With Russian troops now occupying Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, Kiev’s beleagered interim leaders may be thinking twice about their nation’s 1994 decision to abandon nuclear weapons.

Szilard was frustrated by the Kennedy administration’s policies, and moved to a hotel near the White House to lobby for arms control. In 1962, he founded the Council for a Livable World, the first political action committee for arms control and disarmament.

“The folly of imposing new sanctions now is fraught with irony. Years of steadily tightened multilateral sanctions have succeeded. They’ve brought the new, relatively moderate Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to an accord that halts Iranian enrichment of weapons-grade uranium,” writes Council Board Member, Gerald Warburg for The Virginia Pilot.

On the docket last Thursday afternoon was a massive omnibus government-funding bill that included $572 billion for the Defense Department — the Council for a Livable World calculated the actual DoD allotment at nearly $610 billion.

Executive Director, John Isaacs, Friends Committee on National Legislation’s Kate Gould & National Iranian American Council’s Jamal Abdi join The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann to discuss first-step deal with Iran