While most news coverage of the President’s State of the Union address has focused on jobs, the speech included some very important promises on nukes:
Even as we prosecute two wars, we are also confronting perhaps the greatest danger to the American people — the threat of nuclear weapons. I have embraced the vision of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan through a strategy that reverses the spread of these weapons, and seeks a world without them. To reduce our stockpiles and launchers, while ensuring our deterrent, the United States and Russia are completing negotiations on the farthest-reaching arms control treaty in nearly two decades. And at April’s Nuclear Security Summit, we will bring forty-four nations together behind a clear goal: securing all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world in four years, so that they never fall into the hands of terrorists.
We need to make sure this issue continues to receive the attention it deserves. Important decisions are being made in the next four weeks and you can make your voice heard.
President Obama is in the midst of finalizing a Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) that will decide America’s direction and priorities on nuclear weapons issues for many years to come. Will he heed the growing bipartisan consensus among military and security experts that the only solution to the threats posed by nuclear weapons comes through moving toward their elimination? Or will he allow the inertia of Cold War thinking to continue to put our nation in danger?
You can help the President make the right decision by publicly calling on him to fulfill the promises he made in Prague and those he reiterated last evening in his State of the Union address.
Write a letter to the editor of your local paper! Explain how the Nuclear Posture Review will set the direction for U.S. nuclear weapons policy for the next 5-10 years, and how the administration must seize this opportunity to take a global leadership role on reducing the dangers posed by nuclear weapons.
We need to make sure that voters understand that reducing nuclear arsenals increases U.S. security. Raise your voice and tell them how negotiating immediate reductions in nuclear weapons stockpiles is essential to making Americans safer. And it is a key step toward the goal we all support of a nuclear weapons free world.
Please send us a copy of your submission, and let us know if your letter gets published.
