Quakers and their allies work to reduce the threat of nuclear war and to promote diplomacy in the Korean peninsula

This week, in coalition with Physicians for Social Responsibility, Peace Now, Montrose Peace Vigil, Reconciliasian, ICUJP and other peace groups,  our FCNL Advocacy Team and our allies have been visiting Congressional offices to encourage our elected officials to 

1) support diplomacy to resolve conflict in the Korean peninsula and other parts of the world

2) endorse bills that would prevent the President from launching a preemptive attack on North Korea (or anywhere else) without Congressional approval and 

3) set an example of denuclearization by reducing our own nuclear weapons stockpile and agreeing not to initiative a nuclear war.

Specifically, we were lobbying in support of the following bills:

• HR 4837 and S 2047 (No First Strike Against N Korea without Congressional authorization)  - getting support from colleagues on both sides of the aisle.
• HR 4415 – No First Use of Nuclear Weapons, introduced by Adam Smith in Nov 2017, asserts that US will not use nuclear weapons first in a conflict.
•  HR 669 - Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2017 – Introduced by Ted Lieu. Campanion of S. 200. Similar to HR 4415.
• HR 2668: Smarter Approach to Nuclear Expenditures Act and S1235 (SANE) Reduce our bloated nuclear weapons budget by $100 billion.*

On Friday, July 21, Kit Bell, a member of our Advocacy Team, led a  delegation to the office of Senator Harris to ask  for her continued support and advocacy for S 2047.  The delegation included: Edie Salisbury, Sue Park Hur (Reconciliasian), Roberta Medford (Montrose Peace Vigil), Frances Motiwalla (Peace Action), Phil Kanehl,  and Lynn, Guhn and Yul (children of Sue Park). They  met for around 20 minutes with her field representative Brent Robinson. They told him to encourage Senator Harris to work with colleagues across the aisle on these bills. They also asked her to sign onto S 200 and S 1235. The staffer was interested in their presentation and said that he would pass on our message to Senator Harris. He thanked us for meeting with him and encouraged us to visit again in the future. This is our third visit to the office of Senator Harris during the past year. 

On Tuesday, July 24, I led a delegation to the office of Representative Judy Chu, where we met with her staffer Maile Plan. Our group consisted of Edie Salisbury and Pat Wolff (members of Orange Grove Quaker meeting) , Rev. Jeff Utter (retired UCC pastor), and myself. This was our second meeting with Maile in the past six months and it lasted almost an hour. We told her how pleased we were that  Rep. Chu spoke last August at an ICUJP Justice Luncheon focusing on the threat of nuclear war and was very vocal in opposing nuclear weapons. We also thanked Rep. Chu fr supporting a bill that would  prevent the President from launching a preemptive first strike against North Korea. Her staffer was very interested in the bills we advocated that would reduce our nation's nuclear stockpile and prevent the President from launching a nuclear first strike without Congressional approval. She took notes and said she would bring these bills up with Rep. Chu. 

These repeated visits are building long-term relationships with our elected officials and their staff that we trust will help them to see the importance of the issues we are advocating and take action. We are pleased to be working with a coalition of diverse peace groups in the LA area, and hundreds of FCNL Advocacy Teams around the country.  We feel that it is crucially important to reduce, not modernize or increase, our nuclear stockpile and eventually abolish nuclear weapons altogether. And we must do all we can to encourage diplomacy, rather than war, on the Korean peninsula and in other parts of the world. 


*HR 2668: Smarter Aproach to Nuclear Expenditures Act. Senator Ed Markey, Co-President of Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (PNND) introduced a bill into the U.S. Senate on Friday 28 February, that would cut $100 billion over the next decade from the U.S. nuclear weapons budget. The Smarter Approach to Nuclear Expenditures, or "SANE" Act, is co-sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Jeff Merkley. Companion legislation has been introduced in the House by Representative Earl Blumenauer.

Specifically, the Smarter Approach to Nuclear Expenditures (SANE) Act will:

• Reduce deployed strategic submarines from 14 to 8 and reduce the purchase of replacement submarines from 12 to 8 – saving $16 billion.
• Cut warhead life extension programs and defer the development of new ICBMs – saving $15 billion.

• Remove the nuclear mission from F-35s and delay the new long range bomber – saving over $32 billion.
• Cancel nuclear weapon making facilities and missile defense programs – saving $37 billion.

Programs to modernize various nuclear warheads would be done away with under the bill, and work would be delayed on a new class of intercontinental ballistic missiles, resulting in an estimated $15 billion in taxpayer dollars. The legislation would ax all missile-defense activities, and cancel plans to build new facilities for fissile-material processing in order to cut an additional $37 billion.

"As we’ve seen in recent stories, the human beings who control [nuclear weapons] can be unreliable," Blumenauer said in a statement included in the Markey release. He apparently was referring to recent scandals surrounding the Air Force's nuclear-missile mission, which have highlighted a number of problems with professionalism and morale inside the officer corps assigned to control the ICBMs.