On this day last year, I was glued to CSPAN’s live feed of the Senate floor. Late in the evening, they finally started to vote on ratification of the New START Treaty, and I realized that years of hard work had finally paid off. By a vote of 71 yeas to 26 nays, with 13 Republicans voting in favor, the New START Treaty had been ratified! We jumped up and down a bit, sent off our victory email to thank all of you, and I was able to head out and enjoy my early holiday present.

Rose Gottemoeller, the chief negotiator of the treaty with Russia, has a post on The Hill today celebrating the anniversary and the major victory for arms control the Senate vote represents:

On September 24, 1996, President Clinton signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would ban any signatory nation from exploding nuclear weapons.

The problem is that 15 years later, the Senate has yet to ratify the treaty. And without the full backing of the United States, the treaty has languished, with progress in other countries stalled as well.

But now, President Obama is testing the waters for a possible push to finally ratify the treaty, and set the stage for a global ban on nuclear explosions. After our recent victory in making the first reductions to the US and Russian nuclear arsenals in decades, momentum is on our side.

On August 7th Mark O. Hatfield, former Senator from Oregon, passed away at the age of 89. Exactly 66 years and 1 day earlier, when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Hatfield was stationed in Japan as a young naval officer. About a month later he was among the first American servicemen to arrive in the devastated city:

When I entered Hiroshima, the charred bodies were still being pulled out of the rubble. The horror that I experienced burned a lasting impression in my conscience. To this day, it serves as a philosophical anchor – my beacon of clarity in a political arena that turns a deaf ear to those who do not speak the exotic language of megatons, kill probability ratios and other terms that desensitize us to the true nature of nuclear war.

Republican Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) is threatening to take $500 million worth of food away from poor children because “we can’t afford it.” But Congress manages to find billions to spend on nuclear weapons every single year. I want to change those priorities, don’t you?

Because thousands of you spoke out earlier this month, together we got Congress to protect funding for nonproliferation programs. The final budget for 2011 provided a $190 million increase for programs that lock up nuclear bomb-grade material around the world, a major accomplishment when the Republicans were fighting to cut almost everything. Thank you!

Can you help us build on that success by telling Congress to block wasteful spending on nuclear bombs and new bomb factories in 2012? Please click here to contact Congress today.

Last night Congress voted to pass the final budget for 2011, and while there is a lot we are not happy about, there is one success to celebrate. Nuclear nonproliferation efforts were given an increase of $190 million over last year’s funding.

These important programs that clean up loose nuclear material around the world had been threatened with as much as a 20% cut! That would have severely jeopardized the efforts to lock down bomb-grade nuclear material within four years, one of the crucial steps on the road towards a nuclear weapons free world.

from Global Security Newswire: