article XIV Conference in New York City on September 23, 2011.


    As Delivered


    Ellen TauscherDistinguished Co-Presidents, High Commissioner, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,


    I am so pleased to be here representing the United States. When Secretary Clinton came to this conference two years ago, she ended a ten-year absence on the part of our nation. Today, I stand before you proud of the accomplishments that the Obama Administration has made thus far in arms control, nonproliferation and disarmament.


    Since entering office, the Administration has achieved entry into force of the New START Treaty, released an updated Nuclear Posture Review, and helped to achieve a consensus Action Plan at the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference.


    The Administration also convened the successful 2010 Nuclear Security Summit, helped secure and relocate vulnerable nuclear materials, led efforts to establish an international nuclear fuel bank, and increased effective multilateral cooperation to prevent illicit nuclear activities.


    For the United States, this is just the beginning. One of our highest priorities is the ratification and entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. The Treaty is an essential step toward the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons, the vision President Obama articulated in Prague in April 2009.


    The CTBT is central to leading nuclear weapons states toward a world of diminished reliance on nuclear weapons and reduced nuclear competition. With a global ban on nuclear explosive tests in place, states interested in pursuing or advancing their nuclear weapons programs would have to either risk deploying weapons uncertain of their effectiveness or face international condemnation, and possible sanctions, for conducting nuclear explosive tests.


    A CTBT that has entered into force would benefit national and international security and facilitate greater international cooperation on other arms control and nonproliferation priorities. The United States has observed a moratorium on nuclear explosive testing since 1992 and our policies are already consistent with the central prohibition of the treaty.


    It has been 12 years since our Senate failed to give its advice and consent to the ratification of the CTBT. Lack of support stemmed from two concerns: the verifiability of the Treaty and the continuing safety and reliability of America’s nuclear deterrent without nuclear explosive testing.


    Today, there have been dramatic developments on both fronts and we have a much stronger case to make in support of ratification.


    The Treaty’s verification regime has grown exponentially over the last decade. Today, the International Monitoring System (IMS) is roughly 85 percent complete and when fully completed, there will be IMS facilities in 89 countries spanning the globe. At entry into force, the full body of technical data gathered via the International Monitoring System will be available to all States Parties. In addition, with the recent Fukushima nuclear crisis, we have already seen dramatic proof of the utility of the IMS for non-verification related purposes, such as tsunami warnings and tracking radioactivity from reactor accidents.


    We have continued to provide the full costs of operating, maintaining and sustaining 34 certified IMS stations among those assigned by the Treaty to the United States. We announced last month a voluntary in-kind contribution of $8.9 million to support projects that will accelerate development of the CTBT verification regime. This month, we concluded a Memorandum of Understanding with the Provisional Technical Secretariat to contribute up to $25.5 million to underwrite the rebuilding of the hydroacoustic monitoring station on Crozet Island in the southern Indian Ocean.


    Together, U.S. extra-budgetary contributions to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization this year total $34.4 million, more than our annual assessed contribution. Given the tough budget climate in Washington and other capitals, those contributions clearly demonstrate our ongoing commitment to the treaty and the vital importance the United States attaches to completing the verification regime.


    With regard to our nuclear deterrent, our extensive surveillance methods and computational modeling developed under the Stockpile Stewardship Program over the last 15 years have allowed our nuclear experts to understand how these weapons work and the effects of aging even better than when nuclear explosive testing was conducted. The United States can maintain a safe and effective nuclear deterrent without conducting nuclear explosive tests.


    With these advancements in verification and stockpile stewardship in mind, we have begun the process of engaging the Senate. We like to think of our efforts as an “information exchange” and are working to get these facts out to members and staff, many of whom have never dealt with this Treaty. We know that this is a very technical agreement and we want people to absorb and understand the science behind it. There are no set timeframes and we are going to be patient, but we will also have to be persistent.


    Of course, we do not expect people to be in receive-only mode, so we are eager to start a discussion. It is only through discussion and debate that we will work through questions and concerns about the Treaty and eventually get it ratified.


    Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentleman, the United States is committed to the CTBT and we intend to see it enter into force, but we cannot do it alone. As we move forward with our process, we call on all governments to declare or reaffirm their commitment not to test. Congratulations to Guinea for becoming the 155th nation to ratify the CTBT just days ago. Also, congratulations to Ghana, Central African Republic, Liberia, Trinidad and Tobago, the Marshall Islands and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, all of whom have ratified the Treaty since our last conference. Your example adds important momentum to achieving the goal of ending nuclear explosive testing forever. We call on the remaining Annex 2 States to join us in moving forward toward ratification.


    We do not expect that the path remaining to entry into force will be traveled quickly or easily. For our part, we will need the support of the Senate and the American people in order to move ahead, but move ahead we will, because we know that the CTBT will benefit the security of the United States and that of the world.


    Thank you.

  • US Cancels Nuclear-Capable Missile Test on International Day of Peace

    David KriegerThe US Air Force is standing down its plan to launch a nuclear-capable missile on the United Nations International Day of Peace.  It’s a very small step, but it is a step in the right direction.  It’s possible that the Air Force planners didn’t know about the International Day of Peace or even that there is such a day.  There is such a day, though, and it is observed annually by the countries of the world on September 21st.


    When the Air Force announced that it had scheduled a test of a nuclear-capable Minuteman III inter-continental ballistic missile for September 21st, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation notified its Action Alert Network.  Members of this Network sent over 7,000 messages to President Obama calling for cancellation of the offending missile test, and for the president to act in taking US nuclear weapons off high-alert status. 


    Perhaps those thousands of messages awakened someone to the inappropriateness of demonstrating a nuclear show of force on the International Day of Peace.  But perhaps not.  In announcing the cancellation of the missile test, a spokesperson said it was being postponed in order to complete “post test analysis” of another Minuteman III test that failed on July 27th.  It makes sense to study previous failures, but one wonders why the Air Force would announce a test shortly after a failure, and then use the failure as the reason to cancel the new test.


    At any rate, the US has precluded one serious mistake, that is, to have thumbed its nose at the world community by performing a nuclear-capable missile test on the International Day of Peace.  Regardless of its public justification for standing down its missile test, it was the right decision to cancel it. 


    The International Day of Peace will now be a slightly more peaceful day.  But the fact remains that the United States and Russia each maintain some 1,000 nuclear weapons on high-alert status, a Cold War posture that has no place in the 21st century.  President Obama could take a meaningful step toward his stated goal of a world free of nuclear weapons by taking all US nuclear weapons off high-alert status.  This would be showing real leadership, the kind of leadership hoped for from the United States.


    The United Nations General Assembly called in its Resolution 55/282 in 2001 for the International Day of Peace to “be observed as a day of global ceasefire and non-violence….”  It would be a major step for the United States to actually observe the International Day of Peace by observing a ceasefire in its current wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and its hostilities in various other countries.  That would send a message to the world that the US is ready to begin leading an international effort for peace, rather than being so quick, determined and persistent in seeking to settle disputes with its powerful military forces. 

  • North Korean Delusions

    Martin HellmanReading the mainstream media, you’d be forgiven if you thought the only problems with North Korea’s nuclear weapons program were a direct result of that rogue nation’s “nut job” leaders. The most recent example is the coverage of a talk on nuclear proliferation given my friend and colleague, Dr. Siegfried Hecker. While he’s now a professor here at Stanford, in his former life, he was Director of Los Alamos from 1986 to 1997, so “when Sig talks, people listen.” The AP dispatch starts off as follows:



    A U.S. scientist who visited a secret North Korean nuclear site last year says Pyongyang may seek to launch a third atomic test to enable it to develop a small fissile warhead that can be carried by a missile.


    Nowhere in the article does it say what I’ve heard Hecker say many times before, and what is the essence of his advice on what to do about North Korea’s nuclear program: If we continue to make unilateral nuclear disarmament (by the North) a precondition to talks, they won’t talk. (Would we, if the tables were reversed?) If we don’t talk, they’ll build more bombs, better bombs, and export their nuclear technology.


    On the other hand, if we will temporarily put denuclearization aside and address some of their legitimate security concerns – we’ve threatened to attack them repeatedly, and Obama’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review leaves open the possibility of our using nuclear weapons against them – Hecker is convinced by his seven visits there that we can get what he calls “three NO’s for one YES:” no more bombs, no better bombs, and no export in return for our treating them with some respect and reducing the level of threat that they feel from us and South Korea.


    When he gave a guest lecture in my seminar on “Nuclear Weapons, Risk and Hope,” Hecker told the class that many people in Washington agree with him, but tell him that his suggestions are impossible because of domestic politics. If the president were to treat North Korea with some respect and address their security concerns, he’d be accused of rewarding bad behavior. While there’s some truth in that perspective, isn’t that what nuclear deterrence is all about?


    Returning to the impossibility of rationally approaching North Korea’s nuclear program, what Hecker hears in D.C. makes clear that the solution lies not with our supposed leaders, who must follow the crowd, but with individual citizens like you and me. Until enough of us start demanding rational nuclear policies, we’ll live in a world where it is just a matter of time before the unthinkable happens. If we can find the courage to say that the nuclear emperor needs some new clothes, we could move to a world that not only is safe from nuclear annihilation, but also much safer in general. Please help by sharing this message with your friends and reading at least the home page of my related web site.

  • Libyan Delusions

    Martin HellmanBack in March, as NATO attacks on Libya moved into full swing, I wrote three related blog posts (“Libyan Blowback?”, “More on Libya,” and “Let’s Make a Deal!”) that illuminated the nuclear proliferation aspects of our attacks. But, humanitarian concerns trumped nonproliferation considerations, and we attacked anyway. Or did we fool ourselves? Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article “Revenge Feeds Instability in Libya” on page A7 which suggests that we suffered at least some self-delusion:



    Tawergha, which rebels seized last month, … serves as a cautionary tale of what awaits Libya if the sort of victors’ justice Tawergha has endured for weeks is repeated as rebels move into other pro-Gadhafi cities. It could turn whole tribes and regions into disaffected swaths of society, fueling violence and instability. … rebels have been torching homes in the abandoned city 25 miles to the south. … On the gates of many vandalized homes in the country’s only coastal city dominated by dark-skinned people, light-skinned rebels scrawled the words “slaves” and “negroes.”


    “We are setting it on fire to prevent anyone from living here again,” said one rebel fighter as flames engulfed several loyalist homes. … “The revolution was supposed to give people their rights, not to oppress them,” said Hussein Muftah, a Tawergha elder who fled to Tripoli last month, referring to the Feb. 17 uprising.


    UN Security Resolution 1973, which formed the basis for NATO’s attacks on pro-Gaddafi forces, authorized military action to protect civilians. Where is the public pressure to “do something” now? Or were our earlier actions driven – probably unconsciously – more by hatred of Gaddafi than concern for human suffering?


    We need to probe our motivations more deeply before engaging in seemingly small wars. Otherwise, as my three earlier posts show, we increase the risk of a final, nuclear war.

  • Could War Be Going Out of Style?

    Martin HellmanIn an article in current issue of Foreign Policy, American University Professor Joshua Goldstein provides data to support his title,“World peace could be closer than you think:”



    the last decade has seen fewer war deaths than any decade in the past 100 years, based on data compiled by researchers Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch of the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Worldwide, deaths caused directly by war-related violence in the new century have averaged about 55,000 per year, just over half of what they were in the 1990s (100,000 a year), a third of what they were during the Cold War (180,000 a year from 1950 to 1989), and a hundredth of what they were in World War II. If you factor in the growing global population, which has nearly quadrupled in the last century, the decrease is even sharper. Far from being an age of killer anarchy, the 20 years since the Cold War ended have been an era of rapid progress toward peace.


    Possible reasons for this substantial decline in war fatalities are given in the article. Professor Goldstein’s related, new book, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide, has garnered praise from some noteworthy reviewers, adding credibility to his assertion:



    “Winning the War on War does what no other book has attempted, providing a synoptic view, and narrative, of the slow but successful evolution of UN peacekeeping. It takes an unusual and unorthodox approach that works very well indeed.” Paul Kennedy, J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History, Yale University; author of the bestseller, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.


    “Professor Goldstein has written a novel, highly informative, and exceedingly valuable book.” David Hamburg, President Emeritus, Carnegie Corporation of New York; former president, American Association for the Advancement of Science; author of No More Killing Fields.


    I hope you’ll enjoy this thought provoking article and book. I also hope that Prof. Goldstein is right about war fatalities being on a continuing downward trend. Aside from the horrendous loss of life, every war entails at least a small risk of spiraling out of control and ending with the use of nuclear weapons.

  • Time to Disband NATO: A Rogue Alliance

    Alice SlaterWhen the Cold War ended, many believed there would be a peace dividend, nuclear disarmament, and dismantling of the war machine with industrial conversion to peaceful technology. Instead, we’ve witnessed the aggressive expansion of NATO, to include the former Soviet Republics, right up to the Russian border, which should be a wake-up call to many living in the American Empire. Many people still labor under the apparently false impression that the US is exemplary in holding up the rule of law, the sanctity of the United Nations, and human rights. After all, Americans were the good guys who defeated Hitler and made the world safe for democracy. The NATO expansion took place despite promises made to Gorbachev after the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union with the fall of the Berlin Wall that if he dropped his objections to the admission of a unified Germany as a full-fledged, fully armed member of NATO, the western states would freeze NATO membership and not expand any further east. Russia lost 20 million people in World War II to the Nazi onslaught, and Russian wariness of a strengthened reunited Germany participating with their former NATO foe was certainly understandable.

    I visited the Soviet Union in 1989 on a delegation of the NY Professional Roundtable during the heady days of Gorbachev’s newly announced doctrine of glasnost and perstroika—openness and reconstruction. It seemed as though every man over sixty was sporting a chest covered with medals, commemorating their service in the Great War. On every other street corner in Moscow and Leningrad, there were memorials to the war dead. The Piskaryovskoye Cemetery at Leningrad, with acres of mass graves, anonymous mounds of over 500,000 buried there who perished in the 872 day siege of Leningrad, was a painful, searing vision which haunts me still. The siege resulted in the tragic deaths of up to 1,500,000 soldiers and civilians and the evacuation of 1,400,000 more, many of whom died due to starvation and bombardment. The guide for our delegation at one point asked me, “Why don’t you Americans trust us?” “Why don’t we trust you?” I exclaimed indignantly. “What about Hungary? What about Czechoslovakia? Why should we trust you?” He looked at me with a pained expression, “But we had to protect our borders from Germany!” I looked into his watery blue eyes and heard the fervent sincerity in his voice. At that moment, I felt betrayed by my government and the years of constant reminders about the communist threat. The land was flat as a table between Russia and Germany. There was no buffer against the German onslaught, except the mountains of Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The Russians were in a defensive posture as they built their military might. They were using Eastern Europe as a buffer against any repetition of the ravages of war they had experienced at the hands of Germany.

    And the huge multi-trillion dollar buildup of nuclear armaments and NATO forces—what were we defending? We had our forces amassed, including nuclear weapons parked in eight NATO countries on their continent. And when we were the only country on the planet in possession of the bomb—after Hiroshima and Nagasaki– we refused to turn it over to international control under UN auspices, which had been urged by Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the bomb. Instead President Truman insisted on an unfair advantage for the US in his Baruch plan—letting the American people think he was being reasonable, pretending to present fair terms for controlling the bomb which in reality impelled Stalin to get his own bomb—putting us into a tragic and costly arms race—imperiling our own national security and the entire fate of the earth.

    Nothing has changed. The Empire has no clothes. It has been revealed. Having unilaterally withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, the US is leading NATO to build a ring of missiles round Russia in Europe. It is globalizing its military forces and operations. An armada of missile-laden NATO war ships is deployed in oceans around the world with nearly 1,000 US military bases on every continent on the planet. Working in this expanded military capacity, NATO members and their allies are encircling China in the Pacific, just as we are surrounding Russia, while rejecting Russia and China’s repeated proposals to negotiate a ban on weapons in space. NATO is a lawless rogue alliance, determined to control the world’s oil and other scarce resources, by brute force.

    The US first led NATO into illegal action when it bombed Kosovo in the interests of “protecting” people, without the UN’s legally required authorization for any acts of warfare that are not taken in self-defense against an armed attack as required by the UN Charter. The US and its NATO allies refused to go to the UN for permission to enter into hostilities, as required under the UN Charter, because Russia was threatening to veto any such action in the Security Council to protect its ally, Serbia. Despite the lip service NATO gave to some sort of trumped up “responsibility to protect” Kosovo’s Albanians, (by bombing the Serbians to smithereens) Clinton was on the record saying: “If we’re going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key …. That’s what this Kosovo thing is all about.”1

    It’s beyond belief that NATO’s assault on Libya is only about “protecting civilians” while at the same time hundreds of civilians are being killed by NATO bombs and drones. Here too NATO’s old boy colonial network is seeking to secure Libya’s oil. NATO is now engaged in three wars in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The US is also bombing blindly away in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia as well, with “pilots” sitting at their computers and playing with their joysticks, lawlessly targeting “terrorists” with their unmanned drones, raining death and destruction down on the unseen people below, assassinating those whom they suspect may be wishing to do harm, without evidence, trial, finding of guilt, along with a host of innocent men, women and children.

    It’s time to disband NATO. There will be a NATO summit meeting in Chicago, in May 2012. Grassroots activists are organizing around the world to gather at a counter summit in Chicago to restore the rule of law as a means of resolving international disputes and to voice a new vision of global security and peace. To sign on to this new Call for Action and make common cause with the movement to disband NATO, contact: Judith LeBlanc jleblanc@peaceaction.org or Joseph Gerson jgerson@afsc.org.

  • Ten Years, Ten Lessons

    David KriegerSeptember 11, 2001 was a traumatizing day for the United States.  The photographs of the airplanes crashing into the World Trade Towers are still haunting, and the senseless loss of life is still painful.  Images of the burning trade towers and people jumping to their deaths are indelibly etched into the minds of those who saw them.

    U.S. policy decisions after 9/11 have turned what began as a traumatizing day into a traumatizing decade for the United States and the world.  It is not clear what our political leaders have learned over the span of these ten years, but here are some lessons that seem clear to me:

    1. The United States, despite its vast military power, was and remains vulnerable.  Our borders are not inviolate.  Our citizens may be attacked on our own territory.

    2. The U.S. is not hated for its freedom, as President George W. Bush opined, but for its policies in supporting dictatorial and repressive regimes, particularly in the Middle East.  Whatever freedoms the American people had on 9/11 have been greatly restricted over the past decade by the Patriot Act and other measures to increase governmental powers.

    3. Wars are costly and they undermine economic prosperity at home.  The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have overdrawn the U.S. budget and helped to create the current economic malaise in the country.

    4. American leaders are willing to lie the country into war, specifically the war in Iraq.  We should have learned this lesson from the Vietnam War.  There has been no accountability for the initiation of an aggressive war, as there was for the German leaders who were tried and convicted at Nuremburg following World War II for their crimes against peace.

    5. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have injured and killed large numbers of civilians.  For each terrorist who has been killed, more terrorists have been recruited to expand their numbers.  What the Bush administration called the “Global War on Terror,” and the Obama administration prefers to call the “Overseas Contingency Operation,” is unwinnable by military means and likely to be endless.

    6. A volunteer military can be used and abused with little response from the American people.  Large numbers of volunteer soldiers have served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    7. Despite the illegality and moral repugnance of torture, American officials have been willing to engage in it and, as in the case of Dick Cheney, many remain unrepentant for its use.

    8. President Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan has shown that there is bipartisan political support for keeping the flames of war burning.

    After the U.S. was attacked on 9/11, it had the sympathy of the world.  By its policies of endless war, the U.S. long ago lost those sympathies.  If the U.S. wants to find a more decent foundation on which to rest its policies, I would hope that it would be based upon these two larger lessons:

    9. War is not the answer to dealing with the threat of terrorism.

    10. The way forward is with policies that are legal (under U.S. and international law), moral (demonstrating appropriate care for the innocent) and thoughtful (not based in hubris, alienating to the rest of the world and conducive to creating more terrorists).

    Sadly, at the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, the U.S. seems lacking in sufficient self-reflection to grapple with these lessons. 

  • Kansas City Here It Comes: A New Nuclear Weapons Plant!

    This article was originally published on the History News Network.


    Lawrence WittnerShould the U.S. government be building more nuclear weapons?  Residents of Kansas City, Missouri don’t appear to think so, for they are engaged in a bitter fight against the construction of a new nuclear weapons plant in their community.


    The massive plant, 1.5 million square feet in size, is designed to replace an earlier version, also located in the city and run by the same contractor:  Honeywell.  The cost of building the new plant—which, like its predecessor, will provide 85 percent of the components of America’s nuclear weapons—is estimated to run $673 million.


    From the standpoint of the developer, Centerpoint Zimmer (CPZ), that’s a very sweet deal.  In payment for the plant site, a soybean field it owned, CPZ received $5 million.  The federal government will lease the property and plant from a city entity for twenty years, after which, for $10, CPZ will purchase it, thus establishing the world’s first privately-owned nuclear weapons plant.  In addition, as the journal Mother Jones has revealed, “the Kansas City Council, enticed by direct payments and a promise of ‘quality jobs,’ . . . agreed to exempt CPZ from property taxes on the plant and surrounding land for twenty-five years.”  The Council also agreed to issue $815 million in bond subsidies from urban blight funds to build the plant and its infrastructure.  In this lucrative context, how could a profit-driven corporation resist?


    Kansas City residents, however, had greater misgivings.  They wondered why the U.S. government, already possessing 8,500 nuclear weapons, needed more of them.  They wondered what had happened to the U.S. government’s commitment to engage in treaties for nuclear disarmament.  They wondered how the new weapons plant fit in with the Obama administration’s pledge to build a world free of nuclear weapons.  And they wondered why they should be subsidizing the U.S. military-industrial complex with their tax dollars.


    Taking the lead, the city’s peace and disarmament community began protests and demonstrations against the proposed nuclear weapons plant several years ago.  Gradually, Kansas City PeaceWorks (a branch of Peace Action) pulled together the local chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, religious groups, and others into a coalition of a dozen organizations, Kansas City Peace Planters.  The coalition’s major project was a petition campaign to place a proposition on the November 8, 2011 election ballot that would reject building a plant for weapons and utilize the facility instead for “green energy” technologies.


    The significance of the Kansas City nuclear weapons buildup was also highlighted by outside forces.  In June 2011, against the backdrop of the Obama administration’s plan to spend $185 billion for modernization of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex over the next ten years, the U.S. Council of Mayors voted unanimously for a resolution instructing the president to join leaders of the other nuclear weapons states in implementing U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s five-point plan for the elimination of all nuclear weapons by the year 2020.  It also called on Congress to terminate funding for modernization of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex and nuclear weapons systems.  Addressing the gathering, the U.N. leader declared that “the road to peace and progress runs through the world’s cities and towns,” a statement that drew a standing ovation.


    Even more pointedly, Archbishop Francis Chullikatt, the Vatican’s ambassador to the United Nations, appeared in Kansas City in July 2011.  According to the National Catholic Reporter, Chullikat “came to this Midwestern diocese because it is the site of a major new nuclear weapons manufacturing facility, the first to be built in the country in thirty-three years.”  In his address, the prelate remarked:  “Viewed from a legal, political, security and most of all—moral—perspective, there is no justification today for the continued maintenance of nuclear weapons.”  This was the moment, he declared, to address “the legal, political and technical requisites for a nuclear-weapons-free world.”  Highlighting Chullikatt’s speech, the National Catholic Reporter declared, cuttingly:  “The U.S. trudges unheedingly down the nuclear path.  Now more than ever we need to attend to the messages of the often marginalized peacemakers in our midst.”


    Actually, peace activists in Kansas City looked less and less marginalized.  Nearly 5,000 Kansas City residents signed the petition to place the proposition rejecting the nuclear weapons plant on the ballot, giving it considerably more signatures than necessary to appear before the voters.


    Naturally, this popular uprising came as a blow to the Kansas City Council, which put forward a measure that would block the disarmament initiative from appearing on the ballot.


    At an August 17 hearing on the Council measure, local residents were irate.  “You cannot divorce yourselves from the hideously immoral purpose of these weapons,” one declared, comparing the city’s subsidy for the weapons plant to financing Nazi gas chambers “for the sake of ‘jobs.’”  Referring to the Council’s charter, which provided for the appearance of propositions on the ballot when they secured the requisite number of signatures, the chair of PeaceWorks asked:  “Are we a government of laws or of . . . corporations and special interests?”


    Since then, the situation has evolved rapidly.  On August 25, the City Council voted 12 to 1 to bar the proposition from the ballot.  The next day, the petitioners went to court to block Council interference.  Honeywell, CPZ, and their friends dispatched a large legal team to Kansas City to fight against the citizens’ initiative, securing a court decision that might delay redress for years.  In response, Peace Planters seems likely to speed up the process by crafting a new petition—one that would cut off city funding for the plant.


    Whatever the outcome, the very fact that such a struggle has emerged indicates that many Americans are appalled by plans to throw their local and national resources into building more nuclear weapons.

  • Ten Years After September 11, 2001: A Soldier’s Roadmap to a Peaceful Future

    2011_08_23_chappell_911.pdf