Nuclear Non-Proliferation Emergency

I received this information from Jody Dodd, our Leadership / Outreach Coordinator in the US WILPF national office in Philly.
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There is an emergency at the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference. The following quote from Rhianna Tyson, WILPF's Reaching Critical Will associate sums it up:

This morning some diplomats were practically in tears saying, 'this means the end of the NPT regime, we cannot say with a straight face that the NPT will be here in five years for the next review conference.' They were predicting - I heard some diplomats saying over lunch 'By the next review conference there could be ten more nuclear weapons states'. There could be some sort of nuclear terrorism attack, who really knows. And if something happens, if another state acquires nuclear weapons, if terrorists acquire some sort of nuclear device, then that's going to be the last bit of evidence that anybody needs to say 'look, the NPT failed and it did not work and it did not save these people from nuclear annihilation. If we thought the NPT was in a crisis before this Review Conference started, it's in a much greater crisis now.

Check out Banning the Bomb for more information and for video reports from the nuclear NPT Review Conference.

Also read News in Review, the only daily NGO newsletter from the NPT Review Conference from International WILPF.

Life Would Be a Dream if Every City was Santa Cruz, California

The following update from Santa Cruz, California comes from Sandy Silver, our US Section President. Please feel free to share your experiences with WILPF on the local level via the comments section.

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Last week, the Philadelphia office received an email from a UC Santa Cruz student who is a member of Students Against War. One of their goals is the demilitarization of UC institutions. They were in the midst of organizing carpools to attend the UC Regents meeting in San Francisco to protest against the continued operation of the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory, and asked for WILPF's support.

The email was immediately forwarded to several WILPF members in Santa Cruz. I contacted the student and invited her to the local branch meeting, which featured a report back from the NPT meeting in New York and an upcoming protest at Vandenberg AFB. The speakers at the program were the three WILPF members who had attended the NPT meeting and who had been three of the 40,000 people who marched in New York in support of the NPT. One of the three WILPF members is the Mayor of Santa Cruz.

Although she couldn't attend, she alerted others in the Students Against War, and another student came. She made the announcement about the upcoming meeting of the UC Regents and received a very warm welcome. She stayed to hear the report back about the NPT, took lots of notes and was very enthusiastic about the work of WILPF.

The Mayor of Santa Cruz is also a faculty member at UC Santa Cruz in the Community Studies Department. After the meeting, I introduced the student to the Mayor and they immediately exchanged email addresses and he offered to post flyers and contact other faculty members. He also told her that he will be making announcements in all of his classes and will encourage other faculty members to do the same.

Another example of "Making the Connections"!!

Models of Occupation: Israel and the U.S.

MidEast Campaign Leadership Team Member Libby Frank pointed me to this extremely insightful and brief comparison of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

"Models of Occupation," by Neve Gordon on ZNet

Women Challenge U.S. Policy: Building Peace on Justice in the Middle East is one of the two incoming national campaigns of U.S. WILPF. The campaign will begin at the Triennial U.S. WILPF Congress in San Francisco this August.