Be on the lookout for January 2025 DISARM/End Wars actions

CARTOON: COLD WAR, 1948. 'Peace Today.' Rube Goldberg's 1948 Pulitzer Prize winning cartoon comment on the precarious position of world peace. It has not gotten any better! Used with editorial license from The Granger Collection

December 2024

by Cherrill Spencer
Co-chair of DISARM/End Wars Committee

Your DISARM/End Wars Issue Committee is busy planning actions for you to take in late December and January, so please be on the lookout for eALERTS to all members and emails to the branches detailing actions to take and events to attend. “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars,” declared Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump in his victory speech on November 6th. An ad hoc committee of DISARM has written a letter to the President-elect and his senior foreign affairs staff to provide advice on how to reach a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine-Russia war and how to start building détente in Europe so it can be a peaceful region. We encourage you to share this letter with your Congressional representatives and with your own networks. It will appear soon at the top of this webpage: https://wilpfus.org/story/statements-and-resolutions.

Suggestions for articles to read/videos to watch:
There is a recording of the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony held on December 10th, with the prize being awarded to the Nihon Hidankyo organization, which has advocated for the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs for about 70 years.

It is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqvPpz1huIw.

It includes commentary in English that explains who is who and what is happening. Here is the main message from the Nihon Hidankyo lecture:

“It is the heartfelt desire of the Hibakusha that, rather than depending on the theory of nuclear deterrence, which assumes the possession and use of nuclear weapons, we must not allow the possession of a single nuclear weapon. [...] I therefore plead for everyone around the world to discuss together what we must do to eliminate nuclear weapons, and demand action from governments to achieve this goal.”

This is a good moment to remind you that August 6th and 9th, 2025, will mark the 80th anniversaries of these horrific bombings, and it is not too early to start planning your actions to bring attention to your local communities about the continuing menace of nuclear weapons.

The New York Times (NYT) interactive opinion pages continue to publish informative articles on various aspects of nuclear weapons. These pieces are not behind the NYT paywall. Here is the latest piece: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/05/opinion/nuclear-weapons-space.html.

WILPF also seeks disarmament from conventional weapons of war, and here is a thorough analysis of the relationship between conventional weapons based on new technologies and existing nuclear weapons: https://www.sipri.org/publications/2024/eu-non-proliferation-and-disarmament-papers/potentially-revolutionary-impact-emerging-and-disruptive-technologies-and-strategic-conventional.

We recommend these upcoming events in January 2025; more details will be sent by email. The threat of nuclear war is increasing rather than abating. President Biden’s recent sending of long-range missiles (ATACMS) to Ukraine has sharply increased the risk. The tragic Israel/Gaza conflict continues to expand. Cold warriors in high places are beating the drums of war toward Russia and China. Enormous public expenditures are being spent on upgrading all three legs of the U.S.’s nuclear weapons triad. Responding to these dangers, the annual “Reducing the Threat of Nuclear War” Conference will be held as a virtual gathering on Saturday afternoon, January 25, 2025. This long-standing MIT-based conference is one of the nation’s most significant gatherings of nuclear disarmament advocates. The 2025 theme will be “Reducing Congressional Spending on Nuclear Weapons.” We will tell you more and will ask you to invite your Congressional representatives to attend, by email, when the registration details are available.

Every year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board meets to set the hands of the Doomsday Clock. In January 2024, they kept the clock at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to a global catastrophe, based on the current threats of nuclear weapons and the climate crisis. It will be re-set on January 28th, 2025, and all the major media will run stories about it. The NGO ReThink Media wants us to take advantage of this worldwide media attention to get our local radio and TV stations and newspapers to run our Op-eds about why your hometown residents should be worried about nuclear weapons. They ran an excellent training workshop on how to write and get an Op-ed published around January 28th and how to plan a media event.

You can watch the recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1D_p0E-qJs. A second training workshop described how to prepare to be interviewed by your local TV or radio station, which applies in general to any interview topic. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlTnnkAA6LQ.

Please Join Our Disarm/End Wars Issue Committee. We Welcome New Members. 

We meet by Zoom on the second and last Sundays of each month at
4:30 pm PT, 6:30 pm CT, 7:30 pm ET.
To find out the Zoom link and to request to join the DISARM listserv,
write to disarmchair@wilpfus.org.