 our Zoom discussion with John Rehibiting Nuclear Weapons which will be coming into force on January 22nd. Momentous event and we're delighted to have John here to explain how it came about Forrest. This event is part of a series sponsored by the Vermont Institute for Community and International Involvement. Vicky with two eyes at the end is a sequel to Vicky with one Institute for Community Involvement which was the original name that became Burlington College. After the bankruptcy and demise of the college in 2016, some of the staff primarily Sandy Baird and friends wanted to bring back opportunities for community discussion with the goal of supporting civil society and municipal democracy in Burlington. So you can see that here it is just a moment and I will share a screen image with you here. Can you see it? Yes. Yes. Okay there it is. You can see that the added eye in Vicky stands for international involvement. So check out our website Vicky.com for our track record events dating back to September 2019. Also coming up we will be sponsoring the first Burlington mayoral debate on January 21st. So the Phoenix is rising. So I will get rid of that now. Before John speaks I'd like to just draw attention to an event that happened in 2018 and that is a kind of precursor of to the treaty that we're talking about today that declares that weapons are illegal. The plowshares seven who entered Kings Bay Trident submarine base in Georgia on April 4th, 2018 sought to make real the Pope Isaiah's command to beat swords into plowshares. They acted on the ground that these weapons are inhumane and should be considered illegal. One of the plowshares seven Martha Hennessey from Vermont whose granddaughter of Dorothy Day is now in Danbury prison for 10 months for taking what she calls my nonviolent sacramental action against nuclear weapons. So what I'd like for us to do here and here's another screenshot I hope wait a minute here here it is um your screen okay someday we'll we'll very smooth there it is okay um let's look at the at the weapon system that these folks were were protesting against at at in in Georgia and what is a Trident submarine engineered to do so this graphic was drawn by Vermonter Jim Geyer in 1983 when the Soviet Union as you can see still existed some of these numbers may have been changed by requirements of the start treaty there but at at the moment there are six Trident submarines at Kings Bay each submarine can carry 24 Trident two ballistic missiles there you see them 24 uh if god forbid all of these missiles from one submarine were launched they will upon re-entering the atmosphere each of the 24 missiles could release up to eight warheads independently targeted re-entry vehicles they call them in other words targeted to this one St. Petersburg this one to hit Moscow this one to hit et cetera and um these unleashing 192 nuclear warheads to wipe out dozens of cities off the map and that's only one of the some of the six submarines these are the nightmare weapons of the apocalypse so Martha and her Catholic worker compatriots are now facing prison sentences for bringing attention to this floating potential Holocaust harbored at Kings Bay Georgia I am hoping that we and John John Royer and this movement supporting the treaty will further reveal the military madness that sustains the arms race and that American citizens will agree that we too our country the united states should join the treaty prohibiting your weapons actually always says it I know so just a few a few words now about John um he is a member of physicians for social responsibility and serves on world beyond wars board of directors he was a professor of conflict resolution at St Michael's college here in the Burlington area determined to bring his commitment to non-violence into areas of conflict he recently spent four months last year in south Sudan with the non-violent peace force and for the last two months on the streets of Washington DC including last Wednesday with members of the DC peace team providing safe space for protesters and engaging in conversation with Trump activists so John will talk for about 20 25 minutes and then we would like you to if you have questions to put them in the chat you all know about the chat at the bottom of the screen there you click on that and you write a little message and Beth will be monitoring that and we hope that will be the way to get a dialogue going so all right please start John thank you all for having me and being willing to talk about a topic that is just seems to be like one more god awful thing to worry about on top of all the other god awful things that are in our lives but I think it's worth doing everybody see the slides you can you know you can make your screen larger the slide larger and your people smaller by moving the little line between them on the side if things are in the way so we have this new treaty called the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons that was adopted in 2017 and about to go into force so I want to go over what does that mean and why should we care I mean obviously we have enough to worry about right we've got a virus it's taken over the planet that shows no sign of slowing down despite the vaccine having been out for a full month right climate disasters everywhere my daughter in LA tells me the hospitals out there have instructed the mts that if they go to a house where somebody's had a cardiac arrest that is no pulse or or breathing at the time they get there they're not to bring them to the hospital where they would have a chance at resuscitation that I spent my career doing that's how tight things are and now of course we have this whole civil strife within the US so where do nuclear weapons come in why should we care well Nancy Pelosi reminded us that maybe why should we care because we've got a guy who's rather impulsive of in his speech and in his orders firing and hiring people and he has absolute sole legal authority to launch nuclear weapons one or all of them without consulting anyone she gave us the news that she had talked to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and she felt reassured by that but the legality of it is the only thing that would stop him is a mutiny policy gives him the right to do that and what is the message to enemies and allies around the world that the only thing that would stop us from attacking is a mutiny against our own president very much reason to worry but aside from that nuclear weapons I think most people recognize how dangerous they are to use but few recognize how dangerous they are to possess secondly this treaty is the best opportunity to eliminate them since the nonproliferation treaty came into force in 1970 that led to such disarmament via the strategic arms reduction treaties that are still in effect until February 5th this year when for the first time the United States is not just automatically renegotiated or renewed them furthermore we should care because while solutions to the environmental and pandemic crises that we face are very complicated obviously long-term and very expensive whereas solutions to the threat of nuclear annihilation are relatively easy and not just cheap but because we stop spending money on creating the risk it pays for itself and can help pay for solutions to these other existential threats we face now just as a review and I'm sure most folks on this call are familiar with this but just update ourselves the total nuclear warheads in the world's arsenals are now between 13 and 14 thousand 90 percent of which are controlled by Russia and the United States Russia and the United States are also the only countries that have something just under a thousand each on hair trigger alert that is they can be launched on warning or launched by a leader within a half an hour or less and to review the size of these weapons these four mushroom clouds show at the bottom the very small one being the Hiroshima weapon that destroyed Hiroshima and the one at the top being the largest that the United States ever tested in the atmosphere which itself was about one-third the size of the czar bomb that the Soviet Union tested in the 60s for most of the history of nuclear arms race the weapons were in the hundred kiloton or the one megaton range the cloud on the left and now most of those 13,000 weapons are between the 15 kiloton weapon and the 350 kiloton weapon just remind ourselves of why we should worry about these of course if they're used which is not the biggest issue because I think people recognize this but it's good to remember just how bad it's going to be much worse than anything we're facing now just remind us that it's a very personal thing because our beloved senators and governors and mayors have decided that the nuclear weapons delivery system of the f-35 despite what the National Guard tells us is listed as as a nuclear weapon delivery system makes us a target for other planners who have to eliminate nuclear weapons delivery system in the event of a nuclear war making us a nuclear target so if we take a 200 kiloton airburst that is one besides those between those two small mushrooms and typical in the soviet submarine arsenal that could be in the north atlantic right now and be here within 15 to 20 minutes if they so choose would create this fireball over the airport that is the several hundred yards across and vaporizes absolutely everything the small yellow circle the red circle then is the 20 pounds per square inch blast which destroys absolutely everything but reinforced bunkers everything is gone and destroyed in that area and if anybody manages to not get hit by the blast directly the green is the 500 millirem radiation burst gamma radiation that kills 90 of the people who are exposed to that the gray circle then shows the five pounds per square inch over blast pressure from the blast that destroys all unreinforced buildings and injures about 90 percent of the people who live in that area you can see that puts us over the hill toward downtown burlington and way out past williston and south and then finally the tan larger circle is the thermal area where the intensity of the heat from the flash is enough to ignite absolutely everything flammable gasoline tanks and cars and eat dry wood trees woodhouses and causes immediate third degree burns on exposed skin and this is a air burst that is a bomb detonated in the atmosphere to do maximum blast damage if on the other hand you're trying to eliminate underground bunker you do a ground burst which makes huge amounts of soil and everything underground radioactive and puts that into the mushroom cloud causing these large plumes of radioactivity that creates much disease and death in the weeks and years to follow and this is that same 200 ton burst and it's and it's a radiation cloud over the next week or so and the direction of course is determined by wind that day and then the other element that we often forget besides those first three problems with nuclear weapons is the firestorms it causes from all the things that coalesce and burn this is actually what destroyed most of heroshima and the problem with that much burning is in dense areas where there's a lot of combustible material it puts enormous amount of soot far more than the mushroom clouds into the atmosphere and climate scientists at Rutgers who've been studying the effects of climate change for many many years and trying to predict it says that in in a war between India and Pakistan which are the only two nuclear powers to be at war with each other intermittently in the last few years if they used half of their arsenals which is now up to about 150 Hiroshima Hiroshima sized nuclear weapons the amount of soot from all the cities burning in those areas forgetting about the 10 or 20 million people that would be killed outright would put enough soot in the atmosphere to drop the temperature in the northern hemisphere about a degree and a quarter and and that has enormous effects this can be seen in this next screen can you all see my faces there okay so a temperature drop of one degree would create enough problem growing food in the northern hemisphere and eventually in the southern hemisphere that the famine caused by that would probably leave the two billion of the world's poorest people to die from starvation alone and that's a limited war between India and Pakistan that would not have immediate effects on us until the weeks and months later a war fought between those high alert nuclear weapons that if a mistake happens and they just launched those weapons and then they realize oops that was a mistake we won't launch any more the climatologists tell us would drop at least four degrees centigrade in the in the atmosphere conditions which would create unbelievable amounts of of temperature change and and starvation for the rest of us then of course if all of the the weapons that are available are used we're talking about temperatures of eight degrees which would create in a couple of weeks what 10 000 years of the ice age ice age created basically ending civilization and this is on top of all the billions of people killed directly by the the effects of the fires blast and radiation so given that good news why do we have these things well somehow buried in our in our teaching and our in our learning over from the time we were young is that this is deterrence it keeps the bad guys away it's mutually assured destruction which is is much more like mutually assured suicide at this point but those who protested them are thought to be safe from attack no all out wars after all have occurred between powers since they've added the nuclear weapons and none have been used as an act of war in the last 75 years and those to some people seem like pretty ironclad arguments but you could say a lot about whether that's true or not think for example that did nuclear weapons save us from the attacks at 9 11 did nuclear weapons allow us to easily beat vietnam in a war or allow the soviets to beat the afghans in their own country did they stop nuclear arm britain from suffering an attack on the falcon islands by argentina so in my mind it's rather limited thinking that believes these things but more to the point you know as a doctor when i tried to talk people out of unhealthy habits say smoking you know quite often i get the thing back well my granddad smoked until he's 90 and he never got cancer and so it's a psychological phenomenon in human beings and other species too that the longer things do well the more we come to believe that they will continue to do well in the greater sense of well-being we have and that's the way i look at us with nuclear weapons think of it like a turkey being hatched for a nice egg and its human caretakers carefully place it in an incubator with the proper heat and when it hatches they feed they feed it well and they keep it warm and they give it whatever they need to give it to grow well and that turkey no doubt has a lot of faith in its human caretakers until a certain day like thanksgiving and all of a sudden everything they believed is just not true and they think how could we've ever believed that and i think that's the way it's going to be with nuclear weapons unless we take action soon so what are the risks of deterrent they fit in three main categories first of all any current leader can use these weapons to win a war or to make a point then there's the problem of nuclear terrorism we know for a fact that terrorist groups are forever trying to obtain materials or the weapons themselves and then there are accidents and we know a lot about these in trump's early years we had he and kim jong-un both with nuclear weapons saying all kinds of nasty things about each other and if those weapons had gone off like they almost thought they did in hawaii nobody was terribly surprised and here's pakistan threatening the world because of being angry at what india is doing kajamir these are two nuclear armed powers that two soldiers shoot at one another then there's the problem of terror terrorism so the u.s. has nuclear weapons in five nato countries the one of interest to terrorists would be in surleague air base in southeastern turkey where i've been told in in 2007 2016 or 15 the there was a coup against the urtigan the prime minister of turkey and one of the leaders of that was the commander of the base where these nuclear weapons are stored in surleague and he cut off all power to the base and that led for an opportunity that that created some chaos where those nuclear weapons were put at risk at the time isis of us at the height of its geographical power and was less than a hundred miles from those nuclear weapons we're taking that's another chance we're taking and then if you ever read the records about how many kilograms of fissile material are unaccounted for from the forward soviet union and even from us and how many nuclear weapons we've lost here and there becomes something to be concerned about there have been six documented times where either russian or u.s. forces came to believe that they were under attack and only at the last moment pulled out from unleashing total armageddon and this is separate from the cuban missile crisis which was probably our closest ever to nuclear war stanislaus petroff you know who died last year and just put out a wonderful movie i hope you'll see it if you haven't so far called the man who saved the world helped design the system that he was running and he he saw this movie show so well and it actually interviews him but what he remembers is seeing this incoming signals from the computer saying we were under attack first there was one and another and another and in a very difficult decision he simply refused to believe it but he just couldn't bring himself to to launch those weapons that's just one of many and then there are broken arrows defined by the u.s. defense department as nuclear weapons that have been launched at least their carriers have been launched accidentally lost or unaccounted for there've been 32 of those i'll spare you the movie about this at the time and so general lee butler former commander of all u.s. nuclear forces both submarines and icbms and aircraft the air force general in his memoir said the world escaped nuclear holocaust by some combination skill luck and divine intervention and he finally decided it was mostly divine intervention before his time back in the eighties that's the same conclusion i came to that there's any proof of the existence of god it's the fact that we're still here when we've tried to do everything we can to do ourselves away but actually it was more than just divine intervention it was people taking action you know some of us here i was the only one here that was in in uh central park in 1982 when a million people gathered to say it's and time to end the arms race and that followed many many years of work with the nuclear freeze campaign and nuclear free zones that were highly participated in by towns in vermont people like helen caldecott and ace jack eiger who just died this week and the others from physicians for social responsibility that i met when i was a young doctor who convinced people to change in particular ronald reagan who got my interest by saying we were going to win a war for the soviet union when he became president and had plans to do that and a mere three years later through i think tremendous activist efforts agreed that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought and while he didn't do anything to reduce nuclear weapons himself he did finally after a number of years sign the intermediate intermediate range nuclear forces treaty and i just wanted to show you this map and the effects of treaty since that's what we're talking about tonight and how critical that is uh you can see on this graph the the blue lines are us numbers of weapons in the red or the soviets and how they played a game of ketchup and eventually had to prove themselves superior and the strategic arms limitation talks that that came before reagan really accomplished almost nothing and even the non-proliferation treaty of 1968-1970 you can see put only the tiniest dent in this and it wasn't until the intermediate range nuclear forces treaty that things really started to happen and that's one of the treaties that trump pulled us out of that thing that had saved us so many billions of dollars in unnecessary weapons to reduce the risk for all of europe and then the treaties that also made a huge difference or the strategic arms reduction treaties and these are what continue today the start to and now what they call the new start in 2010 which you can see but the rate of decrease in nuclear weapons is slow dramatically and as of February 5th none of these treaties are any longer in place and there's no reason in the world don't think these to think that these weapons are not going to be increased in number though they may be decreased in size because that's makes them more usable in some planners minds so treaties have huge impacts and so our decision is already being made for us starting with obama despite what he said in prog about wanting to get rid of nuclear weapons he said well it's not going to happen in my lifetime and he let the congress begin to a lot money for modernization of nuclear weapons over the next 10 and actually 30 years to the tune of 1.24 trillion dollars which of course since this congressional budget office report in 2015 or so is now going to 1.6 or 1.7 trillion dollars very similar in price to the cost of the f-35 fighter jet actually and the leaders of course of all the nuclear nations nuclear arm nations don't like this ban treaty at all they want to bomb the ban so the choice is really ours we can either ban the bomb with a prohibition treaty eliminate these things for good or we can agree with the way things are heck with the ban and face our new nuclear arms race and I think absolutely inevitable catastrophe so what is the treaty on the probe prohibition of nuclear weapons do it actually bans everything to do with nuclear weapons if you think about a nuclear weapons have really been technically illegal under humanitarian and every law for because they're indiscriminate in how they slaughter civilians and noncombatants and they're totally disproportional to any military objectives so technically if it was a true court of law they would be banned on the basis of current law but this treaty bans everything about them development testing production possession transfer or the threatened use of it and essentially any kind of support to nuclear weapons and that's what makes all the difference it was adopted and I was there for that in 2017 by the majority of nations in the world so far it's been signed by 86 nations who all expected eventually to ratify it ratified by 51 nations which has allowed it to enter into force this friday now what is the value of it entering into force so you hear criticisms of well what good is it going to do it's not signed by any nuclear nation and they're the only ones that matter it won't eliminate a singular nuclear weapon by itself which is true and then the the state department statements that I've heard and basically say it doesn't account for international security concerns but I can't make any sense when they say it what that actually means that somehow it's just a belief that in deterrence we have more security than we don't do without it and I just don't see any evidence for that that's a criticism and then it that it's not verifiable and we can talk about that too if anybody has questions how do you be sure that you get you're rid of all yours and the other guy doesn't well the fact that it's illegal to even support these is and it's the effect that we'll have without not everybody signing it we have lots of evidence for that so biological weapons and chemical weapons which were signed by the big powers in 1972 and 1993 of course have made those weapons of mass destruction unacceptable so that when Syria may or may not have actually used them but would even threaten to use them the whole world went nuts and said no way no way you can't do that and so they've been used very very little since then landmines were banned in 1997 and cluster bombs were banned in 2008 the US hasn't signed either of those and yet except for North Korea we pretty much observe them we don't spread landmines and sell them all over the world anymore cluster bombs have a very interesting story in the US because we don't want part of that treaty and yet the only munitions cluster munitions manufacturing plan in the US which was run by Textron just shut down a few years after this saying that people aren't interested in them anymore so not everybody has to sign these things to have a huge huge effect so what it will do for the nuclear power is instead of nuclear weapons now being a a badge of honor and a and a source of pride which they still are from many people in the world they're now illegal they're prohibited where they have a stigma and states possessing them over time we believe will become rogue states rather than powers to emulate and what is has been a moral long is now unequivocally illegal under international law and it's a very good reason when we push our our congress people to stop voting money for these things to say look this is one more really good reason not to spend money on things we can never use and could do us in so what can we do well robin brought up this brave group of seven you know if the nuclear weapons go off there's not many people who think nothing of these people know nothing of these people now could care less about them we'll see them as anything but heroes as one of them and more than one of them said in their statements as they were being sentenced to jail speaking out against these weapons and their submarines at kings bay they said you know ultimately what am I going to say to my children and my grandchildren what are they going to think when things go wrong and they say well mom what did you do to try to stop that and they have the answer we did everything we possibly could but I don't think we have to go to jail necessarily I think there's a place for that and if we all did it they'd pack the jails and nobody would have to go to jail if really just a few thousand of us did it did it but that takes a lot of guts and a lot of risk that most of us aren't willing to take so what else can we do well the immediate things that are really likely to succeed are to push president elect biden to renew the new start treaty which expires in just a couple of weeks when that goes away there's no limits on a new nuclear arms race so renewing that treaty and he has expressed a willingness to do that the other thing that could be done immediately that he has expressed a willingness to do is rejoin what they call the joint comprehensive plan of action which is some people call the iran nuclear deal which all international inspector inspectors who work inside iran said was working iran destroyed most of its centrifuges that concentrate fissile material and we're doing everything in compliance with the deal and trump withdrew from it and now iran has started to enrich rani into a much higher percentage again and unless our attacks viciously in a war with unbelievable suffering or get back into this agreement they within a year or two or three could have a nuclear weapon and of course always because this is all money driven push for reduction in nuclear spending even if you don't believe in reductions in all military spending our federal representatives are three fairly liberal folks in in congress need to support biden in this which i think they all have the two things i mentioned they're much less enthusiastic about decreasing military spending and then the the best single bill that will have to be a new bill i guess in 2020 because it's a new session of congress is is the one introduced for the last 10 years by elinor home norton's the non-voting member of congress in from dc called the nuclear weapons abolition economic and energy conversion act and you'll see a version of this in 220 she went from for the first five years having no cosponsors not a single other congressperson to having about eight last year and we can push our three people who have never voted for it to to sign on to that and then the international campaign to to eliminate abolished nuclear weapons supported by its us version of the nuclear ban dot uh or a nuclear ban uh tries to get as many politicians at all levels from city council to federal to even though they're not in a position to vote on the treaty to say they would vote for it if they ever have the opportunity so that's called the parliamentarian pledge and has become really important in europe where the countries are refusing to the leaders are refusing to sign but higher and higher percentages of the parliaments are signing on and that will eventually change that who who joins the treaty in europe uh just a background on this nuclear weapons abolition economic conversion i like it because it does everything eliminates a nuclear weapon and demands that the money spent on them go into green energy conversion and other things to help people it's a very simple bill that's less than two pages summarized here says the united states government should provide leadership and signing a ratifying this this treaty or if they don't like that when any other international agreement that provides for the elimination of all nuclear weapons in every country nobody here is talking about unilateral disarmament uh but understict strict international control and redirect resources you use for nuclear weapons for these better things and a peaceful economy including addressing human and infrastructure needs and then finally be a leader in in getting all other countries to join their commitments can you imagine if the us said we're going to go with this thing the influence they could have in in getting people to go along with it just as some evidence of that uh just before this treaty was finally ratified by enough nations to put it into force in december the u.s state department sent the letter to all the countries that had signed it asking them to rescind their signature saying that this was going to disturb the international order and please withdraw from the treaty not a single one did finally within vermont what can the vermont legislature do well if you remember back in 2019 i think the senate passed sr5 which is saying it was a resolution against having any nuclear weapons delivery systems in vermont and then some people i think from our federal office uh lobbied against the house version of that and it was shot down i testified before the legislature last year to try to revive it but the the pandemic was just starting and they put everything else aside since then the other thing that we've done is in the cities of south burlington burlington winewski we've passed back from the brink resolutions and i'll tell you a little bit about here so if the u.s is not ready to actually sign the treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons there are things we can do immediately that will at least bring us back from the brink of of the the danger of of nuclear war and that is these one and two almost together now and and trump has given us all the more reason to do that we can end the sole unchecked authority of any u.s president to launch a nuclear attack but if we just renounce the option of using nuclear weapons first it kind of accomplishes both things right now the only nations that i guess china is the only one of the nuclear powers you said we will never use the weapons first but us is the only one that regularly puts them on the table under the the sentence all options are on the table we could stop that which if you were anybody else in the world would probably make you feel safer rather than let's say then finally taking the the weapons off hair trigger alert and canceling all the expenditures on replacing these new weapons with modernized or enhanced or more usable weapons and then finally pursue an agreement to get rid of them all so these are the five back from the brink things and these three townships so far have signed these in a way similar to towns that signed the nuclear freeze resolutions back in the 1980s that eventually led to such tremendous reductions so anybody that's in the town in vermont that wants to do that it's pretty pretty easy we had no trouble very little resistance for these very common sense things and now's a good time to do it if you can get people's attention away from all the other problems meanwhile as individuals i would say just get on the lists serve of i can the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons uh we are starting a new movement in with the help of a group called code pink who has a lot of expertise in in divestment see these these companies are going to be very susceptible to public pressure now and unlike governments who ultimately answer to corporations and and the whims of their politicians and have guns to stop us from doing things corporations are exquisitely sensitive to their bottom lines and when people talk about divesting from from those companies in their pension funds and in their personal finances and so forth they really perk up and pay attention letters to the editor i had one come out about this that i think robin sent out the invitation to this uh that i that still is very relevant from september and i just submitted another one to vermont digger uh just let people know about this this is just too easy not to do so i'd be happy to take uh questions about this all let me show you one more slide um and that is this is how many this is the 26 worldwide major nuclear weapons contractors and almost none of them make just nuclear weapons they have business everywhere and because they have businesses in countries that have signed the treaty they're now going to be subject to questions from those countries about their involvement with nuclear weapons and that's going to create new conversations that have never happened before and these are this don't bank on the bomb again is a program of the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons which led to this treaty which actually created this treaty and these are all major financiers and investment companies around the world who have digested from nuclear weapons so this is no pie in the sky stuff this is really really doable so thank you thank you happy to take questions we have one two questions in the chat um hedaco are you there now can you if you wanted to ask your question uh you said hedaco yes i'm here yes great thank you do you want to go ahead and ask the question for everyone in the chat and then john can respond uh well one of the reasons that the speakers addressed included deterrence effect and i thought well that is fine among sovereign nations but now it isn't that difficult i do i understand it making atomic bomb and some rogue band of individuals can make it to use it to insist on their rightful cause quote unquote uh we're not protected from that i think that the doctor's point in uh the significant uh a gain would be to make it very uh shameful actually to be associated with this illegal uh weapons productions and and considering the use of it against humanity uh uh i i take it and then i i must really uh say that i i'm very grateful for this happening because it was very difficult for the last 75 years no matter where it was we didn't have a good listening ears now we do oh excuse me we when i speak of it myself and others uh survivors of the nuclear bomb you're a survivor hedaco yes i am thank you and thank you i i i if it were not for physicians for social responsibility i would not open myself to share anything because i was determined to leave it alone because i had to spend my life denying that i was so affected and protecting myself disclosing the very deep personal grief but uh the i was at the university of chicago hospitals and the another institution uh there the group of radiologists really were interested for their understanding how i could have survived it and really wanted information in their monthly meeting and just on the academic reason i shared the information and and from there i had to accompany them they said you know you you would really help us if you could come with us and it was a year of nuclear freeze and they were doing a fantastic work and i was so moved by their enthusiasm and compassion and dedication and i i now even though these were very difficult times and and difficult tasks so i i i have to carry out i thank you for your persuading me that there was a place for survivors to share their testimonies thank you you know and uh i'd like to just add that hedaco did a wonderful webinar with us disarm wilf disarm uh it was at uh naga sake day i believe with photographs from her childhood and you can go to wilf disarm and see the link because we we taped that um i'd like to ask a question um we were we're trying to figure out in the sense what to do here in burlington on the 22nd and uh it's um two days after the inauguration um and uh so uh emotions may still be high i don't know but um i have looked at that list of 26 organizations and and compared it here in burlington and we we don't have any directly but we do have pratt and whitney so i actually emailed susie snider who's the head of uh don't bank on the bomb and said well pratt and whitney i think is associated with uh nuclear issues and she said well pratt and whitney is a subsidiary to united technologies which is subsidiary to raytheon i mean this is the games they play uh and there is a decent um factory or office up there near the airport i think it's mainly associated with making the engines for the f-35 in virgins as anyone here research that that's what uh there is a factory that makes engineer makes engines for the f-35 would that be a proper um destination for a a car uh caravan on the 22nd and uh i i know some of you on this call have looked at the nuclear band site where they suggest going to a nuclear company and um wearing wearing a plastic garb and calling yourself um a a a code a code what is it called you know as if you're coming to check out whether they're actually fighting pardon compliance is treaty compliance unit yes yes and uh so they did that down in north hampton and uh you know it's it's sort of a media event uh and you have to we would have to call pratt and whitney and say we are coming and then call the call these um media as well so that is um in in process and anyone who wants to take part or has other ideas of what to do on that day uh please let me know we want to uh let more people know you i mean look at us here we're mainly older people who actually remember back when helen caught up came and talked about many of the things that john has just talked about but we need to get the younger generation involved and we need at least for them to know by doing taking some action so any thoughts on that score if i could just clarify uh and i see there's a question about the f-35 uh going after pratt and whitney wouldn't be directly relevant to this to this particular treaty because uh the the f-35 which is a separate topic in itself in an equally costly program over the next 30 years is is a dual use aircraft you know right now nobody's saying that the f-35 is ready to carry a nuclear weapon although it could be any day uh but it's it doesn't necessarily mean that you're you're delivering nuclear weapons um did you isn't there a general dynamics uh facility somewhere in wilson yes yes and that's very involved with uh the gatling gun they used to occupy the whole building down on pine street uh where they manufactured the gun but that's been moved elsewhere but the residue of that they have some offices so there again it's not a nuclear um it it's not a nuclear office uh or doesn't doesn't make nuclear materials but i mean that would be a possibility nevertheless but i believe general dynamics is involved in the manufacture of nuclear weapons i'm not sure pratt and whitney is specifically the manufacturer of those weapons so they wouldn't have to be doing that here to call them accountable for that yeah yeah okay there's some other questions on the chat uh sally is asking did you did i just want to i guess you wanted to clarify does that do the f-35s also cost 1.24 trillion dollars if you look at the lifetime cost of the airplane over the next 30 years it's remarkable to me how similar the costs are they're the 30 year to 50 year life of the f-35 and the next 30 years of nuclear weapon spending are in the trillion now in the trillion and a half dollar range and it magically that always goes up with time uh right but those are two weapon systems that i just don't see any use for in the world at all even if you're the a believer in the strong military defense these are neither these are defensive weapons of any kind nuclear weapons certainly can't protect you from anything and f-35 is is not even the best yet to shoot down an incoming bomber with a nuclear weapon on it the the older planes do that equally well the f-35 we're paying so much for because it has stealth capability to penetrate into some other country and bomb their country which is not a defensive move in any sense of the word it's just interesting and to translate that into vermont terms i haven't looked at the latest figures for the f-35 per year but nuclear weapons uh the the amount we're spending each year amounts to about 125 million dollars a year of vermont tax dollars going into all the aspects of nuclear weapons well that's not a small piece of change not in vermont um jane is asking uh well first let me say it's not a big group so if anybody wants to unmute yourself and ask a question i don't think chaos will reign but for now i'll just add um i'll just put jane's out there which is she's curious how the american public feels about nuclear weapons and trump's act in these days have there been any polls recently i haven't seen a poll on trump particularly it was nancy polosi that brought that to to the news recently but there was kind of a discouraging poll which goes against almost all prior polls out of harvard and it was a small sample i looked at it as no more than five or six hundred people but 53 percent of the people in this most recent poll said that we need to spend more money on nuclear weapons but that is in contrast to everything that's been going on for for most years uh when you look back most americans want to see nuclear weapons reduced or eliminated i mean if you just ask people what their future wants to be almost all it said that so i don't know what was going on with that particular poll but it's it's it is a little bit worrisome and i think it reflects the fact that we have forgotten what we learned in world war two that war needs to go uh but because we've all been raised with the belief that world war two was some kind of heroic event that the us saved the world from evil which isn't really true in the historical record uh we've come to think of war was maybe a good thing and and any weapon that we can win a war with and all nuclear weapons the best weapons of all is this kind of mythical thinking that that that permeates permeates us and the sheer lack of education just like kids really don't know how the system works i understand civics classes aren't universal anymore people don't even know what the vote means they certainly don't know what what nuclear weapons can do uh psr had a little video contest and the winner was a four minute video where they interviewed groups of young people and asked them how many nuclear weapons there were nobody had it right they were off by a handful to many almost everybody underestimated how many there were so education is just a huge part of this you know we we brought some hibakusha to to the burlington schools and reached about 1500 kids two years ago but my follow-up calls to the schools let's continue some education about this fell on deaf ears so any ideas are more than appreciated yeah beth let let me say something and that is that um on the call here is sharyl spencer who is uh active in wilf disarm and has been compiling some resource guides for um for uh january 22nd and um why don't you say something about them it's it's compiling all the events that are happening around the country and we haven't put anything in yet because we don't know we haven't made anything happen but so many communities are let us know what you found sharyl uh yes uh good afternoon everybody i'm i'm sitting here in palo Alto california and i work with robin on the disarm committee of the women's international league for peace and freedom and um i think we have like 18 branches of wilf we have about 40 branches but 18 of them are actually going to have in-person demonstrations on on friday the 22nd on street corners uh these are political protests and therefore even though california is completely locked down at the moment we're not supposed to gather with other people at all but political protests are allowed so uh we are this is a kind of an educate the public bring attention to the fact that this treaty which makes nuclear weapons illegal in 51 countries and of course we know there's going to be more um bring that to the attention of the passing public and then the icanw.org has a map of all the events that they've been told about and i just saw an email that there are 87 events they've got on their map including ones in australia in new zealand in germany most of them are in are in the us and um at the same so those are in-person you know always outdoors always with masks etc and uh but there are a lot of webinars that are going to be happening organized by other organizations like uh plowshares and psr in in oregon is is having a webinar and hidako is actually going to be one of their speakers and global zero so in my resource guides i spent a lot of time finding all these webinars and events and then icanw just yesterday announced that they are going to be live streaming they say only for 90 minutes um it'll start at noon i don't know start at 3 p.m your time and they will be having uh they're kind of going to be following the countries where the um as it comes into effect in its time zone oh really and they're going to have speakers and music and rather like the live streaming that happened on Hiroshima day last year where we had many organizations we submitted you know short videos and and we had panel discussions and hopefully some of you saw those yeah so um so you if you go to icanw.org and then look at their website uh you will find the notice about that live streaming on your computer i mean and there's some big countries that have ratified the treaty now the ratified the treaty is a big step it means their parliament has mulled over this thing and what does it actually mean to not allow possession or transportation or votes to come in with radioactive material they're pondering this and and they you know mexico decided to uh austria maybe someone knows some of the others um bigger cities that are countries right interestingly enough that the vatican was about the first one to ratify it it doesn't take very much for the vatican to ratify anything i think the pope has to say so so um uh but if you look at the countries by population like a quarter of the world's population are actually represented i think it's a quarter in in the 50 countries because you've got bangladesh you've got indonesia and and a few other places that have got a lot of people who live there so some of them are small states they are islands in the middle of the pacific that you've never heard of but they are sovereign nations and they are letting the world know you're not we don't want you know your nuclear weapons the other thing you're supposed to do in the treaty is assist other people who've suffered from nuclear weapons and the marshall islands for example was where uh the us detonated let me see tens of bombs in the 1950s and they're still suffering from from the radiation leftover um so it's it's actually relatively short it's only 10 pages the the treaty and it has 20 articles and so you can find it again through icanw.org you can find the actual text of this treaty and see uh and then and then uh you can understand it's a contract between these countries and we're trying to make nuclear weapons in anathema is one of the things like we've made chemical weapons in anathema so that's a hope is that even though the nuclear weapons states haven't signed it uh that nevertheless people will look down on them for having it having them yeah carol i want to amplify something you said i think equally important to remember that while so far the nations have signed it are less than a fifth of people that'll change when big countries like brazil and indonesia sign but of the countries under india and china of course with their vast populations if you survey people in those countries china i don't have the date on but certainly india most people want to get rid of nuclear weapons and and so it's it's the governments you're going against it's not really going against the will of the people to to join this treaty well i mean i think it should pointed out be pointed out that um africa the nations in africa they signed some sort of anti-nuclear treaty or um nuclear freedom not to promote nuclear weapons and latin america also isn't that true john nuclear free zones they're actually nuclear free zones nuclear free zones large part of the pacific all of most of africa and most of the caribbean in south america we really need one in the near east of course but that's going to be tough people are working on that so the just another interesting fact uh i i read the bbc news website every day and every five minutes today so he was impeached by the way if you've all missed it it's done he's impeached um 10 bishops in the uk issued a statement the other day saying that nuclear weapons are terrible and britain should sign the tpnw and so on and so forth so religious groups are very much against them and you know you know we we appreciate their efforts and the pope the pope has spoken out against them totally and they tried in submarines that the um the plowshares people were active against which we also several of them are also in in washington state but they're in it was they were created in in collaboration with england and they are in scotland and now with brexit scotland is is is like they're they may just go on their own and they hate the the trident submarine in fact one of the activists uh tim walis who did a wonderful webinar a few weeks ago uh has grown spent years there and has studied it and uh written a book about it and is very um hopeful that uh scotland will just say we don't want these weapons anymore yes scotland voted to stay in the eu when you when you divided the votes out and look you know by by region how different parts of britain voted scotland actually didn't want to leave and they may you know there's a threat that they will leave britain in order to go back into the eu yeah yeah this treaty may well play a part in that this treaty this treaty may well play a part in that equation right yeah so again the simplest things i i think to do is is is to write to your your congresspeople catherine bach i don't have catherine you're still listening over there but uh she's familiar with lobbying our our congresspeople through the friends committee on national legislation which agrees with all this and and uh getting ahold of these guys and saying these two things right off the bat rejoin that new start treaty that's the single most important thing work out the iran thing the iran thing was sounded like it was going to be a no brainer also until trump assassinated one of their major scientists and now the people in iran are so furious about that they may not want to get in the street and and then this back from the brink resolutions you know should we try to get that through the state legislature and how do you do that in a time when they're so preoccupied with coven but the thing is to keep bringing it up every time you can no so there's this big effort for next friday the 22nd because that's the day it becomes in force from those 51 countries who ratified it but of course it's an ongoing process so we have to keep it in the public view and nancy polosi talking about the nuclear button that was marvelous for raising the issue in in the general public's mind and we're trying to you know i'm tweeting about that i'm trying to get uh the public you know to keep keep some focus on that yeah well and we haven't mentioned the banks i mean that could be another focus is that the the investments that banks have made in nuclear industries and we uh some of us met with a woman from code pink uh to look uh on the state level and the pension funds plans that have are developed and of course then there's the dichotomy that if for example the teachers union and their statewide pension fund they might you know they have to be argued they have to be cajole to see that this is an important thing to do because they might feel that they are uh will lose money if they divest from these nuclear industries but john you've you've researched that and that usually it hasn't happened yeah what little data there is i haven't seen personally been been told by people working on this for a while is that that the fear that that people will lose money if they divest from these certain things isn't isn't borne out at all people if you look at weapons companies they actually haven't done any better than the general market surprisingly yeah good so are there any anyone else who wants to have something to say sandy baird you often have comments say is that i noticed when i was teaching school that most of my students never knew that the united states had been the first ever to use nuclear weapons and i think it's important to understand that that we also understand the united states will never give up this idea of first response because the united states also has done that already united states is the only nation that has used nuclear weapons in a war right it what's always amazed me about that it wasn't because they were desperately about the loser they already won the war and still used it i know but thank you very much john that was very interesting and thank you robin for organizing it and best for recording it so i'm gonna have to leave now too but thank you thanks robin me too well best wishes to everybody don't hesitate to contact robin or i and let me just throw my chat to sable is gonna put my email in there but robin knows how to get in touch with me if anybody wants to get in touch with thank you good night yeah okay all right blessings everyone thank you thank you bye bye thanks sharel okay thanks everybody bye