Urgent Call

Fall 2002

Dear GBPSR Members,

GBPSR has joined other peace and disarmament groups as a sponsor of a new nuclear disarmament campaign called An Urgent Call: End the Nuclear Danger. Randall Forsberg of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, a leader in the Freeze movement of the 1980s, is the principal organizer. The primary goal is to get one million signatures on a petition by the same name by June 2003, and ten million signatures by June 2004.

Citing increasing risks of the use of nuclear weapons, the petition calls for the following:

1. Renounce the first use of nuclear weapons
2. Permanently end the development, testing and production of nuclear weapons
3. Destroy nuclear weapons withdrawn under treaties and increase resources to secure nuclear materials and implement destruction
4. Strengthen nonproliferation efforts by ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, finalizing a missile ban in North Korea, supporting UN inspections in Iraq, locating and reducing fissile material worldwide and negotiating a ban on its production
5. Take nuclear weapons off hair trigger alert, reducing the risk of accidental or unauthorized use
6. Initiate talks on further nuclear cuts, beginning with U.S. and Russian reductions to 1000 warheads each

The request is to have members of sponsoring groups sign the on-line petition and for each signer to then recruit ten more signers. Signers are asked to make a financial contribution. The money will be used for TV, radio and print advertising that reaches mainstream America with the hope of making nuclear disarmament a central issue in the 2004 election. Rep. Ed Markey has also introduced a bill in Congress based on the Urgent Call petition, HJRes97. Petitioners are asked to call their representatives and urge them to co-sign this bill.

We hope all GBPSR members will sign and circulate petitions, donate to Urgent Call and call their representatives. You can obtain more information and sign on-line at www.urgentcall.org. If you want to sign a written petition, obtain petitions to circulate and/or otherwise commit time to work on disarmament issues, contact steering committee member Adela Wilkeson MD, 978-851-3814, or awilkeson@attbi.com.