In this regard, it may be that later this year (after the presumed Senate ratification of the New START agreement), we will shift to a strategy de-emphasizing incremental arms reduction treaties, which are painstaking and give enormous power to recalcitrant Senators since a two-thirds majority of 67 votes is required for any treaty to be ratified, to one advocating that Obama take unilateral actions to reduce the nuclear danger. That won't necessarily be easy, especially if the NPR comes out with only modest changes to US nuclear weapons policies, but Obama can take many executive actions for example, de-alerting nuclear weapons by taking them off hair-trigger alert or unilaterally reducing US nukes to 500 and challenging Russia to do the same without treaty negotiations that would avoid the inevitable compromises necessary to try (likely in vain) to win Republican support in the Senate for future treaties.
In our view, 2010 will likely be more important in terms of movement building than specific policy achievements on nukes. The events Peace Action and our US colleagues and international allies are organizing around the NPT RevCon are designed to do exactly that (please see the campaign website at www.peaceandjusticenow.org ), as is the Think Outside the Bomb youth and student network (www.thinkoutsidethebomb.org), which is planning a major convergence in New Mexico this August.
The NPT RevCon is seen by many in governments around the world (including some in the US government) and in the peace and disarmament community as a time to push for serious progress toward the global abolition of nuclear weapons. The international petition campaign calling for the initiation of negotiations on global nuclear weapons abolition (petition available on the website above and also the Peace Action website at www.peace-action.org ), international conference and march and rally before the NPT RevCon convenes are designed to show civil society support for nuclear abolition, and to put nuclear disarmament squarely in the context of the broader struggle for peace and social and economic justice.
*Kristensen, Hans M. Nuclear Notebook. Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. 2009.
Lisa Putkey is the Scoville Peace Fellow at the Peace Action Education Fund. Kevin Martin is the Executive Director of Peace Action and Peace Action Education Fund. Peace Action, headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside the nation's capital, is the country's largest peace and disarmament organization with nearly 100,000 dues-paying members and chapters and affiliates in nearly 30 states. The organization is over 50 years old, beginning with the 1957 founding of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (Sane), which later merged with the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign (Freeze) to form Sane/Freeze, which changed its name to Peace Action in 1992. www.peace-action.org
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