 So the U.S. tried to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, mainly through pressure and sanctions. But that approach has backfired. It has actually hardened Pyongyang's resolve to hone its nuclear missile technology. North Korea has said the only way that it will give up its nuclear weapons is if the U.S. quote, abandons its hostile policy. In other words, take reciprocal steps towards arms reduction. But that is presumably the lasting that Washington wants to do. So now here comes Joe Biden, and how will his team resolve this dilemma? So what is that saying, you know, the definition of insanity? If you repeat the same failed approach and expect different results? I think that Biden's advisors are at least in consensus that the all-or-nothing approach, meaning demanding that North Korea give up all its weapons all at once, that was the approach of John Bolton, and that has failed. So at least there is that recognition. So instead, the catchword now is arms control approach. What this means is first, let's freeze North Korea's plutonium and uranium nuclear operations, and then after that, we'll see what happens. Let's take incremental steps toward the ultimate goal of complete unilateral denuclearization. So this is the preferred approach of Secretary of State nominee Tony Blinken. He advocates an interim deal, cap North Korea's nuclear weapons by time to work out a long-term agreement down the road, and then he says we should get allies and also China on board to pressure North Korea, quote, unquote, squeeze North Korea to get it to the negotiating table, quote, we need to cut off its various avenues and access to resources. He advocates telling countries with North Korean guest workers, send them home. And then he says if China won't cooperate, then threaten China with more forward-deployed missile defense and military exercises. I think that this is no different from the failed approach of the past in the full pressure, isolation, and the goal still is unilaterally disbanding North Korea. Excuse me, I think somebody has, needs to mute. Thank you. It's Victor here. Okay. The only difference is that the Biden administration is willing to take more time to get to the ultimate goal, but it's still the same approach, still the same goal. In this case, North Korea will probably continue to press forward on its nuclear weapons and missile capability, so unless the U.S. drastically shifts position, I think renewed tension between the U.S. and North Korea is, will eventually happen. It's a question of if, not when. The other way around, it's a question of when, not if. So instead of focusing on how to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, asking how to get to permanent peace in Korea would lead us to a different, more fundamental set of answers. Because then we will realize that actually all parties, not just North Korea, have a responsibility to take steps towards mutual arms reduction. As we know, the U.S. still has 28,000 troops in South Korea. Until recently, they regularly conducted massive war exercises that included plans for preemptive strikes on North Korea. They have included flying B-2 bombers, which are the bombers that drop nuclear bombs. And do you know how much it costs to fly a B-2 bomber? $130,000 an hour to fly a B-2 bomber. Just for one hour. So the U.S. and South Korea had scaled back these exercises since the summit in 2018. However, recently, the commander of U.S. forces in Korea has called for the resumption of these large-scale joint war drills. And if the Biden administration decides to move ahead with these war drills, which is scheduled for March, it would actually renew very dangerous military tension on the Korean Peninsula. It would harm any chance for diplomatic engagement with North Korea in the near future. So just to close out, to reduce the threat of nuclear war with North Korea and also to preserve the option of resuming talks in the future, the Biden administration should actually do two things in the first 100 days. One, continue the suspension of the large-scale U.S.-South Korean joint war drills. And during the Q&A, I can talk more about a specific campaign to do that. And then the second thing is they need to start a strategic review of North Korea policy that begins with the question, how do we get to permanent peace on the Korean Peninsula? And I would say a very important part of that is ending the Korean War that has been unresolved for seven years, replacing the armistice with a permanent peace agreement. Thank you. Thank you so much, Yan. Those are excellent actions that we can take. And I know that Congressman Ro Khanna said he would be reintroducing his resolution to declare a formal end of the Korean War, so we'll be awaiting that and supporting that as well. Please feel free to post anything you want in the chat that you want people to follow up on. Thank you again. Medea, would you like to introduce Jodi? I think you know her. Yes. Thank you, Hanli. That was beautiful, and I hope we get a chance to have questions, because I think what you bring up is just so important to figure out how we can do best to push the Biden administration to be better on this issue and allow the North and South to establish their own pathways to peace, which, unfortunately, the U.S. has been an obstacle to. And Jodi, well, Jodi is my dearest sister for several decades now. I don't think there's a day that goes by when I don't talk to her about 20 or 25 times, and is constantly amazing me with her new ideas and brilliance, and on top of all the other things that she is doing, she started this China Is Not Our Enemy campaign at Code Pink. And in full Jodi style, it is a campaign that not only educates people with weekly webinars that are just beautiful, and you can go to the Code Pink YouTube channel and find a series of fantastic webinars with the greatest guests, but also comes up with an action every single week for people to do. And so it's quite astounding and beautiful how you're growing this list of people who want to be involved in this campaign, China Is Not Our Enemy. So thank you, Jodi, and take it away. We have to unmute her. Unmute her? I think she should be able to. Thank you. Thanks, Medea. I'm so excited that you're my partner, I'm blessed. And Hunley, thank you. I avoid talking about North Korea in my presentation, because it is key for a long time to China, North Korea. And I think people don't know that 300,000 Chinese lost their lives in the Korean War, which was the U.S. War on Korea. China did not want to be at war, so it too has a deep history. Anyway, in April of 2018, my husband moved to China, which meant that I was in China every month until January of this year. On January 30th, I flew from New York City to LA instead of New York City to Shanghai. And it is through this lens that I've been watching the heat and lies escalate towards China. Of course, I had my eye on Hong Kong, I knew it was complex, but I also knew from my time in China that most of those 1.4 billion people who are Chinese believed that Hong Kong was stolen from them by the British. And they suffered the opium war, which besieged their country and they feel it painfully, shamefully and painfully. And they're not going to let U.S. get control of Hong Kong, which is what it wants. It's Korea, Hong Kong, Afghanistan, which it's been trying to constantly get type 1, where can its bases be directed towards China? So they could see in Hong Kong that U.S. funding was going to amplify what was happening and people were out there with Trump signs and American flags. So you can imagine that it was unsettling to the Chinese and China and in Hong Kong. And from their point of view, it was a mess being made a lot by the United States engagement. And then I was watching the heat and lies grow with COVID and it wasn't just Trump, but it was the U.S. papers of record, the Washington Post and the New York Times. And it began to feel like the Iraq war. I called up Medina and I was like, this is the Iraq war all over again. What I was reading and hearing had nothing to do with the facts. And the facts weren't even hidden. Soon into the year, V.J. Prashat at the tri-continental did a three-part dossier, breaking it all down. But what you were reading in the media was just stories. Okay, what did Chinese do wrong about COVID, which is what keeps them messed up? There was no cover-up to the world. It was revealed to the World Health Organization in December by the first doctor who saw it and to grandparents of their grandchild. On January 1st, according to the U.S. head of CDC, he got a call from the Chinese CDC, telling him there was a strange and communicative disease that attacks the lungs. We know this from the New York Times because the U.S. CDC guy said the China guy called crying. So, yes, there was a cover-up, but it was in China. It was a three-day cover-up as they worked to put a plan in place to protect the people. Just announcing it would have caused pandemonium. When they announced it, it had a plan. I think the Chinese pandemonium would have looked not as silly as people stocking up on toilet paper, though. But anyway, so why were lies being fished out of the story and spread by the U.S. papers? Why attack China when it did everything right? When the WHO is praising it for locating and segmenting the disease faster than any pandemic? If you want to point a finger at China, it should be how to do it right. Governments from surrounding countries were immediately offered what was needed to create plans for their countries. The losses around China are low, and 5,000 is the number of lives lost in China, a country of 1.4 billion. All the new cases are brought in from the outside. And recently, as we read in The Guardian, I think it was yesterday, more and more is being revealed that it existed in Italy and France all the way back to September. So it didn't even maybe originate in China. So it was January 30th when I didn't get on my flight because I didn't want to be quarantined into China. I was talking to my husband every night about the experience. He lives in two communities, one in Shanghai and one in Sanya. He's Jamaican, and there's an island in China, so he goes there when he needs his Jamaica hit. And each one was different, and they were each created out of the neighborhoods. So I think few people in the United States know that politics in China is local. I would consider it to say that it's more democratic than US because democracy is not about voting. It's about the community coming together, voicing its needs, working together, finding solutions. So now my husband, he goes to dinner with 18, works in an office with 40, goes to parties while I remain in the quarantine. I was avoiding. So those were a few points that Marcy wanted me to address. But given the nine months that I've been working on this China's Not Our Enemy campaign, we've been building and working within coalitions on the issue, one globally. It's called No Cold War. One is in the grassroots movement, it includes Pivot for Peace and the Chow Collective, two organizations that have grown out of the need to stop the war on China and our China Advocacy Collective in DC. And at the core of the problem is the narratives we get caught up in and make decisions from. And I even noticed in Marcy's questions that even our questions are inside the state narratives. I'm watching the learning curve with the crew in DC and it's like they're starting to catch themselves, but we forget that we're inside of this bubble of a narrative that's created for us. And what's cool about it is that once you figure it out, it's easy to debunk their stories by pulling up facts. Cold War, this is the U.S. war on China. It is not a Cold War with China, it wasn't a Cold War on Russia, with Russia it was a Cold War on Russia. But this is U.S. aggression and already a hybrid war on China. It was a U.S. war on Korea, it was a U.S. war on Vietnam, it was a U.S. war on Iraq, China once peace with the U.S., it is not imperialist, it knows the cost of wars, they have been very recent, it almost destroyed a 5,000-year-old country. War is something that's very real to the Chinese people. I just want to remind everybody that China was one of the four poorest countries in the world in the 60s and 70s. But also I want to let you know that in the 1800s, Beijing was the biggest city in the world and China had the highest GDP. It was then that England wanted to colonize China, it had fully plundered India and was waking its way to China and that's when it first attacked Afghanistan. So this story goes way back and it pulls in a lot of stories that we're engaged with that I don't think many of us have unraveled. We have to see the big picture as they're going to try to bring us to fight on their narratives of little stories. We have to keep pulling the narrative back and it is complex and it's a big picture, it's about a history of imperialism and as we pull back the curtain much can be revealed. For Asian Americans, the racism that is centuries deep will be painful but not news. The narrative is ours to change and to rewrite the story, we have to be on the offensive, not on the defensive. Others, Marcy's requests were about the trade war. China made a decision to invest a huge in technology and raising productivity but they want to share it with the workers so they knew if they needed to increase wages, they've increased social protections and insurance and all kinds of things for workers and they say they did it because they were listening to Henry Ford who said that you can't start making cars if you're not paying the workers enough to buy them, which is kind of how the U.S. worked for 70 years until Reagan and the 80s and 90s and the U.S. went global. But trades are my issue. If you want to hear more about trade, I did a webinar with John Kavanaugh from Institute for Policy Studies. My favorite quote from that was John said, Chinese workers didn't steal your jobs, GM did. So if you want to learn more about trade in China, check that webinar out. Another thing Marcy asked was about accusations of curacy manipulation, expulsion of journalists and consulate closures. All those things are in their narrative. Those are reactions to U.S. aggression. China has met every push by the U.S. with a pushback, except in things like the arresting of Meng Wangqiao, the chief financial offer at Huawei. They arrested her in Canada. That was an outlandish illegal act and no one in the world is holding the U.S. accountable. Stealing TikTok and WeChat under conditions that no other country would take lying down, all from lies and accusations that are unfounded. It's kind of like Obama's red line with Syria, but the attacks like in Iran and Venezuela are all in the world of finance, the new war zone. It is like what happens in the streets of the U.S. and Palestine. Power does what it wants with no repercussions. Hell, Biden got to be cheerleader for the Iraq War, cost the U.S. hundreds of thousands of casualties and billions of dollars, and no accountability, just rewards. Now he's president. Oh, and just a reminder, it is the U.S. that has China surrounded by hundreds of U.S. bases, 50 of which are large bases, plus the U.S. seven fleet, and the U.S. has installed anti-missile systems in Taiwan and South Korea. I could go on about how the U.S. is the aggressor, but I want to come back to the narrative. We have to change the narrative. We can't get stuck in the he said she said that we'll just go back and forth. Our narrative, war with China is bad, unnecessary, and imperialism. The end is nuclear war and a nuclear winter, which means nothing grows and we are toast. The U.S. needs to learn how to compete and cooperate, not drive war. We know, like with Iraq, this will engage the entire region. How do you think Taiwan feels? They will be used by the U.S. to get to China, just like Hong Kong, so it will be an entire region affected. Right now, we need money flowing to the needs of people, not new high-tech weapons and plans to destroy the Chinese fleet in 72 hours. Certainly, we don't need to be brought to the brink of nuclear war, but I leave that to Molly to talk about more. In response to Uyghurs and Hong Kong, I don't think people realize that when the U.S. creates military buildup, it can only force China as it has other administrations and other countries to move into protection. That protection is going to be worse for Uyghurs and Hong Kong. They will be in protective mode. Both those places are where the U.S. wants to weaken China. This will cause both countries to spend a lot of money, but not just China and the U.S., because the U.S. will pull in more and China will pull in more. What we have is another rape of resources away from the needs of people lining the pockets of the military industrial complexes with no good end. Our narrative, this is racist. This is driving xenophobia. Asian hate crimes are up 800%. All the hate and lies that are being driven are that, hate and lies, vile hate and lies. We need to help pull back the narrative and talk about what is happening to human beings. That includes Biden, who bullied China just two weeks ago, all the way China failed on COVID, all the way the U.S. has failed on COVID. Still with the lies and cheap talking points, the New York Times continues with them, but we delivered over 5,000 signatures to Kamala Harris telling her to back down Biden just two Mondays ago. It was that Wednesday, and the New York Times noted that she was silent. We have to keep on her so that she can go after the Biden administration and pull them back. Kamala has a Chinese name. She's the first Asian American vice president. We must keep the pressure on. I'll post links in the comments after I'm done of ways you can engage with Kamala and also the racist tweet by Senator Marsha Blackburn that we've been taking down this week. Already 2,000 people have sent emails to Marsha Blackburn telling her to take down her tweet and apologize to Asian Americans. Okay, our narrative, caring state or callous state, China just eradicated extreme poverty taking 900 million out of poverty. I live in a city of 15,000 homeless. We, as a global people, need to be in cooperation, learning from each other and connecting, not driving war. This is imperialism greed and it's at the expense of all the people on the planet. There is healthcare to address, climate chaos, and the migrant nations it will be producing soon. World resources need to be directed to caring for the people on the planet. So get to know China. Don't be used by their narrative. It's the State Department narrative. Which side are you on? Is it about capitalism or communism or is it about care and callousness? Don't get stuck, stuck, quieted by the red scare that they'll definitely be using. This is about peace and love against lies and hate. You can feel it when you're in it. Find which side you're on and you'll have a ground to stand on. We have a website full of webinars and articles and stories. There's a collective in China supplying us with weekly insights into the news of China called the Dongfen Collective. And in the next month, they're going to start giving us insight into the political discourse and what that looks like in China and what they're having arguments about. We'll learn their form of engaged democracy as they take on big issues, issues that are so familiar to ours. So from the Chinese point of view, this is blaming the victim. China's not the protagonist in this. Learn the history, theirs and ours. And please engage. If you engage in any of the actions I post, then you'll be invited to engage in the ones I post every week. It is going to be up to us to change this narrative. And thanks for all you do for peace. Thank you, Joni. When we look forward to what everyone I post in the chats, so people can follow up with you, really appreciate what you had to say. Next, I would like to introduce David Swanson. David, I've known David for, I don't know, over a decade. He's phenomenal, wonderful thinker, a brilliant thinker. He's an author, activist, journalist and radio host. He's the executive director of World Beyond War. We'll also be hearing from Leah Bolcher, president of World Beyond War in a moment. David is the campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. I'm sure you've seen their petitions. He's written a number of books, including War is a Lie, and When the World Outlawed War. David blogs at davidswanson.org. You can follow him there. Also at warsacrime.org. David Swanson hosts Talk Nation Radio. He recently interviewed Radea and myself on Michelle Florin or any other foreign policy issues. And David is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee. He was awarded the 2018 Peace Prize by the US Peace Memorial Foundation. David, take it away. Thank you, Marcy. Terrific job you're doing with these calls. Thank you, Medea. Wonderful remarks by Hugh and Lee and by Jodi. I think I would learn more by skipping my turn here, but I'll try to talk briefly. Leah Bolcher, who's going to be speaking soon, I think, is the president of the board of the group that I'm the director of World Beyond War, which we started several years ago now, to try to create something global to go after the whole institution of militarism with educational work and with activist work. And that's what we've been trying to do. So we have chapters in Canada, for example, that have been working on trying to free Meng Wanzhou and getting a lot of heat in Canada for pushing that there. But we are forming chapters and there are chapters that you can join in increasingly in all parts of the world. We also are doing endless webinars now. And I think we all need to be taking more advantage of doing this globally. There's no reason we can't have people from China, from Korea, from any part of the world on these online events with us. And it's just wonderful when we do have people from all over the world talking together as a community of peace activists. It's very encouraging. Some of the local campaigns that chapters are working on in addition to closing bases, which is Leah's topic, are divestment and demilitarizing police forces. So we're working on those and other particular campaigns that you can find on worldbeyondwar.org. On this topic of China and a Cold War, and I think there is this problem of Cold War with Russia as well, I think the first thing we have to do is cure exceptionalism. And I wrote a book a year or so ago called Curing Exceptionalism. The idea that anyone would fault China for failing at something, speaking from the United States, that you would fault anyone on earth for failing at anything from the United States is the great absurdity that we have to question. And we have to cure competitiveness. This notion that you can talk about some country as a corporate competitor, an economic competitor slash a military enemy is just madness. We have to stop letting someone designate for us these enemies and these competitors. We also have to stop imagining that bombing people can somehow provide them with greater rights. We don't have to prove that China is not doing anything wrong. We have to reject the absurd idea that anybody is helped by threats and attacks. We have to stop imagining that other nations arming themselves somehow threatens our rights, that China is going to take away our freedoms. I think we have to recognize that we're being played for suckers, that we're being lied to, that China and Russia simply make much more profitable enemies for weapons dealers than does terrorism. And so this is the need for the Asia pivot. And it would be so easy to get a reverse arms race going. There is no question that if the United States scaled back the teeniest bit, rather than continually upping the military spending and the bases and the ships, that China would follow suit. But it has to be given that chance. So I wrote a couple days ago and I put the link in the chat earlier and I sent to Marcy proposing what I might talk about an article called 27 Things You Can Do. And I've mentioned a few of them in passing already and I'll try to mention a few more, but not nearly the whole list. You can go to the link in the chat. But one thing we can do is to raise awareness of the nuclear danger, shifting the threats and provocations and basing and weapons building to a nuclear enemy is a whole different danger from making terrorism the focus. And there is going to be a wonderful day for education and activism and agitation and celebration on January 22nd, when nuclear weapons become illegal in 50 plus nations. And we push other nations to do the same. So you can go to worldbeyondwar.org slash one two two, meaning January 22nd and find a large and growing toolkit of things to use on that date. You can also find, as one of the 27 things, a form to email your Congress members, your senators and misrepresentatives in Washington on getting out of the way and letting Korea make peace. The things that happened in Washington, this past era, this past regime that's on the way out, that really struck me in terms of power arrangements, were number one, that Congress finally used the war power's resolution and ended a war, but it was vetoed. And that Congress now has adopted this habit of forbidding presidents to end wars. So you can't take troops out of Korea, which hadn't even been proposed as far as I know. You can't take troops out of Afghanistan. You can't take troops out of Germany. That would be, you know, merely 75 years. It's too reckless and rushed. But this is insane to have Congress forbidding the ending of wars. So we really need to focus on repeating that ending of the war on Yemen and saying what's next, Afghanistan, Syria, which ones can we proceed to end one by one and undoing this notion that Congress can forbid ending a war. One of the items that I had in this list that I think Marcy put in the agenda as what I was talking about was the Green New Deal. And the reason I mentioned the Green New Deal is that it's the best opportunity we've got to get any money out of militarism. And getting any money out of militarism is the best chance that a Green New Deal has of doing anything significant, because that's where the money is. And, you know, we couldn't get 10% out of militarism during a deadly pandemic to move it to opposing the deadly pandemic. This is how entrenched that spending is. But if something's going to pass, that's going to be called a Green New Deal or something like it, and we can get not just Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, but the whole Congress to understand that they need the military money, and we can move some of that money as part of that deal to some sane foreign policy, as well as domestic policy initiatives, we just might get a few dollars out of the military budget. Another thing I think we need to do is get Congresswoman Lee and Congressman Pokan to tell us who's in the military budget reduction caucus and what it stands for, and start getting every member of Congress into it. And I think the biggest enemy in the Pentagon is not China, is not Russia, is not North Korea, is not Iran. It's having college like normal countries do. It's making college part of public education. It's giving young people the choice of getting an education instead of joining the killing machine. So we have to advance that. But I think the early opportunity is going to be on ending the war on Yemen, and I think we have to expand that not just to the practice of ending more wars, but to ending the weapons sales, and not just to Yemen, but as in Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's bill, ending the weapons sales to all the human rights abusing nations, and then ending the insane notion that you can use war weapons without abusing human rights, and ending foreign weapons sales entirely. This is what we need to be moving toward, and Congresswoman is going to introduce her package of seven piece related bills again, but this time separately as seven separate occasions. And I think we should be promoting each and every one of those. I think also on our list should be going after Biden to end the sanctions on the National Criminal Court. You don't get more lawless than sanctioning the courts. And of course, having pushed back on Flournoy and been part of a successful change there is terrific. We need a few more of those in the coming weeks. There aren't any good ones. We shouldn't be standing for near-attending or any of the war mad nominees that are in front of us. So this list goes on and on. I'll stop and save the rest for conversation and get to another speaker. Thanks, Marcy. Thank you, David. Wonderful to have all of you participating. I'm learning a lot. I appreciate it. All right. I believe, Hania. Oh, no, excuse me. Mindy, you're going to introduce Leah. No, that's Hania. Oh, I'm sorry. Hania. It's going to introduce Leah. I thought Molly. I'm Molly. Okay. I will introduce myself. It's probably the easiest. Leah, I would love to introduce you, but I'll pass it on to Maria. All right. Well, I'll start out just by saying that it's been wonderful working with Leah in many capacities, both the world beyond war and before that, the United for Peace and Justice, and now with the fabulous work that you've been doing, Leah, about the U.S. bases. And I think that's such an important component. And you, as a veteran, know very well these issues and speak from a position of authority that many other people don't. And so maybe if you give us a little bit of your background and then tell us about the campaign to close U.S. bases. Great. I'm happy to do that. Thank you very much. Before I get to start my presentation, I wanted to shout out to Code Pink because I was part of a delegation that went to Pakistan in 2012 when I was the President of Veterans for Peace. And it really changed my life. It changed my focus on when you meet with people who are the real victims, firsthand victims of American war. It's really a sobering thing and very enlightening. So whenever the travel eases up and we can travel again, if Code Pink, I'm sure we're putting together more delegations. I highly recommend them. Marcy, can you share, give me a power to share my screen? Oh, sure. Sure. Yes. Okay. Here we go. All right. Over now. All right. I think. Can you see, are you guys seeing my slide? I am not. Well, you're a co-host. So you should be able to share your screen. Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm so sorry. This is so complicated. You know, share. Oh, there we go. Oh, there you go. Yay. Okay. All right. All right. Okay. So the first thing I want to tell you, for Christ's sake, let's go in here. Okay. The first thing I want to tell you is, here's a quote from the Pentagon strategic plane document. And they put it in black and right, right there, they say right from the very beginning, first sentences that we are going to be competing with China and that they are an adversary that is reemerging. And we've got to focus our attention them. The second little quote there is, is basically a military pablum to talk about anything a military does. I pretty much fall into one of those categories. But the US military needs their bases in order to carry out their policies. And this, this chart map you may have seen before, sometimes it's startling for people to see this because they didn't realize that the American military has divided the whole world up to sections. And by geography, so we can better control them and command them. And so the, the sectors are North America, South America, Europe, Central Asia, Africa, and Pacific Command. And actually there's a little bit old chart because now they call it Indo Pacific calm, Indo peck calm to include the Indian ocean. But it basically we treat the world like a battlefield. And what's even worse is now we treat the spaces about if it's the latest unified command is space calm. So, you know, so here's a chart that kind of shows you where most of the bases are the circles indicate how many and the size of them. And this chart was put together by a fellow named David Vine. He's a professor of anthropology at American University. He's written two books about American military bases. The one's called base nation. It kind of goes history of the basis and where they are. And then the United States of it makes a point that not only is are the bases imperative to launching wars and make in facilitating wars and making them happen logistically by prepositioning troops and fuel and that kind of thing. But there are actually a cause of war. And he makes that point very clearly in his second book. I think it's I think absolutely that's true. And that is why we believe it will be on war that if we can close these military bases, it will be a huge step towards peace and a huge easing of tensions. And just it couldn't it couldn't possibly do anything bad. I think towards peace if we get rid of these bases, it would be enormous help. So Indo-Pac-Com is the area we're talking about tonight in regards to China. And it consists of these 36 countries that are in green. But I also want to bring people's attention to the point that it's not just the bases in the Pacific, but probably more importantly to the military is the naval operations, the naval, the carrier strike groups. The carrier strike group is an aircraft carrier with several support ships that defend the aircraft carrier. And those ships have cruise missiles and the carrier has probably 40 or more aircraft that have missiles on them. And there's also at least one submarine hanging out with the carrier strike groups. And so we keep them all the time roaming around outside of China and Iran. And that's whenever the military wants to put their foot down or make a point, they move a carrier into place and that fits everybody in fear. Because these carriers and the ships and the aircraft all carry hundreds of missiles that are able to attack anywhere. So Japan has the most American military people stationed on it than any other country in the world. Japan is not a very big country. Northern Island Hokkaido. And then you have Honshu, Tokyo's about here. This is Shikoku and Kyushu. And we're down here in the red. That's Okinawa. Now there are about 90 bases on mainland. And bases is kind of an unclear word. Base is we're talking about facilities where American military people are. They're not all big bases with commissaries and housing and all that. Some of them are quite small, but we're using that word basis to talk about that. But Okinawa, which is very small as you saw, and this is a chart of the main island of Okinawa. It has its own culture. They have their own language. It's not really, it's not equivalent to another island in Japan. It's not been treated that way by the Japanese or by other countries. So they're their own unique culture. But they're also treated as subordinate to Japan's government. And that's why they get stuck, I think, with housing and hosting the US military to such an extent that they do. Because the Japanese people don't want these bases there. And so they put them someplace that they can't fight back very well. 60%. So you see how big Japan is. You see how tiny Okinawa is. 60% of the bases in Japan are here in Okinawa. Even though Okinawa is only 6% of the whole landmass of Japan, and about 20% of Okinawa is taken up with American military. Now the biggest big thing that's happening now with a lot of problems and a lot of pushback, a lot of resistance is Hanoko. A few years ago, or so, maybe six or eight years ago, there was a Marine incident where a United States Marine raped, or three of them, I think, a 12-year-old girl. And it was huge, huge incident. These Marines were based at Futenma Air Station in a very crowded part of Okinawa. And so the public was very, very outrageous, as they should be. And so the solution they came up with was moving those Marines to another part of Okinawa, which is obviously absurd. But that other place is Hanoko. And they are working on a project to dig and deepen the seabed so that it can support a runway, an air facility. The problem is that the seabed itself is described as soft as mayonnaise. It's very, very soft. It's impossible, almost impossible, to build something on it. And so it's the cost overruns. It's done what they thought it would take to spend, it's almost like $12 billion, 12 years. And so not only do you have usual problems with another military base, and you have the crime, and you have all the pollution and toxic waste that all of that, but this mayonnaise seabed may not ever allow them to build a thing. And once it's built, it may crumbled through an earthquake, because it sits on two fault lines. So it's completely, the population there very much against it protesting all the time, and it's still going ahead, but they're still protesting, and we can still stop it. We just have to keep working on that. South Korea has the second most number of American military personnel stationed on it, and most of them are at the DMC line you'll see there. About 25,000 troops. There has been recent talk that the United States was to return 12 bases in the northern part of South Korea, but the sticking point is the cost of cleaning up all the environmental damage that the U.S. has caused, and U.S. saying that they're not going to pay for it, and that's why, that's a negotiation, and it's, don't get me started. Australia. Australia is a very good relationship with the United States. They partner frequently. Australia's involved, to a good extent, with a rim pack, which is the big multinational wargame exercise in the Pacific Rim. They have several facilities around Australia, but the good news is that there are people pushing back. There's an international peaceful Australian network, or IPAN, that's been formed, that has groups from all over the area. In fact, a member of our board of directors, Liz Womerswa, who lives in New Zealand, actually was a focus speaker at the IPAN conference in Australia, so we do have good connections with the activist groups that are on the ground and in their own countries. The Philippines is no longer a big place for the United States military to work from, but in 1904, Subic Bay was created, which is right in here, and had been used heavily by the U.S. 7th Fleet for ship repairs and refueling, all that kind of thing, and then Clark Air Force Base here in 1945, also massive base, and had lots and lots of activity there. But in 1991, the Philippine Senate rejected the continuation of basing rights and wanted to kick the U.S. out, and so it looked like that was going to happen, and then Mount Mintatubo erupted, which severely damaged both of the facilities, and that kind of facilitated the return of American troops back to the United States, but it kind of collapsed that military infrastructure that we had in the Philippines. Now, right now, they're operating under something called a visiting forces agreement, and that is something between a country's naval forces and the host country, agreements about what kinds of actions that the Navy can do in the waters surrounding Philippines, and for the United States to do their own unilateral exercises, whatever. So the VFA, as long as it's in place, the United States doesn't have to go back to the Philippine government and ask permission to do these things. So it's important to the American government to have it, but in this February, in 2020, the President of Philippines, I know he's called the President, but whatever, Rodrigo Duarte said, he wants them gone. He wants to demolish the VFA too and end it. He doesn't want to cater to the Americans in any way, but a lot of people in the Philippine government disagreed with that, and especially worried about China's influence in the small islands over in this area, the other side of Philippines. And so they put a lot of pressure on him, I think, and so in June of 2020 this year, just a few months after that, they have now imposed a freeze on making that decision to dismantle the VFA. So right now, the Americans have said, thank you, we're really happy that you're not going to dissolve that, and we want to work with you. And anyway, right now the VFA is still in effect, but we don't know what will happen with it. Guam in the Mariana Islands, just to mention here that the United States, all those marines that Futemina, I can't pronounce the name, Aris, the marine mirror base, they wanted to put them somewhere immediately, and Tanopo is going to be a few more years. So they moved a bunch of marines to Guam, and there's resistance there to more troops there, but Guam is considered a territory of the United States that there's not a lot of pushback on that. And a really reprehensible thing that the United States has done in the past and still doing is creating live fire ranges on small islands that hardly anybody live on. And then in some cases they have moved entire populations off their island somewhere else, and they destroyed the environment in the island, and they have no place to go back to. That's happened more than once. So resistance, how can we get these bases closed? I describe what I think of as an inside and an outside strategy. And the inside is working with the Pentagon and Congress to try to find, identify bases, maybe costing a lot, or maybe strategically redundant, or no longer strategic, or important, or whatever, and kind of going to this inside the Beltway idea. There are people, they're a member of this overseas base realignment and closure coalition, or OBRAC. It was formed by David's Vine, I mentioned earlier, and it's a group of people. I represent World Beyond War on it. There are other veterans and professors and think tank people, former representative of Congressmen, and they have contacts with the inner sanctum of how things happen in Washington. It was a big, big eye-opener for me, but these people, they know how to give something before a committee, they know how to lobby. So that's the inside strategy. There's another group, the Black Alliance for Peace has a campaign to shut down AFRICOM. AFRICOM was one of the six areas, and they are also kind of taking this inside strategy, working with the Congressional Black Caucus to work on this issue with that kind of an inside tactic as well. Now the outside strategy is working with groups that are in country that already have their own activist groups and pressure points identified, and trying to support them as much as we can. And then World Beyond War is a charter member of the Coalition Against U.S. Foreign Military Basis and Code Pink and a whole bunch of other organizations are charter members of that as well. And we have had conferences, we have had support actions for resistance in Okinawa, especially, we've never heard of that. And so what is World Beyond War doing? What can we do and what are we doing? We have members in 188 countries around the world, and we are able to talk to all those people in all those places and facilitate networking. And we can tell all the people who live in South Korea who are members about other organizations or groups or people and hook them together in, you know, build, multiply the power that we have by networking. So we have that capability. Education is a big thing. We just recently hosted a webinar in conjunction with Black Lives for Peace and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom on AFRICOM and it was wonderful. It was a really great educational tool. We have data sheets, info sheets. Right now we're getting ready to start a major research project of all the military bases. We have a guy that is going to take this on a professional research giant project that I don't know how to do. And we're going to be able to use that research in the future to lobby and to make points with Congress about what we found out. We can promote and support in-country resistance by letting people know about their activities. We put it on our website by writing articles about it. We can do petitions. We can create actions, all kinds of things. And then I am hoping, it is my dream, my vision, that World Beyond World will become central hub of anything that is against the foreign bases, that we will become the go-to place, that we have all the information, we have all the contacts, we have all the history and the facts. We'll be known as the authority on closing US for a military basis. So we're going to need all the help we can get. If you're interested in helping with anything associated with the campaign, please let us know and I will hook you right up. Thank you so much. Thank you, Leah. That was very educational and I hope that you'll send me the PowerPoint and I can share it in a summary email that I'll send out to attendees. That was wonderful. Okay, I think Hania is going to introduce Molly now. Last but not least, I want to introduce Molly Hurley, who is a former fellow with Beyond the Bomb, a grassroots organization working to prevent nuclear war and now works for them as a fellowship associate. She helps guide the next generation of anti-nuclear activists. In addition, she is conducting her own independent research on nuclear weapons issues, as well as the role that art could play in building the movement for disarmament. She currently serves as a nuclear program fellow for the Prospect Hill Foundation and will even travel to Japan next year to continue her work. Please take it away, Molly. Great, thank you. Let's hear really quickly would it be possible to share our presentation? Sure, let me just make you a co-host. Perhaps while I'm finding your name here, you can just explain some of the work that you've been doing. Sure, yeah, so with Beyond the Bomb at least, we're really focused on getting a diverse set of young people involved in the anti-nuclear movement and educating them on what's happening and giving them a sense of agency over this issue and the Prospect Hill Foundation. I'm kind of focused on continuing my own personal education on current nuclear issues and its history and everything. Let's hear, in addition to that, okay, so let's just jump right into a little a slight just a very brief history of China and its nuclear program to do that look at what it looks like today. So this was from August 2020 by Arms Control Association Federation of American Scientists just put out a new report on China and they now say that China has about 350 nuclear weapons with 270 of those being operational. If you look at reports from the Defense Department, it is going to be a little bit lower. That's because FAS also and it looks like ACA also includes non-operational warheads. What's really significant here is to notice that China has about 300-350 nuclear warheads while the US and Russia have about 6,000 or more. So China's arsenals about 120th the size of Russia and the US. Russia and the US own about over 90% of the world's total warheads and then you can see the other seven countries and the approximate size of their arsenal. Just a really brief overview of China's nuclear program. So they first decided to start developing nuclear weapons in 1955. In 1956, Mal gave a speech on nuclear weapons in which he referred to them as a paper tiger which for a lot of western listeners was very confusing. Just the idea of ever describing nuclear weapons as being sort of an empty threat of made of paper and they're just like a scary tiger but they're made of paper essentially. I guess I'll try to give a really brief contextualization but the idea is that especially under Mao but still today too I would say China looks more essentially what Mao was trying to convey is the idea that it's people and their dedication to politics or ideology or like the cause essentially. Their dedication to the revolution and the cause is what is going to win a war not some not a nuclear weapon or not any amount of technology but like the people's will is what is going to win a war and at the same time they view nuclear weapons as just being a form of political coercion and that perhaps and especially now other countries would hopefully dare not actually use a nuclear weapon due to all the different types of repercussions that there would be should a nuclear weapon ever get used again and now it's essentially just a tool for political coercion. China referred to it as nuclear blackmail back in the day when they were getting pressure from both the Soviets and the US under their nuclear arsenal but anyway so then in 1964 their development was successful they tested a nuclear weapon and on the day that Mao announced they successfully tested a nuclear weapon he immediately announced the policy of no first use in which China pledged to never use a nuclear weapon first in any sort of aggression or war or anything. Their nuclear weapons would be purely for retaliation and another side to that is that they would also never use a nuclear weapon against a non-nuclear state. Let's see here in the beginning they had an idea of socialist proliferation which was a belief in successful development of nuclear weapons or they had a belief that the successful development of nuclear weapons could inspire other post-colonial nations that successful development is possible. The philosophy was abandoned later on and changed to a belief in and a commitment to eventual complete disarmament worldwide but kind of originally what China's plan was to try to replace the sense of terror surrounding nuclear weapons with a scientific understanding. Let's see here pretty much since the get-go China's policy has been one of minimum deterrence and uncertain retaliation so China the details on China's arsenal and philosophies and stuff like that are a little murky one of is because China does is a semi-secretive country but that's also semi-armed purpose too and that they want because of that uncertain retaliation such that if China were to be attacked they are running a huge risk because they don't actually know where China's nukes are a lot of their nuclear weapons their ground-based strategic their ground-based missiles and everything are mobile they kind of just drive around the country and stuff like that so they're harder to target and they and exact numbers and details and everything are a little bit murky as well so that we can't pinpoint exactly China's nuclear capabilities and so there's even more sweat of the uncertain retaliation that they might have. In 1980 they joined the conference on disarmament so what's important to note is that the kind of the hallmark nonproliferation treaty the NPT was open for signature in 1968 and entered into force in 1970 China did not join that and India and Pakistan still haven't joined that in North Korea withdrew from that the reason that India and Pakistan and even Israel never really signed on to it was the belief that the NPT created a type of nuclear apartheid such that there are the nuclear has and then there are the nuclear have not so that's kind of how China felt at first two they didn't really like the superpower model that was that we were trending towards at that time they wanted a more multilateral world so in 1980 they did join the conference on disarmament which was created with the explicit purpose of being a more multilateral environment for negotiations however then in 1992 they did eventually sign on to the NPT part of this was from public pressure to join this and part of this was for a show to their deep commitment to nonproliferation and eventual disarmament just kind of a show of good faith whether or not any of the nuclear armsates who are signed on to the NPT have actually been upholding their end of the bargain is like a whole other conversation but then in let's see I think I think they're signing the NPT though is an example of China's ability to give in to social and community pressure for certain actions which runs counter to the belief that China is immune to these types of pressures as a quote unquote non-democratic state which is one argument against the treaty on the prohibition or of nuclear weapons right now that it's not going to do anything to China because China never listens to its people and I think that is I think that's misleading kind of the same along the same vein in 1996 they joined the comprehensive test ban treaty which was an even bigger show of commitment to the cause because China's nuclear weapons came about 20 years after the US's and then Russia was much before them too they were kind of out of the P5 they were one of the last ones to actually successfully get their nuclear weapons and so then just like 30 years later sign a treaty that they would not commit that they would not do any more nuclear testing is a big show of commitment because it means that by not doing nuclear tests it would really limit the future development of their nuclear program and so I think that if they're signing onto the NPT and CTBT are really significant points in history and then in 1995 they put out their first white paper which is a formal document outlining new their nuclear strategy and the most recent one that came out was in 2019 it's an open it's the quote-unquote open strategic challenge to the US but one that does not have to lead to conflict basically it characterizes their modernization and expansion as purely defensive the US and other major nuclear powers both recognized and unrecognized were also currently pursuing modernization and China's characterizes their being purely defensive especially against the rising aggression from the US and most importantly it reiterates China's desire for a win-win cooperation regarding disarmament and also just like in general diplomacy as well as a recommitment to their no first use policy so a quick look at understanding the problem today first we can look a little bit at New START which is a new strategic arms reduction treaty which is set to expire February 5th it's the last remaining arms treaty or nuclear arms control agreement between the US and Russia that Trump was not going to extend biting houses he will extend it one big sticking point for Trump and why he didn't really want to extend it at first was because he wanted to turn it into a trilateral deal between US Russia and China however if we go back to the beginning of my power point this would have been a completely asymmetrical agreement because China's arsenal is 120th the size of the US and Russia's so China was like no way we're not joining that and then they and then the State Department did use this as a tactic to further villainize and blame China for being uncooperative and everything um let's see here uh Trump has since dropped that it doesn't look like New START's going to get renewed before Trump leaves office uh biting houses that he will renew it that's a whole like US Russia thing hopefully it does get renewed but also moving on I think what's significant is that from the beginning China has always had a no first use policy and a commitment to this and this is something this is the central thing that beyond the bomb is currently working on it's getting a no first use policy from the US as well and there is a House and Senate bill um in Congress that we're trying to build get co-sponsors on so that we can uh put it on the floor for vote and everything um China for years has been trying to encourage the other powers to adopt a policy of no first use um it is a really good important first step to more same nuclear policy um so that all of our fingers are finally off the nuclear trigger um let's see here uh one last thing and then um just looking at US hegemony um the US belief in requirement of nuclear weapons for sake of national security against external threats um and I think um couldn't leave touched on this a little bit too but it's the idea that like the US gets to keep its nuclear weapons to protect itself and its national security and like protect itself from external threats and yet China and North Korea don't um that like they they are too irresponsible for that kind of thing possibly or just a complete lack of acknowledgement of the hypocrisy or lack of understanding of like why China or North Korea might feel compelled to maintain their arsenals against um US aggression and everything um and of course this orientalist belief if they feel that like Pakistan, India, China, and North Korea are too because they are too irresponsible or emotional or willing to sell it or ideological zealots whatever kind of mischaracterization to play to make these people seem that they are less human than and less responsible or rational than US um uh leaders um it's just ridiculous um and I and that's uh something that is really plaguing um our current understanding of these Eastern regimes as well including China I think um let's see here um I think also something that's important to point out is that uh US nuclear weapons are on hair to grow alert meaning that these could be uh um sent off and detonated at literally any moment within minutes um as opposed to China they actually keep their warheads separate from their delivery systems um there are a few that they um keep nearby in case they need to be installed quickly but for the most part um I think that's a really interesting point about China's nuclear arsenal um that also reduces the risk of mistakes being made because they're trying to make decisions too quickly uh which the US is at risk of um if word comes in that there's an incoming nuclear attack on the US the president has approximately seven minutes to decide whether or not to launch a nuclear attack in response and that's definitely not enough time uh because a lot of times that these um that these have come in they've been false alarms we have had uh numerous occasions throughout history since 1945 of false alarms coming in and just like through sheer luck uh we did not start a nuclear war on accident um let's hear but that oh and then also sorry if uh any of you want to contact me or something um this is my twitter as well as my email if you're interested in uh be on the bomb definitely check out our website um if you want to join our fight to get a policy of no first use we also do uh we also we don't just focus on no first use but uh basic anti nuclear anti war things such as defunding the pentagon um and getting new start push through and everything and the prospectile foundation you can uh see brief updates every now and then on my independent work and everything um but anyways that is all i have for now so thank you thank you so much molly hurley with the on the bomb so much information to digest and uh such powerful speakers i want to thank our participants panley david swanson lia bolger molly hurley jody evans it's phenomenal the work that you're doing and i appreciate all the posts in the chat and i want to remind people to save the chat and also ask you we have 67 still with us um if you will join us for an action item now um medea is going to tell us about that well i think maybe we should allow the people who have to go to leave um we're going to do this collective phone calling and see how it goes and this is going to uh senators leaving messages of their machines but we do want to uh say to those of you who came and i know it's late it's been almost an hour and a half pack full of fantastic information i feel like i want to go and listen to everything all over again um so to uh echo marcy and saying thank you so much for those great presentations and we will be uh meeting every week so we will be letting you know about the next one and um marcy anything we for those people have to leave anything you want to add or honey no i just that i i have recorded this on my computer hopefully it's work working out and um i can send it to code pink to have code pink upload it to their site or to youtube and i'll let you know about that um where you can see it uh i do urge you to save the chat there's a lot of excellent information links if you want to get further involved and uh can you tell people how to save the chat in case they don't know sure yeah where it says at the bottom of the chat it says two and then it says file and then there are three dots if you click on the three dots it'll say save chat so save chat there