Nuclear Abolition Strategies in the Obama Era | Joseph Gerson

[00:00:00]first of all I just want to appreciate uh everybody who's here I particularly want to uh appreciate the Walkers uh you know it's it's it's Walkers who carry the message from Community to community uh it's at the community level that we begin to transform National policy uh I I have a memory you bring back a memory from before my hair was as white and thin as it is uh of of being the Arizona coordinator for the Continental walk for disarmament and human needs I think that was back in 1976 so ancient ancient history and and and memories um I'll say a little bit at the end is as Jay said uh about uh what you're going to find when you get to New York and and who is involved there's a lot of people uh but my primary task is unfortunately to be the bearer of unhappy news uh and give give some analysis as to where we are and why we are uh in the situation we're in and you know the challenge there as well is to try to uh keep it tight uh what I what I need to begin to say is that um when you enter into to thinking about this and to really studying it uh what you find is that uh the US government is is not what we were told it was uh when we were uh raised as children and going through Elementary School and and High School uh you begin to get an understanding of how uh much of the rest of the world uh begins to to uh conceive the United States uh in relationship to uh nuclear weapons uh it's not a surprise to anybody here that uh they began with Hiroshima Nagasaki uh I don't have time to go into why those bombs were dropped in any detail uh but to appreciate that Japan was attempting to surrender at that time had been for about a year uh nearly all of the major uh us uh military leaders uh Admiral Ley Eisenhower uh even Stimson who was Secretary of War at the time were quite clear that we didn't as Eisenhower said need to use that awful thing um even Curtis L who was leading the firebombing of all of Japan's major cities uh was quite clear that uh Japan would surrender uh without an atomic bomb or without Russia's intervention uh into the War uh by November of 1945 um in terms of what the bomb did uh the targeting criteria and we just need to kind of root ourselves in what nuclear weapons do here for a minute the targeting criteria I'm sorry to tell you uh was it needed to be a city with military functions with densely packed workers homes uh so innocent people were targeted uh from the beginning uh the uh well there were multiple reasons for the bombing the determinative reason uh was that they were the first bombs of the Cold War the idea was to bring the war to an immediate end uh before the uh Soviet Union came into the War uh on April 15th uh the the fear was that the United States would have to share influence in Asia uh as it already had to share influence with the Soviets uh in in Europe see Yola for example uh the concern was around northern China Manchuria Korea and possibly Japan itself let me say a few things about what the bombs the the the Hiroshima bomb did uh to appreciate that the Hiroshima bomb which by today's standards is a small bomb uh most of the Strategic weapons are 20 times more powerful uh than the Hiroshima bomb uh it had the uh Heat Of The Sun 3 million de uh its Fireball was 750 ft across uh within the first second uh everybody within a 2m radius had been poisoned with radioactive fallout within the first second uh the entire city was destroyed all within 2 month while radius was destroyed within 9 seconds um these this I'm going to show you a few pictures here from a um PowerPoint that was uh put together by a actually a Nagasaki abomb Survivor some of these images will be familiar uh some not um uh the Japanese understanding of what what took place there was quite literally hell uh uh by the Year's End uh 100,000 people and Hiroshima had died from a single bomb and to this day people continue to die of cancers and other uh radiation illnesses uh and because radioactivity causes genetic damage uh we we have uh it's not talked much about uh deep fears about what it means in second and third generation um abomb survivors considerable discrimination against them especially in terms of marriage uh because of fears of the genetic uh damage um this man uh actually survived and uh went on to become one of the founders of the organization of of abomb survivors when you get to New York there's going to be the largest probably the largest delegation of abomb survivors to come to the United States ever about 100 uh and given their average age of 78 you should appreciate on the one hand the kind of spirit that leads them to travel so far with many of them having infirmities uh and also to appreciate this is probably the last time uh that such a group will ever be able to come together um the images are horrible um uh you have Devastation uh that was uh didn't quit after the first day or two uh people began to get these purple spots U you vomiting all kinds of horrible things uh my book over here Empire and the bomb has a chapter uh in which which it goes into into consider able and I'm sorry to say unpleasant detail um don't want to spend too much time in Hiroshima I want to show this picture here this is a statue which is right across from the peace Park in Hiroshima uh after the United States didn't want the rest of the world to know what had happened actually Stimson had told Truman uh that with the fire bombings and with the anticipated uh Atomic bombing uh we were in danger of of getting the reputation of of B of basically competing with Hitler in atrocities uh so said our Secretary of War uh to our president uh after the atomic bombing and during the occupation uh it was not permitted for uh Japanese scientists doctors teachers uh to hold meetings to try to figure out what had happened uh newspapers were forbidden to even have the Japanese characters uh for the words Atomic and bomb uh this this is a memorial to uh children in a school the school was essentially um uh incinerated evaporated you see the the mushroom cloud you're looking at at uh essentially incinerated bodies the neighborhood um everything up into that M Cloud uh but because of the censorship they want they wanted to have a they wanted to have a memorial to these children but because of censorship uh they could not indicate what the memorial was to uh and so the eals mc² that you see here is code under the occupation so that they could signal what it was that had actually happened um you know today there's a very vital Japanese peace movement this is a photograph from the evening of August 6th after the official ceremonies when there are many many thousands of people who have come to Hiroshima uh to commemorate and to um uh build movement for for the future uh there will be more than 2,000 people coming from Japan uh to New York uh for both the International Peace conference that'll be held and for the rally in march on May the 2nd uh unfortunately that's not where the unhappy history ends uh the United States uh was the sole you we hear so much about deterrence our policy has always been deterrence if you listen to every president speak we have our nuclear weapons only for deterant uh but in fact the first time the United States prepared and threatened to initiate nuclear war and after uh Nagasaki uh was in 1946 uh before the Soviets had the bomb uh when they were slow to uh withdraw from a a section of uh Northern Iran which they had occupied with our permission uh when we were allies during the second world war to help get supplies into into Russia um they weren't leaving uh Truman called the um Soviet Ambassador into the white house uh told him that if the withdrawal uh from uh uh that portion of Iran did not begin within 48 Hours Moscow would cease to exist the withdrawal began in 24 hours uh if you look at the history and and much of it has been kept secret from us although you can can find it uh since Nagasaki the United States has prepared and threatened to initiate nuclear war on more than 40 occasions um in the Middle East I just run through the list uh 1946 uh 1956 during the Suez Crisis uh 1958 uh during the uh first spasms of the Lebanese Civil War and the uh coup in Iraq uh 1967 during The Six Day War uh 1972 during Black September 1973 during the um October War uh with the Carter Doctrine in 1980 uh in the uh runup to the um uh 1991 uh Gulf War uh in relationship to to Iraq and uh uh Libya by President Clinton uh in 1998 uh and in the r to the most recent invasion of U uh of uh Iraq uh in the Middle East uh sorry in East Asia the threats at least nine times against North Korea uh which should lead us not to be surprised that North Korea wants to get an atomic bomb uh against China against Russia it's a a long and unhappy history that most of us are unaware of uh but most of the rest of the world is uh and it's one reason why the rest of the world uh is pressing for uh the abolition of nuclear weapons uh We've Come very close to um those buttons being pushed closer than we've known on a number of occasions uh and uh while the threat of a thermonuclear exchange between the United States and Russia at this point is greatly diminished uh the possibility of a more limited uh nuclear war uh Still Remains so question what about other countries have other countries made made nuclear threats uh the Russians have uh the Soviets made one in 1956 against Europe which they probably could not have implemented uh Israel during the 1973 War uh threatened to use its Temple weapons uh this was a threat made less against Egypt or Syria more against the United States the idea is that they United States was withholding um u u weapons parts and new weapons uh in a sense to try to engineer the outcome of that war uh golden Myer communicated a threat in order to open up that uh that flow of weapons um and and it worked the idea was that the Israeli weapon would have been used against uh the Russians which would have led to a general war and that's how you blackmail another country India and Pakistan made their threats in 19 during the 1990 n Cargill war and this is something that we have to be I think really quite quite concerned about uh uh you know were they to go to war again we would face the possibility of a nuclear exchange uh were uh just 50 bombs used in in in such a war Not only would it devastate uh South Asia uh but the Fallout uh would result in the first kind of stages of nuclear winter uh kind of global cooling uh which would mean a vast famine estimates are that about a billion people around the planet would die as a result of um of an Indian Pakistan nuclear exchange uh France recently made threats against Iran uh should they act out a little bit and Britain believe it or not made a threat during the Falcon War uh the war against Argentina uh uh so these things are used rather more than one would hope uh Chinese uh made uh again a verbal threat U I think to to communicate serious in a crisis I want to get my year right think 1996 uh uh when there was a confrontation over uh Taiwan uh and they sent a signal to the United States that uh they thought that Los Angeles was more important to the United States than Taiwan uh Clinton administration responded by sending two nuclear capable aircraft carriers through the Tai Taiwan straight uh which very much uh frightened the Chinese so this is this is what we have um in terms of some of the background uh now what's coming up and the reason many people are going to New York is that um uh beginning in uh on May 3d uh there's a thing called the nuclear nonproliferation treaty review conference it sounds very abstract right um it's an occasion when uh all the signatories of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty come together uh to uh hold one another accountable to the commitments that they've made uh most people in this country have no idea of what's in that treaty uh they have an idea of one of the the three legs but let me tell you the three legs of that treaty to my mind it's one of the three most important agreements of the 20th century uh on the one hand the non-nuclear nations with the exceptions of Israel India and Pakistan uh committed that they would never become nuclear Powers uh in exchange the nuclear Powers made two concessions uh one was that the non-nuclear Nations uh could develop have resources for nuclear power generation for peaceful purposes uh that was certainly A Fault in the uh in the treaty and opens up a lot of problems uh and the second in article 6 you rarely read about this in the newspapers uh was that the nuclear Powers committed to engaging good faith negotiations to completely eliminate their arsenals so uh when we come to these review conferences that take place every 5 years on the one hand many nations want to uh make a more stringent inspection regime uh for the non-nuclear powers to help ensure that they don't break out of the npt order and the biggest fear uh that the United States and a number of countries have right now is in relationship to Iran uh but most of the rest of the world is demanding that the nuclear Powers finally fulfill the artist article 6 commitments it's been 40 years uh and what you see is the sense and even Muhammad bar the former head of ia iaea uh was quite clear you've got hypocrisy going on here uh the idea that we have them you don't we make demands of you but you can't demand anything of us um some years ago I live and work up in the Boston area um somehow I got invited to come to a thing at MIT where John deuts was speaking he was number three in the Pentagon in the first part of the first Clinton administration and then became the head of the CIA and I asked him I didn't realize this was on C-Span at the time I asked him when is the United States going to fulfill you know fulfill its commitments under article article 6 and his response was the United States never intended nor does it intend now to fulfill article 6 that's just something you have to say to get what you want out of a conference uh and this is you know this has been uh the attitude and the rest of the world knows this so between this kind of uh uh hypocrisy and the history of nuclear threats you have powerful forces built into Global Systems uh pressing for proliferation especially when you're dealing here with technology that's 65 years old uh you know as one one engineer told me you know any any physicist PhD graduating now should be able to design a a nuclear weapon so the question is how do we how do we limit that okay so then this takes me into uh looking at the Obama U policies and and where we are with that um let me say that during the primary campaign AFC has a program in New Hampshire and we hounded the in in in in the primary season basically uh a year and a half to B basically two years before the um presidential election uh you have a swarm of of of of presidential candidates uh in New Hampshire so you can't walk down Main Street in conquer uh without meeting a bunch of them uh and we had trained people to to ask them you know find them and ask them questions uh so when Hillary Clinton launched her campaign at conquer high school as she's on her way out to door A young woman asks uh will you oppose funding for a new nuclear weapon well I don't know I you know will you will you support uh will you support implementation of article six she turns on her heels and walks away uh but the next day there is a um uh next day there's a uh oped uh in the Manchester Union leader describing just what happened uh Barack Obama goes into a deli and is asked will you support will you fulfill article 6 article what uh but you know before the campaign is over Obama and Edwards and Richardson are all saying they're committed to the abolition nuclear weapons uh they're all saying that that they'll work for its implementation of of article 6 now this does not come entirely from altruism um the um many of us think that the Iraq war or Afghanistan were the greatest strategic blunders uh of the Bush Administration I mean they were terrible blunders they cost our society uh dearly uh but more so was its undercutting of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty this you remember was an Administration that had no respect whatsoever for treaties uh one writer in the New York Times described that Administration like properly as having a romance with ruthlessness uh the this this worship of of military power uh the belief that they could simply Dominate and impose reality one one of their spokesmen uh says look we're an Empire now uh we we we create reality uh and you can report on it uh so when you came in the approach to the 2005 MPT review conference uh usually a year in advance the at least a year in advance the agenda is agreed uh the Bush Administration refused to agree to an agenda halfway through the conference itself the Bush Administration refused to agree to an agenda fin a little b a little bit more than halfway through they agree to an agenda you have another two weeks of of diplomacy uh the uh conference collapses in Failure there's no agreement and what you have is the nuclear nonproliferation treaty order uh in in in considerable Jeopardy uh the idea that we that that that with the US refusing to move on on uh implementing uh any part of article 6 or agreeing to move forward in any way on disarmament uh why should other countries the danger of Greater proliferation uh so in response to this you have uh George Schultz the former Secretary of State State uh Henry Kissinger who himself had prepared and threaten to initiate nuclear war at least twice William Perry uh Clinton's Secretary of Defense and Sam nun the former Democratic senator uh writing uh then two articles in the Wall Street Journal and if you read them carefully uh what you see is they are warning about the danger of proliferation uh they say we have to make serious uh reductions in our Arsenal and we have to reaffirm our commitment to article 6 in order to regain traction within the nonproliferation process and if you read Obama's speeches if you read the nuclear posture review what you see over and over again is even as he's called for the abolition of nuclear weapons but you know perhaps not in my young lifetime uh it's always about nonproliferation uh it's about trying to maintain uh the order and clearly we don't want nonproliferation we don't want proliferation uh but the reality is that we're not going to get it unless we take much more serious actions on our part so let me do then a little bit of deconstruction uh of uh of of the events of the last uh uh several weeks uh to remind ourselves that it's not an accident that we had the signing of new start uh that we had the release of the nuclear posture review and we had the um uh nuclear security Summit all in essentially a month for the nonproliferation treaty review conference this is about developing some momentum trying to gain traction uh for the United States in terms of nonproliferation within uh next month's uh conference and because it's not really ultimately about abolition that's why you and so many people from around the world are going to uh going to to New York uh many governments are going to New York with with with that that deep commitment and in fact the Secretary General of the United Nations this I don't this is widely known yet has has agreed to speak at our conference on May the 1st uh in his call that the uh which he shares with us uh that that uh npt review conference uh should conclude with a commitment to begin those good faith negotiations under article 6 so let me then do some quick deconstruction uh the new start treaty uh negotiated uh with Russia the old start treaty expired um the uh spin on it is that this will uh reduce the US and um uh Soviet arsenals by depending on which article you read uh by a third or will reduce our deployed arsenals by a third there's a difference uh because it doesn't affect at all uh either our or the Soviet Union stock piles on the order of about 7,000 each strategic weapons averaging again 20 times the size of the the Hiroshima a bomb um and uh but it does call for the reduction of um uh of their deployed arsenals uh from from two roughly 2,200 uh to, 1550 uh one Chinese blogger wrote wrote this he said well those countries have had the ability to um uh destroy the world 50 times over uh with these reductions they can destroy it 49 times over um and you while it's a it's a helpful step uh we should appreciate that 7 years from now when this is done uh the deployed arsenals will be the equivalent of 60,000 Hiroshima uh and as the Federation of atomic scientists tells us uh it will not change the nuclear structures of either side uh that said it's important to win its its ratification by the Senate as a way to further stabilize relations uh with Russia uh and to help to create a global environment uh that values at least some limited uh disarmament I should also add just accounting is really pretty nasty uh in Arms Control negotiations one in one does not necessarily equal two or 2 minus one doesn't necessarily equal one uh so in the new counting uh uh a B-52 uh bomber armed say with with 10 atomic bombs will be counted as one Warhead uh so the reductions from 2,200 to 1500 will not be really reductions of five you know almost 600 bombs it's it's um a little bit of slight of hand okay then we have the nuclear posture review uh again its value is that it uh States quite clearly that we want to uh reduce our dependence on uh on uh on nuclear weapons in our national security policy uh It also says and I quote these weapons will continue to play an essential role in our policies um there were reports in the New York Times essentially of a fairly pitched battle uh between President Obama on the one hand uh and the Pentagon and his National Security Council on the other uh reports are that he perhaps uh Vice President Biden uh wanted to move to no First Strike policy I mean our policy we told this deterrence it's not deterrence or if you read deterrence deterr in Pentagon language means deterring other nations from taking actions uh which we don't want them to take uh not necessarily deterrence of of nuclear attack which is how you explain most of those 40 nuclear threats that we've made um and drafts went back and forth back and forth uh but at the end uh us first strike policy uh prevailed about 2 weeks before that China was clear in reiterating its um uh uh its rejection of First Strike uh the Soviets rather the Russians maintained first strike in large measure out of fear of of us attack uh and also because we have a major conventional um overwhelming power uh and to appreciate you know sometimes we want to we want to separate this all out that there's nuclear weapons or there's Afghanistan or there's Conventional Weapons uh but gorbachov who probably had he been able to stay in power would have taken us much much further in terms of nuclear disarmament I said about 6 months ago uh that we can't expect the uh Russians to move toward complete elimination of nuclear weapons as long as we're monopolizing the militarization of space expanding NATO around its borders we've got to deal with Conventional Weapons as we attempt to to uh build down uh in the competition with with Russia um the other elements that are there again we're told that on the one hand we won't use nuclear weapons against states that comply with the npt um but none of the nuclear Powers including the United States comply with the npt they're all out of compliance so what does that really mean uh we're told that we won't use our nuclear weapons against uh countries with chemical and biological weapons um but if it's necessary we'll reconsider uh so we didn't get very much there uh so I'm afraid that in the end as has been described in many places the nuclear Posta review is essentially a status quo document then we come to last week's uh nuclear uh security Summit again you know after the Prague speech uh we had high hopes for abolition we didn't know quite what this conference was going to be uh but as we know it's about locking down uh loose physi material it's important to lock down loose Phile material I mean the number one security priority uh of the United States since uh about 2001 about November 11th 2001 has been to ensure that uh we are not attacked either by non-state uh uh uh uh terrorist or or active nuclear weapons or as a result of uh proliferation uh and a key element to this is locking down physi material this is material um in in nuclear power plants this is uh weapon this is material in the um stockpiles of countries uh a lot has been locked down in Russia since uh uh 1989 but there's still more to do uh we've got problems we worry about what's happening in Pakistan uh and there's concerns about industrial um uh radioactive materials the um you know the possibility that one can get materials coming out of hospitals for example um uh uh factories that use low-level uh radioactive materials uh the fear is that such could be for example put put around a couple sticks of dynamite put in in Wall Street uh and then you wouldn't have what we consider a a nuclear explosion but there'd be sufficient radioactivity in the neighborhood uh that people might not want to come to Wall Street and that would have serious impacts on on our economy and the global economy so we're one more piece to hit in terms of of uh Obama policy uh is unfortunately uh his National budget uh so here we are in a situation where uh in state after State people are losing essential jobs essential Services uh we know that the motor force of the American economy is our educational system uh and yet we Face Cuts there people are still having foreclosures uh but there's going to be $2 billion dollar more to expand the uh uh nuclear weapons uh production infrastructure uh there is $800 million in there to develop a new nuclear capable uh uh Cruise missile uh and there's uh more money uh to study the uh development of a new nuclear weapon which the nuclear poster Rie says we're not going to build so you know it's it's mixed messages uh probably the result of intense uh battles uh and a uh horse uh drawn by a committee so then let me um conclude uh by saying a little bit about uh what's going to happen in New York who's going to be there uh what's it about uh again the reality is that um um major policy changes Come From Below uh whether it's the end of Jim Crow uh whether it's the free movement whether it's the women's movement um it comes from below um change happens structurally and happens by by people's action um governments will come and you know the reality again something most of us don't know is that every year the general assembly votes something like about 183 to3 with a couple of extensions that the uh uh nuclear power should begin those negotiations Costa Rica Malaysia other countries have introduced basically draft treaties so it's not like it's something abstract and impossible uh there's a NGO uh draft treaty developed by um uh scientists engineers and former government officials that lays out the road map of how step by step uh nuclear weapons would be abolished uh the uh mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki having launched to organization called Mayors for peace uh have a plan for the abolition of all nuclear weapons uh by the year 2020 uh there's another somewhat Elite organization called Global zero which has a somewhat longer uh timeline of eliminating the B by 2030 it's not not a dream uh last year uh uh when there was the Preparatory uh uh Conference held at the un uh again people people from popular movements and NOS from around the world uh came together to talk about you know what's happening analyze what's happening uh within the uh the governmental discussions but also to plan where're we're going from from here out of that came the creation of this thing with this God aul name uh called the 2010 uh npt review uh uh International planning committee it's not sexy but it describes what we are uh so this is a a core group of about 25 organizations um from the United States from Japan uh from Europe uh who've been planning a series of events uh to on the one hand uh help people here in this country understand the semile importance of what takes place in New York next month uh to help give um uh some diplomats uh some backbone uh and uh also in being together to be developing uh plans and strategies uh for the longer term uh I should add that we're also clear that uh the nuclear disarm movement can't do it by itself uh there's a recognition that uh uh the danger of nuclear weapons are clearly interlocked uh uh integrated uh with other questions of warm peace economic Justice uh and environmental uh sustainability so our our our call relates around all four and our plans uh move in that that direction uh we issued a call it can be found at the website which is down here www. peace and Justice now.org uh we issued a call uh it's now been signed by something like 310 organizations worldwide and one of the challenges for us on the other side of all this is going to be to see what we do uh with this incipient um uh uh structure um we agreed essentially to do four things uh one is to hold an international uh uh peace conference abolition conference which will be held at Riverside Church in New York um the site of Martin Luther King's uh 1967 declaration of independence from the war in Vietnam which is actually a declaration of independence from militarism and we'll be rooting uh elements of what we do uh in that speech and in that that history uh we have unfortunately limited capacity and we're about we're about full uh we have about 200 people from Japan maybe 200 from Europe uh maybe about 400 in our principal Prim planar we have amazing uh list of speakers which you can find uh on the uh on on the web page um and that's the conference that will be addressed by bank kimon I not particularly because he loves us uh but because it's a way in which he can signal to the world that the kind of work that you're doing uh popular work from below is what is essential we can't just wait for governments to give it to us we have to go out and use our people's power to make governments do what they're supposed to do uh we agreed to hold a International uh International Day of action for nuclear weapons free future uh this will be a March Beginning by Time Square uh going across 42nd Street uh concluding across from the United Nations where we'll be holding a festival uh among the speakers there and also at our conference will be the mayor of Hiroshima and at the rally we also have the mayor of Nagasaki we have people coming from Russia environmentalists from from Russia uh peace activists from Brazil it's it's going to be really quite quite something uh we also agreed to uh deliver petitions uh to uh uh uh the um uh the MPT review conference um we expect something like 12 million 14 million signatures from Japan um about a month and a half ago one organization sent 5.4 million over by by vot uh we'll be displaying them uh on May the 2nd uh and we'll do a a um uh kind of informal presentation on the grounds of the UN uh on uh May the 4th uh a number of organizations that have uh countries have developed different petitions uh will'll be doing a formal presentation uh at the conclusion of business uh within the npt conference itself uh but you know the reality is that um uh people with hair the color of mine um Bones the quality of mine um we we can we can make important contributions uh but the reality is that uh a lot of change comes from young people uh and uh young people are going to be this movement uh for the longer term uh so one of the commitments that we early made was to do what we could to support and facilitate uh organizing done by by young people uh on those days and then throughout the npt review and there just been this really wonderful Network you'll hear more about it shortly uh but young people from Germany I think about 400 uh maybe 5 00 of the Japanese who are coming are under 25 I think outside the bomb here has played a major role and there'll be a series of events and demonstrations uh that they'll be holding throughout uh and if you will building the foundations uh for a militant and longer term uh movement um so that that I guess is what I have to say I guess the last thing I'm going to say is is this it's a story I'm going to use the podium I've got here in the the internet to tell a story that almost nobody knows uh in 1980 uh as the Reagan Administration was uh moving to actually the team B uh before Reagan came to power uh developing plans for the next major escalation of the arms race uh a young man named Randy Keeler and a few people out in Western Massachusetts uh who had been working against nuclear power doing referendums on nuclear power organized referendums in three state senate districts and afsc was involved in this uh calling for freezed in the nuclear arms race and even as Reagan won in those districts people voted for freeze in 1980 1980 um service committee was facing some uh budget cuts and some staff Cuts uh and our staff we had a meeting in New England of our staff and at one point with a somewhat inappropriate segue uh our staff person from Vermont got up and said in the town meeting votes that we have this coming spring uh people in 15 towns are going to vote for nuclear weapons freeze and next year 175 towns in New Hampshire will vote for a nuclear weapons freeze and you know to be honest we all thought Dave that's a wonderful dream but we don't think it's going to happen but give it a good shot uh that spring 17 towns voted for a nuclear weapons freeze you had the first oped article uh in the New York Times announcing uh that this was coming uh on basis of this model uh the following year 330 towns across New England and eight states voted for nuclear weapons freeze forcing President Reagan to do what he swore he would never do which was to negotiate uh with Soviet leaders uh I tell this story uh simply to to remind us uh that it is actions that we take from below often often things that we don't expect will have results uh that ultimately change history and that freeze movement played a major role and unsung role uh in ending the Cold War uh so with that uh let me uh celebrate uh your your work uh appreciate the speakers who will follow who have uh much more to say and uh to hope to see another of you in New York uh and to say we will prevail