Tauscher at Global Zero
Feb 06, 2010

Recently, Ellen Tauscher, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, spoke before the Global Zero summit in Paris on February 3, 2010.

As usual, she had some interesting things to say.

And President Obama set forth an ambitious agenda in his speech in Prague last year. The president has embraced the vision of John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan of calling for a world without nuclear weapons.

Those are not just abstract words for him. This issue animates the president, it’s not one of those issues that an aide had to tell him about. He has put his political capital and muscle behind that vision.

(snip)

Don’t Give the Pentagon a Blank Check
Feb 04, 2010

When President Obama proposed a freeze on discretionary spending over the next three years in his State of the Union address, he exempted the hundreds of billions of dollars spent annually on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as spending by the Pentagon.

Write a letter to the editor of your local paper today to oppose this exemption!

The President’s decision to freeze domestic expenditures but not defense spending is wrong, especially when total defense spending for next year exceeds $733 billion, including almost $160 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Exempting defense spending from the budget axe does not make sense when the country is facing so much red ink. The political pressure to save Pentagon pork is tremendous despite the many expensive weapons programs that are faulty or unneeded.

Since September 11th, 2001, the Pentagon’s budget has more than doubled, from $333 billion to $733 billion in just nine years.  At the same time, our economy has suffered the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.  Any serious attempt to spur an economic recovery has to take the massive defense budget seriously.

Write a letter to the editor of your local paper! Explain how the exemption of the defense budget from the freeze on discretionary spending is not only illogical, but contrary to the President’s goals.

Please send us a copy of your submission, and let us know if your letter gets published.

State of the Union Reaffirms Administration Commitment to Nukes
Jan 28, 2010

While the focus of President Obama’s first State of the Union address was overwhelmingly centered on job creation and reviving the economy, his remarks regarding nuclear weapons reiterated the Administration’s commitment to leading a bipartisan nuclear security agenda that addresses the grave threat posed by nuclear weapons.

As he identified in the speech, the President has adopted the visions of former Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan in pursuing meaningful steps to reverse the proliferation of nuclear weapons and seek a world without them.

Some highlights:

•    Significant progress is being made in negotiations for a follow-on to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, a key agreement for reducing nuclear weapons stockpiles in the U.S. and Russia, which expired on December 5th. (In fact, just hours before giving the State of the Union, the President spoke with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, and the leaders agreed that the negotiations for “the farthest-reaching arms control treaty in nearly two decades” are nearly complete.)

•    U.S. leadership in strengthening the non-proliferation and disarmament regime is essential to garnering international support to halt the North Korean and Iranian programs.

•    He established a clear goal for the April Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, DC of “securing all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world in four years, so that they never fall into the hands of terrorists.”

Massachusetts Mess
Jan 20, 2010

It was a disaster. Pure and simple. No point in sugar-coating it.

Republican conservative Scott Brown handily defeated Democrat Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts special election to fill the seat of the late Edward Kennedy. The vote was 52% - 47%.

President Obama’s agenda is in serious trouble. The universal health care bill, a life-long dream of Senator Kennedy, faces new obstacles.

GOP election prospects for November look brighter.

The only kernel of good news: the President and his team have more than nine months to turn things around before the November 2010 elections.

As for the President’s arms control agenda, the change means less than on other issues. In the Senate, with 67 votes needed to approve a new nuclear reductions treaty or the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, we now will need at least eight Republican votes instead of seven. This is one issue where bipartisanship would have been required, regardless of the outcome in Massachusetts.

Council for a Livable World supporters once again demonstrated outstanding support for a progressive candidate in a tight race. You were generous with your donations and your time. You contributed over $20,000 to the Coakley campaign, and volunteered many hours to call and e-mail voters in Massachusetts.

Today is a dark day, but we have overcome high hurdles in the past.

Thank you for helping out a good cause. Now we have to redouble our election efforts for November to elect good Senators and Representatives.

Shocking news out of Washington, D.C.
Jan 08, 2010

Brace yourselves for the news.

A major Administration report on nuclear weapons is delayed one month from February 1 until March 1.

Dear readers, I am sure you are shocked, shocked beyond belief to think that the Executive Branch, Congress, state legislatures, non-profit groups, students, authors or even ordinary citizens would ever fail to meet a deadline.

Pundits and experts are opining about the significance of this nuclear policy delay.  

It is said that the Administration is mired in bloody internal policy disputes over President Obama’s far-reaching nuclear weapons agenda.

Or the delay means that good guys (whomever they are, or perhaps even good gals, whomever they are) now have a better chance to prevail in the policy battles.

Or the nuclear weapons review will fizzle into deadlock.

Dear readers, it might just be possible that a delay is simply that, a delay. A failure to meet a deadline.  A bureaucracy that could not get its act together. An unprecedented act in Washington, DC.

Not since Claude Rains in the movie “Casablanca” discovered there was gambling in "Rick's Café Américain" have people been so shocked.

So when is a delay just a delay?  Ask the former House Majority Leader from Sugerland, Texas, who dances with the stars.

Averting Nuclear Annihilation
Jan 07, 2010

President Barack Obama has called for a major change in world policy on nuclear weapons, leading to eventual elimination. His initiative is supported by a powerful group of conservative and military allies led by former Republican Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz and Democrats former Secretary of Defense William Perry and Sam Nunn longtime Chair of Senate Armed Services Committee.

These leaders recognize that nuclear weapons are the most inhumane and dangerous ever conceived, that kill and maim without discrimination, the only weapons ever invented that could destroy all life on planet Earth. That must not happen. Disarmament is the only answer: If any country has nuclear weapons, others will want them. Then, some day they will be used by accident, mistake, or design - the ultimate catastrophe.

In The Wall Street Journal and other venues, these conservative leaders argue for their dramatic reforms...

Obama Plays Hardball with the Russians
Oct 09, 2009

In 1991, at the height of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president of the United States. He immediately heightened tensions using belligerent rhetoric attacking the Soviet Union as "The Evil Empire" while authorizing an enormous military buildup against "the focus of evil in the modern world."

A significant number of Americans were worried about the harsh negatives of the Reagan initiatives. One manifestation was the Nuclear Freeze Movement that sought to decrease tensions as well as the nuclear buildup by limiting all nuclear arsenals at current levels as a first step toward their eventual elimination.

Reagan showed his annoyance criticizing "the placard carriers", giving little credence to the groundswell of support for the freeze campaign that swept America in 1981 – 82. This grass-roots uprising was a major factor behind Reagan's March 1983 speech that initiated the missile defense program (SDI) that continues to waste billions of dollars in the military budget.

Among the protesters supporting the Freeze was Columbia University senior Barack Obama, who in 1983 published a plea in a campus news magazine for "a nuclear free world" opposing SDI and military industrial interests “with their billion-dollar erector sets."

Much happens in a week
Sep 22, 2009

Last Thursday, President Obama boldly killed President Bush’s misguided missile defense deployment in Europe, and this Thursday, he continues to push his nuclear agenda forward at a United Nations Security Council summit meeting.

The meeting, the first of its kind chaired by a U.S. president, is designed by Obama to continue the momentum toward nuclear security and arms control that the President initiated in his unforgettable Prague speech in April.

At the United Nations, the U.S. is putting forth a resolution (the draft can be seen here) that calls upon all countries to pursue “a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” In addition, the resolution calls for universal ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and promotes a breadth of arms control and nonproliferation initiatives.

Care to show your support for President Obama’s nuclear agenda? You can send a message to the White House supporting his commitment to pragmatic steps on the way to a world free of nuclear weapons here.

In case you missed it…Obama on Missile Defense
Sep 21, 2009

After eight years of an Administration that seemed impervious to public opinion, what a new era we are in. Over the past three months, Council supporters and advocates sent more than 10,000 letters to elected officials, urging them to oppose wasteful and ineffective missile defense programs, including the proposed "third missile defense site" in Europe.

Last week, the White House announced its intention to reconfigure U.S. missile defense policy in Europe – a move which smartly includes scrapping the missile interceptors in Poland and the accompanying radar in the Czech Republic.  

This shift in policy was prompted by a request by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense that the President revise the previous missile defense plan – a request aimed to align missile defense policy with immediate security threats, rather than long-range missile threats from Iran that do not currently exist.

According to Council ED John Isaacs, ““The decision to revamp the missile defense plan in Europe is based on technological reality rather than rigid ideology…The Obama administration’s proposal is a better choice for U.S. and European security.”

For more on the political context of this announcement, click here for an analysis by Military Policy Analyst Travis Sharp.

64th Anniversary of Hiroshima: Time for Progress on Nukes
Aug 06, 2009

Today marks the 64th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. 50,000 people gathered in the city to remember the 140,000 killed within months of the attack and to honor thousands of survivors.

Hundreds more events to mark the anniversary happened around the globe, including one in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the location of the Y-12 plant where the “Little Boy” bomb was built. The event’s organizer, Ralph Hutchison, stated that, “The bomb does not make us more secure, it makes us less secure."

Many others agree.