Wednesday March 22nd @ 8pm ET

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has set the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds before midnight, but some have said that’s not even close enough. Indeed, with the US abandoning nuclear proliferation treaties, spending a trillion dollars in an upgrade of its nuclear arsenal, and conducting a proxy war with nuclear-armed Russia, we are staring a nuclear holocaust in the face.

This webinar will present an update on current US nuclear weapons plans, including the Biden Nuclear Posture Review, current modernization of production facilities and weapons systems, the FY23 & FY 24 nuclear weapons budgets, the US role in the global nuclear arms race, and the role of war profiteers.

It will also present an update on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, review the outcome of the First Meeting of States Parties and preview the Second Meeting of States Parties, and will discuss actions and opportunities for building grassroots support for the US to join the Treaty.

Presenters:

Jay Coghlan is Executive Director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a nonprofit organization that watchdogs the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Department of Energy’s nation-wide nuclear weapons complex. He has worked successfully against radioactive incineration at the Los Alamos Lab and in Clean Air Act, Freedom of Information Act and National Environmental Policy Act lawsuits against the Department of Energy. Among other things, he prompted a 2006 independent study that concluded that plutonium pits (the fissile “triggers” of nuclear weapons) last at least a century, leading to congressional rejections of new-design nuclear weapons and their production. He is now centrally engaged in fighting against the U.S. government’s most recent and serious attempt to expand plutonium pit production, the chokepoint of resumed U.S. industrial production of nuclear weapons. He is an avid skier and climber (he walked up Mt. Fujiyama when he was 11 years old) and has been a Zen Buddhist practitioner for nearly 50 years.

Ralph Hutchison is on the Coordinating Committee of the Nuclear Ban Treaty Collaborative. He retired as Coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance [OREPA] in 2023. Hutchison has served on state and federal advisory boards dealing with health and environmental impacts from nuclear weapons production and has participated in presentations about the US nuclear weapons complex at the United Nations and in briefings at the US Congress. He has participated in nonviolent direct action/civil resistance actions in the US and, most recently (2019), at the Büchel Air Base in Büchel, Germany, where US B-61 nuclear weapons are deployed.