Nuclear Pork Action Alert: 10 Percent Increase for Nuclear Weapons

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.

Worst of all, the budget has hundreds of millions in nuclear pork for several new facilities that would enable the U.S. to increase its capacity to create new nuclear weapons in the future. A new plutonium pit facility in New Mexico would allow for a huge increase in the production of plutonium pits – the bomb cores of nuclear weapons. These facilities could cost taxpayers $3 billion each in the long run. Meanwhile, funds to dismantle nuclear weapons we no longer need have been slashed.

The budget has millions for new nuclear weapons facilities we don’t need. Ask your representative to cut nuclear pork today!

The international community is coming together in May to evaluate progress on the cornerstone treaty of nuclear disarmament. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty obligates nuclear weapons states – like the U.S. – to work toward nuclear disarmament in exchange for non-nuclear weapons states not acquiring them. Other countries are looking to the U.S. for signs that we are serious about living up to our nuclear disarmament obligations, and this budget undermines our credibility.

Last year, your emails and calls created the grassroots pressure that successfully eliminated pork for the nuclear weapons complex from the economic stimulus. Please email now and ask your representative to cut funding for these new facilities.