By Staff for Popular Resistance – As the Senate moves within five votes to ensure the Iran nuclear agreement becomes reality, hundreds of protests were held across the country calling on elected officials to support the Iran nuclear deal rallying for no war with Iran. The coordinated mobilizations come at a key moment as Congress nears the end of the August recess. Tens of thousands of petitions were also submitted to members of Congress. Lawmakers will vote on the pact—potentially as soon as September 9. You can take action now to call your elected representatives to urge them to choose the path to peace by supporting the nuclear agreement reached between Iran and world powers. Take action here. The war hawks are spending millions of dollars to generate opposition to the agreement but the people are out organizing and are getting very close to victory. So, take action today.
CODE PINK – Popular Resistance will be hosting a table at the Picnic for Peace on August 30th. Please let us know if you would like to join us at our table by writing info@PopularResistance.org. By September 17, Congress has to vote on the Iran nuclear deal and we are working hard to ensure that they vote in favor of this historic agreement. We’ve organized a Picnic For Peace with Iran event to bring together different sectors of the community who care about peace and to have an action that is fun and visible to the press. The picnic will be on August 30, 2015 at 4pm – 6pm at Lafayette Park across the street from the White House at 16th St & Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC , DC 20006. United States
By Leonard Eiger for Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent action – Fourteen peace activists risked arrest at a West Coast nuclear weapons base early Monday morning in a nonviolent protest against the continued deployment and modernization of the Trident nuclear weapons system. The Trident submarine base at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, just 20 miles from Seattle, Washington, contains the largest concentration of operational nuclear weapons in the US arsenal. Each of the 8 Trident submarines at Bangor carries as many as 24 Trident II(D-5) missiles, each loaded with up to 8 independently targetable thermonuclear warheads. Each warhead has an explosive yield up to 32 times the yield of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Trident nuclear protest Aug 2015 2The activists were among a larger group with Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action.
By Len Ackland and Burt Hubbard in Reveal News. ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Standing next to a 12-foot nuclear bomb that looks more like a trim missile than a weapon of mass destruction, engineer Phil Hoover exudes pride. “I feel a real sense of accomplishment,” he said. But as Hoover knows, looks can be deceiving. He and fellow engineers at Sandia National Laboratories have spent the past few years designing, building and testing the top-secret electronic and mechanical innards of the sophisticated B61-12. Later, when nuclear explosives are added at the federal Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, the bomb will have a maximum explosive force equivalent to 50,000 tons of TNT – more than three times more powerful than the U.S. atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, 70 years ago this August that killed more than 130,000 people.
By Alice Slater for Counterpunch – The rest of the world is appalled, not only at the lack of progress to fulfill promises for nuclear disarmament, but the constant modernization and “improvement” of nuclear arsenals with the US announcing a plan to spend one trillion dollars over the next 30 years for two new bomb factories, delivery systems and warheads, having just tested a dummy nuclear bunker-buster warhead last month in Nevada, its B-61-12 nuclear gravity bomb! At this last NPT Review Conference in May, which broke up when the US, UK, and Canada refused to agree to an Egyptian proposal for a conference on a Middle East Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone, made to fulfill a 1995 promise as part of the commitments from the nuclear weapons states for an indefinite extension of the 25 year old NPT, the non- nuclear weapons states took a bold step. South Africa expressed its outrage at the unacceptable nuclear apartheid apparent in the current “security” system of nuclear haves and have nots—a system holding the whole world hostage to the security doctrine of the few
By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese for Popular Resistance – This week, memorials were held to mark the one year anniversary of the murder of Mike Brown which sparked the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This weekend there are events in Ferguson to mark the anniversary of the deaths of Mike Brown, Kajieme Powell and others. . . The US and its allies recently negotiated an agreement with Iran concerning its nuclear program. This agreement has been hailed as an historic step for diplomacy rather than war. The agreement with Iran is under attack by members of Congress who are beholden to AIPAC. . . This week the American Psychological Association decided to no longer allow psychologists to participate in tortrue. There seemed to be considerable division over the recent findings of the APA’s complicity with torture but in the end six dissidents who urged an end to participation in torutre won near unanimous decision.
By Kevin Martin and Phyllis Bennis for Other Words – The deal negotiated with Iran by the U.S. and other permanent UN Security Council members, plus Germany and the European Union, is very strong. It cuts off all paths for Iran to build a nuclear weapon (if indeed Tehran ever decided it wanted to, a decision all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies agree it has not made). Supporters of diplomacy over war must make our voices heard over the din of nay-saying interest groups with deep pockets. The pro-Israel lobby AIPAC recently set aside $20 million to saturate newspapers and the airwaves with calls to kill the deal.
By Vincent Intondi in Zinn Ed Project – When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. announced his strong opposition to the war in Vietnam, the media attacked him for straying outside of his civil rights mandate. In so many words, powerful interests told him: “Mind your own business.” In fact, African American leaders have long been concerned with broad issues of peace and justice—and have especially opposed nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, this activism is left out of mainstream corporate-produced history textbooks. On June 6, 1964, three Japanese writers and a group of hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) arrived in Harlem as part of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki World Peace Study Mission. Their mission: to speak out against nuclear proliferation. Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese American activist, organized a reception for the hibakusha at her home in the Harlem Manhattanville Housing Projects, with her friend Malcolm X. Malcolm said, “You have been scarred by the atom bomb. You just saw that we have also been scarred. The bomb that hit us was racism.”
By David Krieger for the Nuclear Peace Foundation – On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing some 90,000 people immediately and another 55,000 by the end of 1945. Three days later, the United States dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki, killing some 40,000 people immediately and another 35,000 by the end of 1945. David KriegerIn between these two bombings, on August 8, 1945, the U.S. signed the charter creating the Nuremberg Tribunal to hold Axis leaders to account for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Under well-established international humanitarian law – the law of warfare – war crimes include using weapons that do not distinguish between civilians and combatants or that cause unnecessary suffering. Because nuclear weapons kill indiscriminately and cause unnecessary suffering by radiation poisoning (among other grotesque consequences), the U.S. was itself in the act of committing war crimes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki while agreeing to hold its defeated opponents in World War II to account for their war crimes.
By Staff for Global Zero, Join Global Zero on the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan as we cycle what would be the edge of a “small” nuclear blast in downtown D.C. and call on President Obama to keep his promise to “seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” The event will be one of many corresponding events around the world, serving as a powerful reminder that nuclear weapons were designed to wipe cities like ours off the map. There are still more than 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world today. Many of these weapons are ready to launch at a moment’s notice. It’s time we call on President Obama and other world leaders to stand down these weapons of mass destruction and join the fight toward global zero – a world without nuclear weapons. Bike around the Bomb hashtag eliminate nukesJoin us on Sunday, August 9 for the 2nd annual “Bike Around the Bomb D.C.”
By Ron Kampeas for Haaretz – With the influential pro-Israel lobby group pushing for Congress to reject the deal negotiated by the Obama administration, it’s all hands on deck. Lay leaders, too, are canceling their summer plans, and AIPAC activists already are calling lawmakers and hitting synagogue listservs with appeals to can the plan. The two months that Congress has to review the deal will feature a pitched battle pitting the Obama administration and backers of the agreement against opponents and the Israeli government. J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle East lobby, which has largely backed President Barack Obama in all his Middle East strategies, raised $2 million to stump for the deal even before it was announced and already has unveiled a TV ad. The group’s president, Jeremy Ben Ami, who routinely bristles when J Street is likened to AIPAC, insisting that they play different fields, on Wednesday embraced a fight with the older and larger lobby. Asked on MSNBC whether he was going “toe to toe” with AIPAC, he said, “Essentially we are.” AIPAC twice has pulled out all the stops in taking on a president – and lost both times.
By maTT De Vlieger in Portside – From the adoption of the first United Nations General Assembly resolution in 1945, through the promulgation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968, to the recent International Conferences on Human Consequences of Nuclear Weapons and the Humanitarian Pledge signed by over 100 nations this year, the vast majority of the world’s nations have demanded that the world’s nuclear weapons be eliminated. The International Court of Justice has issued an authoritative interpretation of NPT Article VI, unanimously concluding: “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.” Non-governmental organizations have developed a model nuclear weapons abolition treaty which has been circulated by the United Nations as an official document.
So much for President Obama’s commitment to a nuclear-weapons-free world. With its decision on May 22 to block the adoption of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Review Conference’s consensus statement, the Obama administration gave the human species another hefty push toward nuclear catastrophe, shaking the foundations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Why the sabotage? Well, for one thing, the draft text had the temerity to call for the convening of a conference within six months to prepare the way for a Middle East nuclear-weapons-and-weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone. It called for all parties to the NPT Review – read especially the United States – to fulfill previous Review Conferences’ promises to begin the process of creating the zone.
An attempt to strengthen and expand the world’s premier arms-control treaty ended in failure here Friday as international delegations squabbled over a long-sought goal of establishing a ban on weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Following four weeks of negotiations, the United States and several of its allies rejected the conference’s final document, which was supposed to further the implementation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The United States and Britain refused to accept the establishment of an “arbitrary” deadline to hold a conference on a zone that would be free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, and Canada objected to a process that didn’t include Israel, which has not signed the treaty. Iran’s delegate Hamid Baidinejad accused the United States and Britain of blocking consensus in order “to safeguard the interests of a particular non-party of the treaty which has endangered the peace and security of the region by developing nuclear-weapons capability” outside international controls.
In an amazing turn of events, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals this evening ordered the immediate release of Megan Rice, Michael Walli and Greg Boertje-Obed, the Transform Now Plowshares activists who were serving time in federal prison for their action at the Y12 Nuclear Weapons Complex in Oak Ridge, TN to protest plans for a new multibillion dollar nuclear bomb plant there. The government had filed a notice that it would not oppose the release of Greg, Michael and Megan pending resentencing. The government’s notice was interesting—it included notice to the court that, when resentencing did happen, the government would not be seeking terms of imprisonment greater than the time already served.
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