Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: development

  • 2019 Fundraising and Development Intern

    2019 Fundraising and Development Intern

    The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is hiring a Fundraising and Development Intern for Summer 2019.

    Interns will join our dedicated team of seven staff at our Santa Barbara headquarters to work on meaningful projects that advance our mission of educating, advocating, and inspiring action for a just and peaceful world, free of nuclear weapons.

    We don’t expect our interns to have detailed knowledge of the physics behind nuclear weapons, nor to have years of relevant work experience. What we are looking for are highly-motivated, enthusiastic individuals who are dedicated to our mission and who want to make a real, lasting difference in the world.

    Our Development & Fundraising Intern will assist in raising funds for the Foundation’s projects and daily functions. It’s ideal in development to be a people-person who can communicate clearly and comfortably with people of many backgrounds. We highly value collaboration at NAPF, and this intern will work closely with the Director of Development on a day-to-day basis.

    Projects will include:

    • Writing concisely and creatively: Helping to write appeal letters and grant applications;
    • Researching strategically: Interviewing donors and researching potential funding sources;
    • Planning and organizing: Helping to plan a summer party in Santa Barbara and our 36th Annual Evening for Peace;
    • Being a supporter extraordinaire: helping with more routine tasks such as mailing letters and logging donor info into our fundraising database.

    Skills/Qualifications:

    • Studying marketing, communication, or business a plus;
    • Ability to write clearly and persuasively is essential;
    • Self-motivation, organization, and the ability to stick to deadlines is essential;
    • Ability to take ownership of a project by thinking critically and independently, while also following instructions;
    • Experience with event planning, fundraising, or special project campaigns;
    • Comfort speaking with and relating to people in highly social situations.

    For more details on our internship program and for application instructions, visit our Paid Internships page.

    You can also view the position descriptions for our other summer internships:

    Research/Writing Intern

    Communications Intern

    Peace Literacy Intern

  • My Once-in-a-Generation Cut? The Armed Forces. All of them.

    This article was originally published by The Guardian.

    I say cut defence. I don’t mean nibble at it or slice it. I mean cut it, all £45bn of it. George Osborne yesterday asked the nation “for once in a generation” to think the unthinkable, to offer not just percentage cuts but “whether government needs to provide certain public services at all”.

    What do we really get from the army, the navy and the air force beyond soldiers dying in distant wars and a tingle when the band marches by? Is the tingle worth £45bn, more than the total spent on schools? Why does Osborne “ringfence” defence when everyone knows its budget is a bankruptcy waiting to happen, when Labour ministers bought the wrong kit for wars that they insisted it fight?

    Osborne cannot believe the armed forces are so vital or so efficient as to be excused the star chamber’s “fundamental re-evaluation of their role”. He knows their management and procurement have long been an insult to the taxpayer. The reason for his timidity must be that, like David Cameron, he is a young man scared of old generals.

    I was content to be expensively defended against the threat of global communism. With the end of the cold war in the 1990s that threat vanished. In its place was a fantasy proposition, that some unspecified but potent “enemy” lurked in the seas and skies around Britain. Where is it?

    Each incoming government since 1990 has held so-called defence reviews “to match capabilities to policy objectives”. I helped with one in 1997, and it was rubbish from start to finish, a cosmetic attempt to justify the colossal procurements then in train, and in such a way that any cut would present Labour as “soft” on defence.

    Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and George Robertson, the then defence secretary were terrified into submission. They agreed to a parody of generals fighting the last war but one. They bought new destroyers to defeat the U-boat menace. They bought new carriers to save the British empire. They bought Eurofighters to duel with Russian air aces. Trident submarines with nuclear warheads went on cruising the deep, deterring no one, just so Blair could walk tall at conferences.

    Each weekend, the tranquillity of the Welsh countryside is shattered by inane jets screaming through the mountain valleys playing at Lord of the Rings. With modern bombs, no plane need fly that low, and the jets are said to burn more fuel in half an hour than a school in a year. Any other service wasting so much money would be laughed out of court. Yet the Treasury grovels before the exotic virility of it all.

    Labour lacked the guts to admit that it was crazy to plan for another Falklands war. It dared not admit that the procurement executive was fit for nothing but appeasing weapons manufacturers. No armies were massing on the continent poised to attack. No navies were plotting to throttle our islands and starve us into submission. No missiles were fizzing in bunkers across Asia with Birmingham or Leeds in their sights. As for the colonies, if it costs £45bn to protect the Falklands, Gibraltar and the Caymans, it must be the most ridiculous empire in history. It would be cheaper to give each colony independence and a billion a year.

    Lobbyists reply that all defence expenditure is precautionary. You cannot predict every threat and it takes time to rearm should one emerge. That argument might have held during the cold war and, strictly up to a point, today. But at the present scale it is wholly implausible.

    All spending on insurance – be it on health or the police or environmental protection – requires some assessment of risk. Otherwise spending is open-ended. After the cold war there was much talk of a peace dividend and the defence industry went into intellectual overdrive. It conjured up a new “war” jargon, as in the war on drugs, on terror, on piracy, on genocide. The navy was needed to fight drug gangs in the Caribbean, pirates off Somalia and gun-runners in the Persian Gulf. In all such “wars” performance has been dire, because each threat was defined to justify service expenditure rather than the other way round.

    Whenever I ask a defence pundit against whom he is defending me, the answer is a wink and a smile: “You never know.” The world is a messy place. Better safe than sorry. It is like demanding crash barriers along every pavement in case cars go out of control, or examining school children for diseases every day. You never know. The truth is, we are now spending £45bn on heebie-jeebies.

    For the past 20 years, Britain’s armed forces have encouraged foreign policy into one war after another, none of them remotely to do with the nation’s security. Asked why he was standing in an Afghan desert earlier this year, Brown had to claim absurdly that he was “making London’s streets safer”. Some wars, as in Iraq, have been a sickening waste of money and young lives. Others in Kosovo and Afghanistan honour a Nato commitment that had nothing to do with collective security. Like many armies in history, Nato has become an alliance in search of a purpose. Coalition ministers are citing Canada as a shining example of how to cut. Canada is wasting no more money in Afghanistan.

    Despite Blair’s politics of fear, Britain entered the 21st century safer than at any time since the Norman conquest. I am defended already, by the police, the security services and a myriad regulators and inspectors. Defence spending does not add to this. It is like winning the Olympics – a magnificent, extravagant national boast, so embedded in the British psyche that politicians (and newspapers) dare not question it. Yet Osborne asked that every public service should “once in a generation” go back to basics and ask what it really delivers for its money. Why not defence?

    There are many evils that threaten the British people at present, but I cannot think of one that absolutely demands £45bn to deter it. Soldiers, sailors and air crews are no protection against terrorists, who anyway are not that much of a threat. No country is an aggressor against the British state. No country would attack us were the government to put its troops into reserve and mothball its ships, tanks and planes. Let us get real.

    I am all for being defended, but at the present price I am entitled to ask against whom and how. Of all the public services that should justify themselves from ground zero, defence is the first.

  • Rights: Billion Children Under Threat, Says Unicef

    Poverty, conflict and HIV/AIDS are the biggest threats to children’s lives in developing countries, says a new Unicef report.

    “Poverty does not come from nowhere: war does not emerge from nothing; AIDS does not spread by choice of its own,” United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) director Carol Bellamy said at the launch of the 10th ‘State of the World’s Children’ report in London. “These are our choices.”

    Half of all children in the world suffer from extreme deprivation, Bellamy said. “When that many children are robbed of childhood, our shared future is compromised.”

    Unicef says in the report ‘Children Under Threat’ that 956 billion dollars were spent last year on military and war supplies. An additional 40-70 billion dollars a year could finance the Millennium Development Goals, she said.

    “Too many governments are making informed, deliberate choices that actually hurt childhood,” Bellamy said.

    The annual Unicef report into the living conditions of 2.2 billion children was produced by a research team from the London School of Economics (LSE) and the University of Bristol working together with Unicef.

    The report sets out seven areas of essential needs for children: food, safe water, healthcare, education, sanitation, shelter, and information.

    “Over one billion children were found to suffer from at least one form of severe deprivation of human needs and 635 million to suffer from two or more deprivations,” said Peter Townsend from the LSE at the launch.

    The team found that one in six children is hungry and one in five does not have access to safe water. Healthcare is delivered only to one in seven children. Governments in industrialised countries spend an average of 15 percent of their budget on health. In developing countries the figure drops to one percent.

    Conflicts are one of the major causes of deprivation, the report says. Half of 3.6 million people killed in wars since 1990 were children.

    Not only do conflicts displace communities from their home, with an aftermath of hunger, diseases and psychological distress affecting especially children, but in many cases youths and children are forced to become combatants, the report says.

    “In today’s wars where civilians have become the prime targets, we have to accept responsibility for the fact that children are suffering when we go to battle,” Bellamy said.

    HIV/AIDS is increasingly threatening young people: it has become the largest killer of people aged 15-49 in the developing world, while there are now 15 million AIDS orphans worldwide, the report says.

    But poverty is not experienced only in developing countries. In many developed countries the number of poor children increased notably in the last decade, the report says.

    “Children experience poverty differently than adults, and whether or not their families are poor, these children can and should be provided with basic services,” Townsend said.

    Unicef, which has an annual budget of 1.6 billion dollars, is working to improve the living conditions of children, providing early childhood and maternal care, immunisation programmes, education to girls and extra care in case of HIV/AIDS.

    “The elimination of poverty can be financed,” Townsend said. “Cash transfers offer a model of the strategy by which these rights can be delivered.”

    In Mexico, the programme ‘Oportunidades’ (Opportunities) provides cash directly to mothers to pay for food, children’s school needs and basic healthcare. Similar programmes have been developed successfully in Brazil and South Africa.

    “We are working everyday to try to make a difference in these areas,” Bellamy told IPS. “We commit ourselves, not just talk, but we need to engage more partners – governments, NGOs, funding partners and kids themselves.”

    One Unicef campaign in Nigeria seeks to get young people involved in policy-making as a strategy to inform children and young people of their rights, and involve them in change. With about 75 percent of the population of Nigeria under 35 years of age, a Children and Young People’s Parliament is representative enough to interact with the National Parliament to propose laws.

    “Thanks to support from Unicef, we proposed the compulsory immunisation of every child under five years old and the compulsory use of insecticides in schools against malaria,”18-year-old Dayo Israel-Abdulai from the youth parliament told IPS. “Both proposals have become laws.”

  • Peace And Sustainable Development Will Rise or Fall Together

    Peace And Sustainable Development Will Rise or Fall Together

    It is not likely that peace can be maintained in the longer term without sustainable development. Similarly, it is unlikely that sustainable development can take place in a climate dominated by war and the preparations for war.

    In order to assess the prospects for both peace and sustainable development, we must take into account the broad global trends of our time: political, economic, military and cultural. I will attempt to provide some perspective on these trends.

    Political

    In the aftermath of the Cold War, there was a breakdown of the post World War II bipolar balance of power. The United States emerged as the dominant global power, while the Russians have struggled to maintain their economy and their influence. Instead of extending a gracious hand of support to the Russians, as the United States did for Western Europe, including the vanquished nations, and Japan after WWII, the US has sought to extend its global reach and, in general, forced the Russians to accept compromising positions, such as the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe.

    At the same time, the United States has generally opposed the expansion of international law, including human rights law, and has withdrawn its support from many key treaty commitments, including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Accords on Climate Change, and the Protocol to verify the Biological Weapons Convention. Almost daily there are reports of new US assaults on international law.

    As the United States has sought to extend its power unilaterally, it has undermined the international political process established after World War II that operates through the United Nations. The US has withheld economic support from the United Nations and only sought to use it when the US perceived that its own interests could be directly advanced, as in the cases of the Persian Gulf War and the more recent US-led war on terrorism.

    In the past, new coalitions have formed to provide a check on one country asserting global dominance. It is perhaps too early to see clearly the shape of a new coalition that might arise in response to US dominance, but if history is a guide there will be one. Even without any major coalition of forces arising, however, the US will remain challenged by terrorists seeking to avenge themselves against the US for policies that have adversely affected their lives, cultures and countries.

    Economic

    The US has promoted the forces of globalization that have opened the doors for capital to move freely to countries where the costs of labor are cheapest and the environmental regulations are most lax. Despite claims by Western leaders that benefits would accrue to the neediest, this “globalization from above” has continued to shift economic benefit from the poor to the wealthy, and has not provided substantial increased benefit to the poor of the world. Nearly half the world’s population continues to live in conditions of poverty, characterized by inadequate food, water, shelter and health care. These conditions create a fertile breeding ground for terrorists committed to the destruction of US dominance and its imperial outreach.

    Further, global military expenditures are approximately $800 billion per year. These funds are largely used to repress and control the poor, when in actuality, for a small fraction of these global expenditures, the conditions of poverty could be largely eliminated. Of the $800 billion spent worldwide on military forces, the US spends approximately one-half of the total. This trend has been on a steady rise since the Bush administration came into power.

    The rich countries of the world have done little to alleviate the crushing burdens of poverty or to aid in redressing the indignities and inequities still existing after long periods of colonial rule. There is much cause for unease throughout the developing world, which is giving rise to continued low intensity warfare as exemplified by the Palestinian struggle against the Israelis and events such as the September 11th attacks against the United States.

    Military

    In the post-Cold War period, the US has pulled far ahead of the other nations of the world in terms of military dominance. The US is able to control NATO policy and has used NATO as a vehicle for its pursuit of military domination. In addition to dramatically increasing its military budget in recent years, the US has announced plans for high-tech developments that include missile defense systems, more usable nuclear weapons and the weaponization of space.

    Despite its push for global military dominance, however, the nature of today’s weapons limit the possibility of any country having unilateral dominance. Nuclear weapons, for example, are capable of destroying cities, and there is an increased likelihood in the aftermath of the Cold War that these weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists capable of attacking largely, if not completely, with impunity. Thus, the most powerful weapons that have been created have greater utility for the weak (if they can get their hands on them) than they do for the strong (who may be reluctant to exercise such power and also unable to if they cannot identify and locate the source of the attack).

    Cultural

    The world is definitely experiencing a clash of cultures, but not along the fault lines of civilizations as Samuel Huntington has suggested. The opposing cultural trends that are most dominant are between those who define the world in terms of the value of massive accumulation and immediate use of resources (powerful individuals, corporations and the national governments that provide a haven for them) and those who define the world in terms of shared rights and responsibilities for life and future generations (most of the world’s people). The former values, reflected predominantly by the economic elites in the United States and many other countries and constantly on display through various forms of media, do not promote sustainable development, wreak havoc on the poor of the world and invite retaliation. The latter values are reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the growing body of international human rights law that has developed since World War II.

    Dominant Trends

    The dominant world trends today are:

    • Unilateralism by the United States and a downplaying of collective political responsibility;
    • Growing and increasingly desperate economic disparity between the world’s rich and poor;
    • A push for military dominance by the United States in particular and the Western states through NATO more generally, offset by the flexibility of terrorists who may obtain nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction; and
    • The cultural dominance of greed and selfishness portrayed by global media on a broad screen for all, including the poor, to see from throughout the world.

    These trends are destabilizing and unsustainable. They can change by democratic means from within democratic states or they can continue until the world is embroiled in conflagration. That is a choice that is available to us for a relatively short period of time as the trends are already quite advanced. The changes needed are:

    • A shift to multilateralism, involving all states, through a reformed and strengthened United Nations;
    • Implementation of a plan to alleviate poverty and economic injustice throughout the world;
    • A shift from US and NATO military dominance to the implementation of the post World War II vision of collective security; and
    • A shift toward implementation of international law in which all states and their leaders are held to high standards of protecting human rights and the dignity of the individual.

    The United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development, set to take place in Johannesburg, South Africa in August 2002, will fail dramatically unless it takes into account these dominant trends and the need to shift them in more sustainable and peaceful directions.
    *David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and the Deputy Chair of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility.