Will the Senate stand in the way of a safer world, or will it support a new nuclear weapons treaty to reduce the huge US and Russian nuclear weapons arsenals?

Last week, President Obama formally submitted the New START treaty to cut nuclear weapons to the US Senate. Key Senate committees will be holding hearings beginning tomorrow and Republican senators are weighing whether or not to support the treaty.

With more than 23,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, we have 23,000 chances for an accidental nuclear launch or for a weapon to fall into the wrong hands with devastating consequences. The US and Russia have 95 percent of the world’s stockpiles. The New START treaty can make us all that much safer by reducing both countries’ arsenals and paving the way for future progress to reduce the nuclear threat. [1]

(Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

After a year of negotiations, the President Obama and Russian President Medvedev signed a new treaty today to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles in both countries and make the world that much safer.

But will the Senate do the right thing and ratify the treaty, or will they hold it hostage to partisan politics?

 Please click here to ask your senators to support ratifying the New START agreement to reduce our nuclear arsenal.

At the signing ceremony today in Prague, President Obama spoke about how the treaty opens the door to further actions to reduce the threat posed by nuclear weapons. Here’s an excerpt:

We want to remind the president that there is widespread support for strong leadership to eliminate nuclear weapons. That’s why the Campaign is launching a new sign-on letter to President Obama. Will your organization sign on?

The letter will call on the president to announce at the upcoming Global Security Summit that he will host a disarmament summit next year. It will be delivered on April 5 to coincide with the anniversary of President Obama’s Prague speech.

This is not a petition for individual members of the public to sign. It is intended for faith, community, environmental, peace, labor, and other groups to approve and sign on to. Organizations can view the letter here and sign on to the letter by the April 1st deadline.

Below is an alert we sent to some of our supporters on the nuclear pork in the Fiscal Year 2011 budget. Click on the following committee links to check if your representative is a member of a key committee that decides how much funding nuclear weapons will actually get. If your representative is on either the House Armed Services Committee or the House Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee, please take action and email your representative.

Next year’s budget has just been released and while it has a spending freeze for most domestic programs, there’s plenty of nuclear weapons pork. The nukes budget comes in at roughly $7 billion, getting a ten percent increase.

It’s outrageous, unnecessary, and expensive.