New START Treaty Ready to Finish

Here’s the Press Release we sent out today.  While we want to see a world free of nuclear weapons faster, we need to push what we can through the conservative Senate we have.  Paul

Largest Peace Group:  New START Treaty Ready to Finish

Washington, DC — In response to today’s bipartisan vote of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the Resolution of Advice and Consent to Ratification of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) between the U.S. and Russia, which would cut deployed, strategic nuclear weapons, Peace Action’s — a group founded in 1957 to abolish nuclear weapons and the largest grassroots peace organization — political and policy director, Paul Kawika Martin, stated the following from the committee hearing room:

“The New START treaty is a small, but necessary step towards President Obama’s vision of a world free of nuclear weapons.  Overwhelmingly, Americans of all parties, bipartisan national security experts and military leaders agree that fewer nuclear weapons make the United States and the World a safer place.

“The bipartisan vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to move the treaty to the full Senate for ratification represents these views. Peace Action calls on Senate leadership to bring the New START treaty to the floor as soon as possible and our members ask Senators to vote to advise and consent to ratification with the bipartisan support the treaty has with outside experts and voters.”

Under the treaty, both countries would reduce to 1,550 deployed, long-range nuclear warheads, most of which are tens or hundreds of times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, which leveled the city and killed 140,000 people.  The treaty would reinstate a more robust verification regime that will provide the United States with critical insight into Russia’s nuclear forces.  Verification has lapsed since the START treaty expired last December.

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Founded in 1957, Peace Action (formerly SANE/Freeze), the United States’ largest peace and disarmament organization, with over 100,000 paid members and nearly 100 chapters in 34 states, works to abolish nuclear weapons, promote government spending priorities that support human needs, encourage real security through international cooperation and human rights and support nonmilitary solutions to the conflicts with Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq. The public may learn more and take action at http://www.Peace-Action.org. For more up-to-date peace insider information, follow Peace Action’s political director on Twitter. http://twitter.com/PaulKawika