Dear Editor:
Congress is in recess until after the election. Just before going home, they passed a continuing resolution to fund the U.S. government at FY2016 levels until Dec. 9, 2016. Regardless of election outcomes, they will all be back in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 14 for a 16-day lame-duck session to tend to unfinished business.
A principal item on their plate is the FY2017 budget for the rest of the year. In that budget is a plan to spend a trillion dollars over the next decade to upgrade and improve our nuclear arsenal, including a new ICBM to deliver nukes.
New Mexico's Los Alamos and Sandia labs will clearly benefit from that project. But, as Sandia Laboratories director Jill Hruby said in Silver City on August 12, "We execute the will of Congress." If Congress directs Sandia to refurbish and upgrade nuclear weapons, Sandia's people and facilities will do that. But if Congress directs Sandia to step up the pace of dismantling deactivated nuclear weapons and take steps to improve safety and security of our nuclear weapons in storage and deployment, Sandia's people and facilities can do that.
I urge New Mexicans to ask Sen. Tom Udall, Sen. Martin Heinrich and Rep. Steve Pearce now to scale back and redirect this trillion-dollar program to the course recommended in this minute from Intermountain Yearly Meeting of Quakers, a minute that originated with Gila Friends Meeting (Quakers) here in Silver City.
"Intermountain Yearly Meeting, including the states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico and the southwestern part of Texas, (Quakers), calls upon our elected representatives in the Congress of the United States to endorse United Nations Resolution 70/48, GǣHumanitarian pledge for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons,Gǥ adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 7, 2015.
(http://www.icanw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/N1541140.pdf).
In addition to documenting the unacceptability of nuclear weapons today, the Humanitarian Pledge, endorsed by 123 nations (none of them nuclear), calls for these actions by endorsers:
4. Requests all States possessing nuclear weapons, pending the total elimination of their nuclear weapon arsenals, to take concrete interim measures to reduce the risk of nuclear weapons detonations, including by reducing the operational status of nuclear weapons and moving nuclear weapons away from deployment and into storage, diminishing the role of nuclear weapons in military doctrines and rapidly reducing all types of nuclear weapons.'
For the United States, compliance with the Humanitarian Pledge would at least include:
Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
Termination of U.S. plutonium pit production
Acceleration of U.S. nuclear warhead dismantling
Cessation of the B61 tactical nuclear bomb refurbishing and upgrading
Cessation of the new nuclear cruise missile (Long-range Standoff Weapon ' LRSO)
Reinvigorated negotiations with other nations to further the goals of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty"
Nuclear nonproliferation efforts have been successful - 85% of the nuclear stockpiles of the U.S. and the former U.S.S.R. have been decommissioned. The remaining nukes have many times the devastating power of the Hiroshima A-bomb; let's not lose sight of the ultimate goal - a world free of nuclear weapons!
Sincerely,
Tom Vaughan
Silver City, NM 88061