In his December 29 “Chain Reaction” blog, John Isaacs reported that “the first key appointments below the cabinet-level have been made and the news is good.” Isaacs is executive director of Council for a Livable World, a CNWFW coalition partner. Read John's blog for the scoop on John Holdren, appointed Science Advisor to the President, James Steinberg, Deputy Secretary of State, and Antony Blinken, Assistant to the Vice-President for National Security Affairs.

While a global, bipartisan consensus is building for a nuclear weapons free world, the newly re-appointed U.S. Secretary of Defense is saying that the United States should hang on to our nuclear arsenal for the foreseeable future – and while we are at it, we better field a new nuclear weapon. Those of us advocating for concrete steps toward abolition of nuclear weapons have our work cut out for us.
Didn't Gates get the memo?
Back in October, at a major address at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, SecDef Robert Gates insisted “we must always hedge against the dangerous and unpredictable world. That is still true today and maybe even more so. Rising and resurgent powers, rogue nations pursuing nuclear weapons, proliferation of international terrorism, all demand that we preserve this hedge.”
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“Try as we might and hope as we will, the power of nuclear weapons and their strategic impact is a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle, at least for a very long time. While we have long-term goal of abolishing nuclear weapons once and for all, given the world in which we live, we have to be realistic about that proposition.”
Gates went on to champion funding for a new American nuclear weapon, the Reliable Replacement Warhead, which Congress has repeatedly rejected. Gates reiterated this position again on December 1 in a speech at Minot Air Force Base.

Tri-Valley CAREs Charges Department is "Locking in" Provocative Nuclear Weapons Decisions in Waning Days of Bush Administration; Calls on Government to Downsize Weapons Complex, Prioritize Removal of Bomb-making Materials from Livermore Lab

LIVERMORE – In Federal Register notices published today, the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) issued two legally-binding authorizations, called Records of Decision (RODs), to revitalize and rebuild the nuclear weapons complex, at Livermore Lab in California and other sites across the country.

The two RODs codify the DOE NNSA’s "preferred alternatives" laid out in the agency’s final Complex Transformation Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, issued on October 24, 2008.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, directly challenged nations with nuclear weapons to give up their “status symbols” in his keynote address to an October 24 East-West Institute conference. Saying “a world free of nuclear weapons would be a global public good of the highest order,” Ban (who is from South Korea) urged the nuclear weapons states to multilaterally eliminate their arsenals. “Nuclear weapons produce horrific, indiscriminate effects. Even when not used, they pose great risks. Accidents could happen at any time. The manufacture of nuclear weapons can harm public health and the environment. And of course, terrorists could acquire nuclear weapons or nuclear material.”
Noting that the very first General Assembly resolution, in 1946, called for eliminating “weapons adaptable to mass destruction,” Ban urged both nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states to pursue his five point proposal to “revitalize the international disarmament agenda.” In this proposal, Ban endorsed the Hans Blix proposal for a “World summit on disarmament, non-proliferation and terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction.”
According to the Secretary-General,”when disarmament advances, the world advances.” Ban delivered his remarks at the East-West Institute “Seizing the Moment” conference at the UN, with cosponsorship from Campaign coalition partners BASIC and Global Security Institute.

Litigation Charges Pattern of Abuse, has National Implications

LIVERMORE, CA – This morning, Tri-Valley CAREs filed a lawsuit in federal district court in San Francisco against the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and its National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The suit alleges numerous violations of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the nation’s key open government law enacted to ensure public access to federal government records.

Tri-Valley CAREs was forced to pursue litigation after DOE and NNSA failed to respond to six, separate FOIA requests within the 20-day timeframe generally required under the statute. By forcing Tri-Valley CAREs to wait up to 18 months and longer with no substantive response, DOE and NNSA have not only violated the law but greatly diminished the value of the information sought, which often becomes less relevant over time.