Time to abolish nuclear weapons

By Carol Urner for Disarm/End Wars Issue Committee

A New Year begins with  New Years Resolutions. Let’s resolve in 2015 to use our power as committed WILPF women to abolish nuclear weapons and to end all wars! And let’s work to make it so! 

OK, so our reason tells us that this is not possible within a single year, even if those are reasonable long term goals. So, we believe, are general and complete disarmament and human rights and human security for all whether in Russia, the United States, Europe, Latin America or the deserts of Africa. All of our members, Branches, Issue Committees and international work are for realization of these inter-related goals,  

But unless we work as women at full power we will never make any of them so! And we cannot do it alone.  We have to work with other women, and children and with men. We have to love them, labor alongside them and grow in our ability to follow in the ways of non-violence as our foremothers did 

Refer to our DISARM annual calendar for significant dates to help us organize together to reach our goals.

At this point DISARM  priorities continue to be nuclear abolition and ending wars as a continuing threat to sustainable peace. Join us in supporting legislation that promotes nuclear weapons abolition and a carbon free and nuclear free environment as well as deep cuts in the military budget and people before profits in all legislation.

Follow the new nuclear disarmament initiatives on WILPF Reaching Critical Will and organize to send local members –new or old – to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Review Conference in New York in late April and May. Also send members to the  Alliance for Nuclear  Accountability D.C. Days or even to the Global Network International Conference in Kyoto. Ambitions to control and dominate earth from space are of course intimately related to both nuclear weapons development and to the waging of devastating modern wars. Some branches have bequests left to them by members who would appreciate such use of their gifts.

Or work closer to home  on low budget projects like closing down a nuclear power plant,  resisting militarized drones or working to clean up dangerous nuclear waste surrounding abandoned uranium mines, at our nuclear power plants, or left to pollute air, water and soil at former US military bases or bombing and battle sites.

Or join in one of our new action sub groups continuously forming. Check out Joan Ecklein’s contribution on behalf of our committee: Stop Expanding and Arming NATO as an Aggressive Military Alliance. And we’re still waiting for at least one or two WILPFers to step forward on ending militarization of our community police or on more extensive gun control. Members and branches were asking for this at our regional gatherings last year. And on December 19  Obama signed into law the bill authorizing formation of a Manhattan Project national park. The purported text is here. This will need watch dogging to make sure the story is told fairly by the National Park Department, and not presented as pro-military propaganda.

Of course we in WILPF, and those who came before us over the past 100 years, have been working for disarmament and an end to wars since 1915. We have many victories to celebrate and there were moments when we seemed to be coming very close to our goals. One was in 1929 when the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which outlawed war, became international law. It was celebrated as a great victory that year, and nations were still ratifying and signing on in 1934, the year that Jane Addams died. But, though never rescinded, the treaty was soon forgotten as Hitler and the Nazis began to ravage Europe. It is, however, still international law, and already makes US instigated wars over the past 86 years clearly international crimes. And there are many lessons to be learned from both successes and failures in past attempts such as this one as we keep working to realize our goals.

So, in 2015, which is our Centennial Year, let us work with renewed energy to abolish nuclear weapons, to begin general and compete disarmament, to overcome human violence and to put an end to war.

US Department of Energy photo (in the public domain) of the 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear explosion over the Marshall Islands, 1000 times more powerful than the bombs exploded over Hiroshima or Nagasaki.