Nuclear weapons targeted for the scrapheap of history

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June 2005

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Nuclear weapons targeted for the scrapheap of history
While it demands that other countries like North Korea and Iran abandon nuclear weapons programs, the U.S. spends approximately $40 billion each year on its nuclear forces, said Jackie Cabasso, executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation. Even though the Cold War is over, nuclear proliferation is still a huge problem, according to Cabasso.

"In the United States, we have 10,350 nuclear weapons and more than 5,000 of these are deployed. A couple thousand are on hair-trigger alert," Cabasso said. "We're selectively choosing who we think has the right to have nuclear weapons. We have an urgent need to hold our own government accountable when they flagrantly violate international law left and right."

That urgency has begun to revitalize what had seemed a dormant anti-nuclear weapons movement. In recent months, demonstrations against the continued creation and deployment of nuclear weapons and the enormous cost they represent to U.S. taxpayers suggest that the issue may be coming to the attention of a new generation of activists.

In the 1960s, nuclear powers signed on to the UN's Nuclear Weapons Nonproliferation Treaty. The United States, United Kingdom, France, China, and Russia all agreed to gradually get rid of nuclear weapons, as long as signatory countries without nuclear weapons did not acquire them. So far, none of the nuclear powers have lived up to their end of the bargain, especially the United States.

"Nobody comes close to us and Russia when it comes to [sheer numbers of] nuclear weapons," said Alice Slater, president of the Abolition 2000 disarmament campaign. "India and Pakistan have less than 100 a piece, and North Korea probably has less than 10. The U.S. is addicted to nuclear weapons. We continue to rely on them, improve them, and fund them, and it sends the wrong message to the rest of the world."

Americans can choose to send the right message to the world by participating in a nuclear ban demonstration on August 6 and 9, said Carah Ong, development and communications director for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Community vigils will take place at city halls to remember the 60th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski. In addition, large-scale demonstrations will take place outside the four U.S. nuclear bomb test sites, she said.

"We will only achieve our goal of disarmament if we mobilize the masses and show our collective political will. We have to be contacting our elected officials about this, if we ever want to change the nuclear weapons policy in the United States," Ong said.—Kelly Nolan

For more information:
Abolition Now

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