Tri-Valley CAREs
Communities Against a Radioactive Environment
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November 17, 2017
Posted by Marylia Kelley
We are living in a time of great nuclear peril – and great hope. On the one hand, President Trump continues to escalate global nuclear dangers, including by repeatedly engaging in juvenile, intemperate name-calling with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un and doing so without any serious reflection on what it means that the US stockpile contains nearly 7,000 nuclear weapons. On the other hand, 122 countries at the United Nations voted this year to adopt a “Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons,” which is presently undergoing its formal signature and ratification process on the way to becoming international law.
It is in this context that Tri-Valley CAREs has teamed up with Physicians for Social Responsibility, Union of Concerned Scientists and other national and local groups of all types and sizes in a new initiative to call on the US government to make nuclear disarmament the centerpiece of its national security policy.
The initiative is titled, “Back from the Brink: A Call to Prevent Nuclear War,” and it demands that the US:
- renounce the option of using nuclear weapons first
- end the president's sole, unchecked authority to launch a nuclear attack
- take its nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert
- cancel plans to replace the arsenal with enhanced [i.e., upgraded] nuclear weapons; and
- actively pursue a verifiable agreement among nuclear armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals. (In this regard, Tri-Valley CAREs recommends that the US sign and ratify the aforementioned nuclear weapons “ban treaty.”)
The resolution is worded with the goal of achieving a broad consensus, and it is designed to be discussed and passed by myriad NGOs including peace, justice, environmental, civic, political and faith-based organizations, university groups, unions, town hall meetings, churches, synagogues or temples and their social concerns committees, and city councils, county supervisors, and/or state legislatures.
For more information about how your organization can participate, contact us at [email protected] or contact Martin Fleck of Physicians for Social Responsibility at [email protected].