 Like we said, my name is John Kwa. Rarely does my name get pronounced correctly, so thank you as well for that. I work at Global Zeros, a US field organizer, have for the last two years. I'll tell you a little bit about my background. I got involved in activism, it's about a decade ago now, on the Marriage Equality Campaign in Rhode Island, where I'm from. I think a lot of folks these days, maybe I think from my generation in particular, don't come to the fight for peace or to fight nuclear weapons directly from the peace movement, but from other movements linked in. And that's my story. I got involved in organizing my community in Rhode Island because I saw a campaign that could bring about marriage equality nationwide, that could give me the right to marry my partner and was inspired and learned how to bring together my community around social change and political change. When we won that, I went on to college and after college went on to work mostly in the climate movement, pushing for fossil fuel divestment, helping various cities, including DC, to push for fossil fuel divestment, working in Texas and North Carolina, like Suzie said, to ban fracking, as well as for common sense antibiotic regulation on factory farms. Global Zero, I'm sure you all know, but we work to organize communities against the nuclear threat. In the past, we've built grassroots support for the Iran deal, which as of this month is incredibly at stake, I'm sure you know. And with our Race to Zero campaign, have worked to pressure 2016 candidates to have solid stances on nuclear weapons, for dogging them going to their town halls, going to their events, making sure that they're public with how they propose to handle the nuclear arsenal when they're in office, and pressuring them to have better stances on those issues. And generally, I work towards this goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, not only because I think it's unacceptable in 2017, but anytime, to use a nuclear weapon and kill millions of people as an act of war, but also for a variety of other reasons. I think the use of $1 trillion over the next 30 years towards the nuclear arsenal, towards weapons of mass destruction, as opposed to our communities, as opposed to investments in our actual communities and our lives, is reprehensible and abhorrent and we can't stand for that as a country. I think that that money needs to go, I am very involved in the universal healthcare fight and watching, you know actually politicians on both sides say that we can't afford to provide healthcare in this country for all, and then I'm working on this, I'm working on a trillion dollar budget for these weapons and a Senate and a House or Congress that continue to vote unanimously in support of military budget increases. And I know that that's not the way that our country needs to go and I know that that's not what our budget needs to look like. So we're gonna do first, before I start speaking, I know you all have been hearing a lot of speakers today. So I wanted to do a visualization exercise. So if everyone can close your eyes, be great. So you are in charge of a trillion dollars over the next three decades, 30 years. Think, so first think, how old will you be in 30 years? What will that value be? Will you have kids, will you have family? Where will you live maybe? What would you like to see that money go to? Would you wanna see that money in that time in those 30 years go towards a world with our country with free healthcare, with equal education, with solutions to climate change, adjust the financial system? How would over those 30 years, we be working with other countries? So America enters a conflict. What would the United States President's first response be? Would it be war? Would it be aggression? Would it be threats? Would it be asking to sit down and talk? Diplomacy? What would the Democratic Party's response be? The Republican Party or any other parties in this country? What would you want their platform to be? And then what would our relationship with our military be? Would we have a military? Would we fund it to the level we do today? Cool, you can open your eyes, just thinking about those. I think it's important to think about those things because while we specifically work to fight the nuclear threat, sometimes in this issue, we get so mired in the doom and gloom of the issue. We constantly talk about what it would look like if a city was bombed tomorrow, how many lives would be killed. But I think as a movement, we have a responsibility right now to provide solutions for people, to make people think about what a world could look like where we didn't rely on the military as much as we do today, where we didn't spend a trillion dollars on the nuclear arsenal and where we didn't have nuclear weapons and our Congress could put checks and balances and control a president from using a nuclear weapon. Boom. So a little bit about Global Zero and what we're working on now. I'm sure everyone here, I imagine much of this conference has been focused on what the world looks like post-2016. Ever since Donald Trump's election, I think we as well as many organizations and activists here were taken aback by what the world looks like, what organizing looks like going forward. And I've done a lot of soul search, Jane, around what it will take to fight for a world without nukes under this administration. And we have a current political situation where our presidential, where our White House has no interest in working to eliminate the nuclear threat. And in fact, every other week comes out with another statement hinting at not only the president's volatility, but his willingness to increase the nuclear threat. I don't need to tell this crowd this, but it was just last week where it was leaked that upon seeing a chart of the disarmament that we've achieved since the 80s, Donald Trump looked at this chart and furiously pointed to the sky and said we need to have 10 times the amount of nukes that we have right now. He probably isn't gonna do that, right? But I think what that shows is a volatility and an inability to be the commander in chief that we need over that nuclear arsenal when he can say such threats like that. He has hinted at various times of his campaign and while in office that he wants to increase the nuclear arsenal, he continually brings us to the brink of nuclear war with North Korea and wants to destroy the Iran deal to certify it as of last week. But there is, I think, and I think what we need to learn from that is that the White House right now is not an entity that we need to be working with. That it is a villain at the end of the day that we need to be pressuring them. And that ultimately that this administration does not have our community's best interests at heart around the nuclear threat. On the flip side, what we've seen, especially among young people today, is a really beautiful resistance that has grown around many of this administration's stances. How many people went to the Women's March? Awesome, great. How many people were involved in some kind of Trumpcare sit-in or action to fight that healthcare bill? Great, awesome. I'm looking at a few people that I actually got arrested with in Mitch McConnell's office here. Very, I appreciate it. How many people went to the People's Time March? So what we're seeing are tens of thousands of new people, hundreds of thousands of new people coming into the streets who are not politically engaged and honestly don't have a very deep analysis of politics who couldn't tell you how their senators or every senator is voting on every issue, but who are excited about getting in politics and know their values and know that this administration is not standing up for that. And what we're also seeing is that actions that people were not previously willing to get involved in, they now are. They're willing to stand up during a town hall and disrupt their senator or their congressman. They're willing to sit in on a town hall. Even if they don't want to get arrested, that's a pretty bold move. And finally, I think we're seeing folks, especially young people, especially the rising electorate, look at the political parties that we have today and realize that they're just not cutting it. They're looking at the GOP and I think they're kind of awakening to the fact that this administration spells out violence on a variety of fronts for women, for queer people, for trans people, for everyone in the face of the nuclear threat, for everyone in the face of climate change. And actually, maybe even more so, they're looking at Democrats and wondering where are you standing? Where is your courage? Why aren't folks standing up to Donald Trump? We were just talking about, I know there was a lot of questions about impeachment earlier. I'm confused why aren't them standing up more for that. Where are they on these issues? Where have they been? Overall, I think we're all seeing an annoyance with how these parties don't represent us well and need to change or need to stand up more to the nuclear threat, but all of these issues writ large. And I think what we're taking from all of this is a few lessons. One, that this is an incredible opportunity to lose a little bit of the doom and gloom around the nuclear threat. A little bit, we're all gonna die. And instead provide some hope and some solutions and a vision of what a future could look like without a strong military industrial complex and without nuclear weapons. I think it's also an incredible opportunity to link arms with other struggles. We are all threatened by everything that Donald Trump supports and represents. He threatens my rights as a queer person. He threatens my friends' rights as trans people. He threatens all of us because he wants to bomb North Korea and bring us to nuclear war. Many of these are linked, whether it's through some more obvious connections, climate change and nuclear armageddon, go hand in hand. Or maybe a little bit more complex ones. Last week, or maybe it was two weeks ago, Lillian Dago who's sitting in the front, as well as a variety of, I think Co-Pink was also involved in this, did an action with Ultraviolet, a group that stands up for women's rights and justice on the anniversary of the tapes, the, what's that? The Billy, frigging his last name, tapes that came out for Donald Trump during his campaign, to call, to stand up to gendered violence in this country. I think there's an incredible connection between gendered violence in this country and the way that our nuclear system is run almost entirely by men and we turn constantly to war and violence over diplomacy and peace and talks. So whether it's making those more complex or those more nuanced relationships, working with other movements in our actions, in the policy platforms that we put forward and just day to day in the work that we do, I think is really strong and this is an important moment to work together because we're stronger together. And finally, I think that this is a good moment, at least for us at Global Zero, we're noticing to not just be challenging Republicans, but to be challenging all parties and all politicians and asking them what they will be doing to stand up to the nuclear threat under Donald Trump because it is just so real right now. What we'll be doing as it gets closer to 2018 and I'll go into this in a little bit, is demanding of congressmen specifically whether or not they will stand behind a beyond-the-bomb platform, a set of policies that will get us beyond the bomb, that will get us beyond the nuclear threat or whether they will not and they'll kind of tassily endorse the administration as it stands and allow for nuclear threats and proliferation to continue underneath it. And finally, yes, and finally, two more things. It's time to promote voices of people who are currently impacted by the nuclear system. Of course, we're all a danger of nuclear war, but there are people in this country and in territories within this country that are already impacted by nuclear violence. We've seen testing on Marshall Islands just last year, the various Marshall Islands residents brought a lawsuit to the UN and it was declined to sue nuclear weapons states over the impact of testing in the region. We have here, we continue to mine uranium in indigenous territories in the United States and there are communities both by their health and by displacement that are being impacted right now because we continue to support a nuclear system. And it's also time to demand not just that our politicians at the congressional level but also at the local level are doing whatever they can to work on this issue. Many of us, much of the disarmament movement comes from the nuclear freeze movement in the 1980s, which was so local that it just, it was entirely based in towns and campuses that stood up by passing the freeze resolution, calling for a freeze of spending research and development of nuclear weapons between the United States and the Soviet Union at the time. We need to get back to those kind of local roots. I know a lot of organizations here work on those issues and I think especially under the Trump administration that's some of the best work that we can be doing. So what we're working on, right now Global Zero is working on a hundred cities pledge, calling on a hundred city mayors and city councils to stand up to the nuclear threat and push for checks and balances on the president's ability to use a nuke. Right now, the president has unilateral ability to use a nuke whenever he would like, wherever. There's no place for Congress to move in on that decision and say, no, we should not be doing this. It is entirely up to the White House. There's a bill in Congress called the Markey-Lew Bill which makes it so the White House would have to go through Congress to declare it an act of war before using a nuclear weapon. But there's also other bills just last week Nancy Pelosi who is, I was kind of shocked by this came out saying that maybe the Democrats party line should be a no first use policy going into 2018 that we should never first use a nuclear weapon as a strike, not retaliatory, but first use a weapon as a strike. Various other nuclear countries have this. And so what we're calling on is a hundred cities to stand up for checks and balances on the president, supporting either no first use or Markey-Lew, bringing it back to the local level when our White House fails us, our mayors, our cities, our governors can stand up to protect our communities. And if you want to get involved in that campaign you should definitely check out our site, you should also talk to me after, we're trying to get a bunch of cities involved. We'll also be working with Code Pink in the next few weeks in mid-November to hold a week of action against nuclear war in North Korea and cities across the country, a set of rallies in front of senators offices as well as meeting with council members and mayors. So if you're interested in any of that come talk to me after and thank you so much for your time. Thanks.