 A new nukes, not so fast, we're going to look at the challenges both in court and in Congress. We have terrific guests, plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Department of Energy for failing to conduct the proper environmental assessments of ramped-up plutonium pit production for nuclear warheads, many times more powerful than the bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So that's Marilee Akele and Tom Clements will be speaking and then Dan Ellsberg Midway will be joining us to talk about his. Marcie, you want to start us? Yes, can you hear me? Can you hear me? Hello? You want me to? No, I can hear her. You can hear me? Yes, I can. Did you hear everything I said? Yes. Okay, good. So, yeah, so Tom Clements, Marilee Akele, Tom Clements. Uh-oh. Dan Ellsberg. We can't hear you Marcie. Um, are there others who can't hear me? Shay, can you hear me? Wow, yes. Okay. All right, I think we're good. So, Marilee Akele of Tribally Cares, Tom Clements of Savannah Riversite Watch will be joining us in the beginning and talking about their lawsuit and framing the whole conversation around the ground-based strategic deterrent. And then Midway in our Code Pink Congress Zoom, Dan Ellsberg, the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower, prolific author will be joining us. So, thank you. And then toward the end, we'll have our capital calling party. We're going to be calling in and writing into the House Oversight Committee staff urging hearings on nuclear rearmament, specifically on the quadrupling of these plutonium pits and the environmental hazards this poses. So, Medea, would you like to tell us what you're up to? You're always up to so much. I can barely keep up with you. Well, the latest thing we've been working on is this issue of Afghanistan and the U.S. World Bank and international community freezing the funds that belong to the Afghan people. So, there's almost $10 billion. Yes, that's a B, billion dollars in U.S. banks that belong to Afghanistan. There's billions of dollars in the World Bank, Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund. There's $450 million that the IMF, IMF International Monetary Fund, has been holding back for Afghanistan. And you have to recognize for Afghanistan's modern history, especially during the last 20 years, the country has been absolutely dependent on foreign money. So, when the U.S. pulled its troops out, it not only said, okay, we're out of here, it's we're not giving you this money. And the result is an economic crisis where the banks don't have cash. The food prices are soaring. People don't have incomes. The public sector workers are not being paid. And the very brutal Afghan winter is coming on and people will starve and freeze to death. So, we have a campaign called Unfreeze Afghanistan calling on these institutions, including our own government, to give the Afghans the money that was theirs. And there are all kinds of mechanisms where it could be direct payments to teachers and health care workers. But those mechanisms have to be used and used very quickly. So, that's what we're working on right now. And this week we have lots of meetings set up with members of Congress. We met with representative of the World Bank. We will be pushing Congress to push Biden to unfreeze that money. Thank you, Medea, for that update. Also, as many of you joined us last time, we're doing it now, Code Pink Congress, the first and third Tuesdays of the month. And we had some excellent speakers on the situation, the deportations and detentions of Haitian refugees. And we've used a lot of those interviews for Code Pink Radio. I don't know if you're familiar with Code Pink Radio, but it is our radio show that airs on WBAI in New York and WPFW in D.C. It's also on iTunes and Spotify. So, please do download it and share it. You'll hear more from Code Pink Congress on Code Pink Radio, as well as an update on the COP26. We're sending a Code Pink delegation that begins November 1st and, well, October 31st, actually, in Glasgow, Scotland. Without any further ado, let's go to our guests. Let's introduce our first guest, Medea. Well, I have the pleasure of introducing our first guest. That's Medea Kelly. She is the Executive Director of Livermore's Tri Valley Cares. She has been working for 35 years on in-depth research, writing, and facilitating public participation in decisions regarding Livermore Lab and the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex, Nuclear Weapons, Waste and Cleanup. She's testified before the House on Services Committee, the California Legislature, the National Academy of Sciences, and other important bodies. And she serves on the Community Work Group to advise the Environmental Protection Agencies on the Superfund Cleanup of Toxic and Radioactive Pollution from Livermore Lab. So, Medea, we are just delighted that you're here with us. You are a legend in this work. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for inviting me, and hello, everybody. Since I'm the first speaker, I'm going to spend a couple of minutes sort of with the big picture on this rearmament. My group, Tri Valley Cares, objected during the Obama Administration because there was this incremental ramp-up beginning it with U.S. Nuclear Weapons. And that, as you can imagine, accelerated enormously and quickly and ever more dangerously during the Trump Administration. If you take the Congressional Budget Office's estimate of this rearmament, you add the new weapons that were in the Trump Nuclear Posture Review, which came out after their estimate, and you add a very modest percentage for inflation. This is a $2 billion program just over the next 30 years. Billion, I said billion with a B. I'm so sorry. Trillion with a T. It's hard to imagine. I meant trillion with a T. $2 trillion over the next 30 years. So when you hear about Build Back Better and that they don't have enough money, think about this rearmament. This program intends to rebuild every U.S. nuclear weapon, often with new designs, often novel weapons, not like exactly like anything in the stockpile. This also intends to build up and build new bomb plants to build these new warheads. And that gets into expanded plutonium bomb core, or we'll call them pits, pit production. They also intend over in the Pentagon side to have all new delivery systems, new missiles that you'll hear about from Dan, new subs, new bombers. And again, sorry about that B, $2 trillion. So let's talk about now. There was great hope in some corners that the Biden administration would chart a completely different path, but we now have the Biden's administration's first budget request. And what's called the 050 line, which covers the Pentagon and the Department of Energy nuclear weapons enterprise, its top line is 1.7% more than during the Trump administration and stands at $753 billion for fiscal year 2022 alone. And as you sort of heard from what I said, some of this money is in the Pentagon, but new warheads are created in the Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration in the US nuclear weapons complex. And that's also where the new bomb plants are being built. So there's a lot we could talk about. We're going to focus in support of the actions you're going to be taking on three things that are connected. That is a new missile that Dan's going to talk about, the GBSD, ground based strategic deterrent missile. I'm going to talk about the new warhead that's going to sit atop that missile, and it's going to require new pets. And I'm going to introduce our litigation and then let Tom Clements drill down into it a little bit. So without further ado, I want to talk about the W87-1. And I'm going to try to keep this simple, but unfortunately, these warheads, you have to say the number. So it's W87-1. It's being designed at Livermore Lab, where I am. It will be the first new design warhead with wholly new components, completely new components to be developed since the end of the Cold War and the cessation of explosive nuclear testing underground in Nevada. It's intended to replace the W78, and it's going to sit atop, as I mentioned, the new ICBM called the GBSD, or ground based strategic deterrent missile. The W87-1 is a main driver for expanded plutonium pit production because it is being electively, electively designed with a novel pit, a novel core that is not exactly like anything else and will require new plutonium pit production. So when we're talking about new plutonium pit production, I want to make a real fundamental point here. My group doesn't like any nuclear weapons, but I want to talk about the particular dangers of new nuclear weapons. And to let you know that there is zero, zero scheduled pit production for existing designs in the existing nuclear weapon stockpile. All of the production is for new designs. This W87-1 that I just told you about will be the first. It is scheduled to take every single plutonium pit produced at either Savannah Riversite or Los Alamos Lab or at least the first eight years and probably a full decade. All of them are for a new warhead that we, A, don't need and B, is proliferation provocative and dangerous. I talked a little bit about the big picture money for this rearmament, but I really want to emphasize that the money isn't the only danger. The danger is the nuclear weapons themselves. During the Trump administration, other countries began upping their weapons designs and their capabilities. Folks, we are deep in to a new nuclear arms race. It is in some ways more dangerous than the one that I grew up with and that we were all lucky to survive without a detonation. And I honestly believe we were not wise that we got out of that arms race without a nuclear detonation. And by that, I mean a bomb dropped in anger. We had lots of them as tests. And the question is, we were lucky, right? We were lucky. Will we be lucky again? Will the world be lucky again? Possibly not. That's the biggest danger even beyond the money. And the things that we're talking about tonight are key parts of that rearmament, key parts of that new nuclear arms race that the United States is in the front of, is accelerating, is making more dangerous. So with that, I will say one more thing about the W87-1 in terms of its dangers. In order to certify this new warhead, I mean, they're walking it to the bloody edge of what they can certify they think without returning to full-scale nuclear weapons testing in Nevada, which ended in 1992. They're planning subcritical tests underground at the old Nevada test site. A subcritical test uses plutonium, but it's a smaller amount and it stops it right before it goes critical, but walks it to the bloody edge. So this is how novel this warhead is. This is how much it could have problems in the certification process. And if it does, which we believe it may, it will increase pressure to conduct a yield producing nuclear explosive test. And that's an event that would lead to the other nuclear arms states, including Russia, China, India, Pakistan, et cetera, to quickly follow suit. And the escalation of nuclear dangers in that event can't be overstated. So when we're talking about stomping these weapons, we really are in fundamental terms talking about the fate of the world and saving our planet and civilization as we know it. I mean, that's as fundamental as I can put it. So you have the new missile the Pentagon's developing. You have the warhead Livermore's developing to sit on top of that new missile. They're developing this warhead with brand new pits so that it requires expanded pit production in order to produce it. So a plutonium pit, for those who don't follow this all the time, it's the heart and the trigger of a modern nuclear bomb. And production of plutonium pits involves extensive processing and handling of extremely hazardous radioactive materials. And in 2018, and I'm not quite sure where Tom's going to come in. So I'll just say a few facts. In 2018, end of the Trump era, the federal government called for producing at least 80 new plutonium bomb cores per year at two locations, including 30 or more at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico and 50 or more annually at the Savannah River site where Tom is in South Carolina. So what did we do before this? We had a modest production capability from 1989 to the present at the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico. And the last time they did national environmental policy analysis, they allowed themselves up to 20 plutonium pits a year at Los Alamos. And do you know how many they made? Most years zero. Do you know the most they ever made in one year? 11. Does that tell you how many pits the United States needs even if it wants to maintain its present stockpile? It certainly gives you a hint. 80 or more a year, all for new designs, all for the W87-1 for at least eight years. Then they have a new sub-launched warhead called the W93 they want to design that will need new pits they say and that will then use that capacity. Again, nothing for what's in the existing stockpile. So extremely, extremely dangerous. And I want to say a couple words about the oversight committees which is your action tonight because Marcy was kind enough to invite me to meetings but they are extremely interested in this topic and looking at oversight of transportation. The National Nuclear Security Administration has not looked at this. I think Tom's going to talk about it. I hope when he talks about the litigation. But having plutonium pit production requires transportation at multiple sites. Obviously Savannah River, obviously Los Alamos, but also the whip facility for the waste. And even Livermore, they plan to bring plutonium from Los Alamos to Livermore. So Livermore can help with this research and expanded pit production. There are lots of environmental impacts possible that Congress should be involved in and are interested. And there's a incredibly exploding budget for this. I didn't try to numb you with budget numbers. But just imagine things tripling. And that's in the very beginning when it's still in the planning stages. So for all of those reasons, I'm so glad you're with us and so glad you're going to be doing this action with Marcy tonight. And I'll turn it back over to her and to Medea. Thank you so much. Maralia Kelly, Executive Director of Tri Valley Cares, one of several organizations that has filed a lawsuit against Department of Energy, charging the Department with failure to conduct a programmatic comprehensive environmental assessment of production of these new plutonium pits 80 per year without looking at the impact of doing this at multiple sites at the same time. I just wanted to back up and give everybody the broad overview that these pits that Maralia was talking about is for the ground based strategic deterrent they call the GBSD and that's 600 land based underground missiles that they expect to replace the Minuteman missile in North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, and Colorado. And there's actually a missile caucus in the Senate. It's mostly Republicans, but it does include John Tester, who's the senator from Montana used to teach elementary school music and now he's, you know, pushing new nuclear warheads. With that, I'd like to introduce our next guest, another plaintiff in this lawsuit, Tom Clements, serves as the director of the Savannah Riversite Watch. He, as I said, is a plaintiff in the Department of Energy, looking at the impacts of the ramped up production of plutonium pits, impacts on the environment, and on national security. So there's two subcommittees under the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee that we're targeting with our action tonight. Tom has worked for the US Forest Service and the US Office of Surface Mining and for the past 25 years has worked on nuclear issues for Greenpeace International, the Nuclear Control Institute, the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, Friends of the Earth, and the South Carolina chapter of the Sierra Club. And since January 2014, Tom Clements has served as director of the Savannah Riversite Watch. Welcome, Tom. Thank you very much, Marcy. Can you hear me okay? Yes. Okay, great. I'm so happy to be here. And before I start, let me just say I remember very well joining with Code Pink, I guess it was back in 2003, Medea, when you delivered a uranium yellow cake to Rumsfeld's house back behind the Chinese Embassy. That was quite a bit of fun and kind of flummoxed the security officers at his home there. Anyway, so I very much appreciate the work of Code Pink and what you're doing tonight. So I do have a few slides. They're mostly pictures, but following on what Mary Leah said, Shay, if you could put up just the first one. She already mentioned this, but the pit is basically the heart of the nuclear weapon. It starts the primary of the weapon and the secondary part has highly enriched uranium in it. And that secondary is from the Y-12 site, the DOE site in Tennessee. And as Mary Leah mentioned, the pits are right now the only place to produce them is Los Alamos. Next slide, please. So as you may have heard, pits were produced at Rocky Flats near Boulder, Colorado for many, many years. The site was rated because of environmental problems in 1989, officially closed in 1992, has been turned into a wildlife refuge, though the soil remains that was contaminated with plutonium here. You can see the before and after shots of the site in a member group with the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, which my group and Mary Leah groups are members of, is really tracking what goes on there as development starts encroaching. Next slide. So Los Alamos is the only site that has capability to produce pits, as Mary Leah said. So they want to expand this to 30 pits per year. DOE loves to call Los Alamos the plutonium center of excellence. But as you've already heard, in fact, it's really the plutonium center of failure. How in the world they're going to be able to expand to 30 or more, possibly up to 80 pits a year. Well, 30 by 2026 and 80, perhaps by 2030, it's going to be a stretch. Next slide. So along with Los Alamos, the other site that has been proposed is here in South Carolina to produce pits, the Savannah River site. It would produce 50 or more by the year 2030. But DOE officials have already said that the schedule has slipped between two and five years. That 2030 date and the 80 pits were in the National Defense Authorization Act back in 2015. So it is law. So we need to get the law changed on the number of pits produced. The two site option is not in law. This is a choice by DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration. And what they have hit on doing is locating the plutonium bomb plant. I call it the plutonium bomb plant. They call it a processing plant. I never call it that. It's a plutonium bomb plant. It would be located in this facility you can see here that was constructed to make mixed oxide fuel, mox fuel, to use in commercial reactors from surplus plutonium. They began constructing that in 2007. It was canceled in 2017 to allow the termination in 2018, but they wasted $8 billion on that one building right there. So the cost of the mox plant at Savannah River site has jumped earlier this year from $4.5 billion. Now it's $11.2 billion. So what we're looking at is perhaps one of the most expensive buildings in world history. If you look at what the cost is now, it's already pushing $20 billion. And these costs are guaranteed to continue to rise and the schedule is guaranteed to slip. By the way, I'm in Columbia on that map on the right. Next slide, please. So one thing that has not been looked at, and this is one of the reasons we have brought the lawsuit that I'm going to talk about, is a large amount of the plutonium waste, transuranic waste, would go to DOE's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico. There's been no analysis of that. And there's a lot of plutonium waste streams that would go into WIP that have not been analyzed in a holistic way. Next slide. So Tri-Valley Cares, Nuclear Watch, New Mexico, and Santa Fe, the Gullagicchi Sea Island Coalition here on coastal South Carolina, and Savannah River site have sued the Department of Energy and NNSA on June 29 to prepare the programmatic EIS on pit production, or a PEIS. And I'll give you some reasons about that in a minute. But just to jump ahead, the Department of Justice are the lawyers that we're facing off against in the case that was brought by the South Carolina Environmental Law Project located in Georgetown, South Carolina. They filed a motion to dismiss. We have to respond by October 25. So we're working on that response right now. But their filing was extremely weak, in my opinion. It said we had no standing, and that we were trying to challenge the 80 pits per year that Congress has put into law that needs to be changed. But we're not challenging that. We're challenging the fail to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act. And some of the reasons it merely has already mentioned a big one is transportation of plutonium between a host of sites, including Los Alamos, Savannah River, Lawrence Livermore, and then the waste to the waste isolation pilot plant. This has not been analyzed. They have not analyzed all the impacts at sites beyond Savannah River site and Lawrence Livermore. Again, sorry, Los Alamos. Again, the waste isolation pilot plant, Lawrence Livermore being principal, but also the PanTech site in Texas where the bombs are assembled and disassembled and where they're storing surplus pits that would go into the new pits. So they would actually put new plutonium metal on the road to be made into oxide to go into the pits. And also the Kansas City plant where non-nuclear components are made for nuclear weapons. They haven't analyzed this two-site strategy at all. They have failed to properly analyze environmental justice aspects. They have failed to analyze on-site waste disposal of other kinds of waste, including low-level nuclear waste. They failed to analyze the impact of low-level waste disposal at commercial sites, including in Texas and Utah. So there's a host of reasons that we have brought this lawsuit. And I think we're going to have a strong challenge when we make our filing on October 25th. The Department of Justice will have one week to respond, and we're going to continue pursuing this until we get the programmatic environmental impact statement. If the programmatic environmental impact statement is done, it will slow the whole process down, though in and of itself it will not get the law changed to eliminate the 80 pits per year requirement, to eliminate the ground-based strategic deterrent for which the first pits would be made, or to eliminate Savannah Riverside, which is DOE policy. And just a couple of other things. For FY 2002, there's a request of $1 billion for pit production at Los Alamos and $700 million for Savannah Riverside. Savannah Riverside has zero experience with pit production. They're not going to be able to do this. Last slide to end on a positive note. So we have one potential ally, in addition perhaps to the Oversight Committee. Adam Smith likes to talk a lot about being concerned about nuclear weapons proliferation and nuclear war, but he really doesn't do much. We also need to engage him. But I put a couple of quotes up here that give us some hope that he on the Armed Services Committee might take action next year. And I'll just read that. And nearly every instant, NNSA programs have seen massive cost increases, schedule delays, and cancellations of billion-dollar programs. This must end. He knows that pits are going to go far over budget and over schedule. And also on August 31 at a Brookings event, Savannah River sort of gives me an involuntary twitch after the whole mox disaster. I don't trust them. Will Savannah Riverside wasted $8 billion on mox? So what is Representative Smith going to do? And what is Congress going to do to fully review this whole problem that Mary Lee and I are talking about? So I'll leave it there and turn it back over to you, Marcy. Thanks very much. Excuse me. Thank you so much. Tom Clemens, Director of the Savannah Riverside Watch, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the Department of Energy for failing to conduct a programmatic environmental assessment of the ramped up production of plutonium pits. Dan Ellsberg is trying to join us. He had to go to the doctor. He's 90 years old. So we're working on that. But in the meantime, we can take questions for our guests. And if you have a question, please post your question in the chat. I can start out. And then Median, perhaps you have a question and others as well. So if you were going to, this is for Tom and Mary Lee, if you were going to outline the steps that we would need to take to really stop this in its tracks, what would those steps be? You want to go first, Mary Lee? Okay. So one of the things that I hope you've learned is that there's this direct connection between the missile, the warhead and the pets and stopping any one of them helps to stop the whole scheme. And so what do they need for pets and for the new warheads and the whole rearmament? The answer is money, right? And Congress holds the purse strings. And so and I will tell you that the fiscal year 2022 budget process is not completed. So you're doing this in a very timely manner. Contact your members of Congress now and at your leisure and tell them to stop the money. There are also several really good bills. I won't talk about them right now here because it's not the exact action that you're going to do tonight. But I would say stop the money. Stop the authorization. The 80 pits per year limit was put in by conservative members of Congress in the House and Senate Armed Services Committee in the National Defense Authorization Act. It can change. They changed it when they put that limit there. They can change it back to 20. They can change it to any other number. So push on the House and Senate Armed Services Committee to get that 80 pits per year changed. Also the third thing is which is why I'm excited. There are 118 participants on this call. It's public knowledge. We as the public are powerful if we take our knowledge and turn it into action. But people have to know about this before they can act and react. So you're actually part of what we can do about it and in particular the people that you talked to. Thank you very much, Maria. Yes, Tom. Let me just add a couple of things. The Defense Committee has authorized these programs and there was a move a couple of years ago in the House with Defense Authorization to get that 80 pits per year reduced. So I think we have something to hang some hope on with the Defense Armed Services Committees to get the authorization removed from 80 pits because there was already a move for that. So we need to get the authorization changed and we also, as Maria said, need to get the funding cut. But the second pit plant at Savannah River, it is not in law. This is just DOE policy. So we also need to pressure DOE itself and the Pentagon so they change their policy. They made a joint announcement in May 2018. They were going to pursue this two-site approach. So I think if we can slow them down in any way, like with this programmatic environmental impact statement, it's going to make them at least reconsider having two sites. Thank you, Tom. Yeah, and I'm just posting in the chat that the Secretary of Energy, of Energy, is Jennifer Granholm. And she's been campaigning for Bill Backbatter, but she's also a big supporter, as Tom pointed out on the phone with me the other day of this ramped up production, what they call it nuclear modernization. I refuse to call it that nuclear rearmament. So she needs to get the message, the Department of Energy needs to get the message, the people who oversee the Department of Energy, Diane Feinstein and the Senate. But ultimately, and correct me if I'm wrong, isn't this a matter of appropriations? Isn't this like Patrick Leahy from Vermont? He's Chair of the Appropriations Committee. Isn't it finally, isn't it in his lap, ultimately? He needs to be lobbying on this. Yeah. Senator Feinstein is the Chair of the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee through which the Nuclear Weapons Budget has to pass on its way to the Bigger Appropriations Committee. The House is also a great place to push. They in the past have tried to cut this program. I think they need to hear from us that just because we now have a Democratic president, they shouldn't stop trying to cut these programs. So that's important. I also want to bring up one thing that hasn't been talked about yet, if I might really quickly hear. If we win the litigation, what do we win? We win obviously the analysis, which is really important and could stop the program if it's shown what all the dangers are. But also, we win public hearings across the country in a national programmatic environmental impact statement. That gives us, you, everyone the opportunity to organize and use it as essentially a referendum on rearmament and expanded PIP production. So stay tuned for that as well. Thank you. That is very hopeful. I mean, that's one of the problems, right above many that the public has not had the appropriate opportunity to comment on any of this. Nadia, would you like to read one of the questions? Yeah, there's a couple of questions. One came from Madison who runs the China's Not Our Enemy campaign at Code Pink. And she asked what has been the intellectual justification for this nuclear proliferation. And I think in light of the fact that she runs our China program, it would be nice if you could say what are China and Russia doing to court modernize their nuclear weapons? Well, I'll answer on part of it. And I'm not fully informed exactly what China is doing. But the goal with the ground-based strategic deterrent, according to DOD, is to replace the ICBMs that are deployed in the states that Marcy mentioned. So this is part of their modernization. And they claim it's cheaper to deploy a new missile, the ground-based strategic deterrent, with new plutonium pits than it would be to refurbish all those 400 missiles that are already in silos. I don't buy that. And China is already seeing what the United States is doing. And as you may have seen, they could be making a whole new field of ground-launched ICBMs. So this is really exactly what the contractors want. And we haven't talked enough about them. This is being fueled by contractors. It's the contractors for Department of Defense and for the Department of Energy that are behind this. They're the ones behind talking up a new Cold War with China. We've got to face off against them. So we need to challenge what the contractors are doing in all this as well. And we really don't know who the contractors are going to be to build the SRS plutonium bomb plant yet. That's secret. We have some indication, but we don't really know who's going to build it or refurbish that mox building. And I just say one word about Secretary Granholm. I'm sorry. We have a bad Secretary of Energy. She is just countowing to what DOD tells her about nuclear weapons. She is not standing up. She's not informed. She won't meet with public interest groups. She's focused on climate change, which is great, but she needs to get informed about what's going on with potential new Cold War and what's happening with all the nuclear waste involved with that and the existing waste that DOE sets. Thank you. Nadia? Oh, well, Mayor Lea, did you want to add anything? No, that was a good item. Thank you. Okay, we'll look through the chat and see what else we've got. It's Northrop Grumman that's Northrop Grumman. Yeah, they got the sole source contract under for the ground based strategic deterrent. Yeah. That word deterrent is, I mean, U.S. deterrence means planning for full scale nuclear war. It's not a deterrent. We have a question from Anne Wright about the issue of protests. She said, I know there have been lots of protests in Kansas City and, of course, Livermore Lab, there are constantly protests. She's asking if you have them in South Carolina and can we call a national day of action? I typed something, Anne. You know, I'm in South Carolina. What more do I need to say? But land of Lindsey Graham and citizen involvement is far below what we need. And thanks to the local friends group, the Quakers who are involved and a few others, but we don't have a real big critical mass to take more action. So there are a core of people, but we have not had any protests per se, but we have had some fairly sizable meeting. Mary Lea came to Aiken, South Carolina. Jake Coglin from Nuclear Watch New Mexico. So that's the kind of thing we've done to try to get attention to these. All right. Thank you. I'll say something real clear about National Day of Action, because there are two that I think have an awful lot of potential to grow bigger and for folks on this call to organize some things in their own community. One is the ad hoc coalition that I belong to working on the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons is calling for entry into force day, which was January 22, 2021. So January 22, 2022 will be its first anniversary. And we're calling for actions in banner holding and sign holding all across the country and hoping to beat the 100 actions that we helped spark on entry into force day. And we'll have templates, banners, you know, things, things ready made that you can then add to all of your great science. So put January 22 on your calendar for 2022. Great. Really, maybe you can post that in the chat too when you're done. All right. And also the Hiroshima Nagasaki commemorations. This is not only our responsibility to the Habaksha, but this is an opportunity to bring people together and let them know what is going on now and what the dangers are now. So think about August 6th and August 9th also as opportunities to link together and create national days of action. Thank you. And I just wanted to check to see if Dan Ellsberg was on the call. As I mentioned, he was at the doctors and he was trying to get on. He was going to do his best to call in. I noticed somebody new entered and I wasn't sure. Dan, are you there? We will continue. All right. So somebody asked in the chat, who are the main military contractors working on this ground-based strategic deterrent? They include, as I mentioned, Northrop Grumman. They got the sole source contract, $13.5 billion. That was under Trump then. But they've been very clever, I don't know if that's the right word, in terms of getting others involved so that there are multiple stakeholders and jobs. Not that the jobs would be more than if we put people to work planning trees. Certainly that would be more beneficial. But they also include Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Bechtel, Honeywell, Aerojet, Rocketdyne, Parsons, Textron, and others. Okay. Any other questions? Feel free to jump in, Nadia, if you have a question. Last time we saw the nuclear freeze, it really gained so much momentum and was engaged. Lots of people were engaged in it. What do you think we need to do in terms of making this a mass movement? As you mentioned, it's so under the radar. Most people don't know anything about it. Any thoughts? Well, I'll comment. I was very active in the nuclear freeze, beginning in around 1990. So I, in Georgia, and we had a very active big group that was working on the Savannah Riverside. We have lost that. So I'm not going to present an answer, but I think rebuilding that concern is what we need to do. But I find here, most people don't know that the government is going to waste that $2 trillion on planning for nuclear war or that they're going to waste $100 billion on pit production at Savannah Riverside. So I think the potential is there to motivate people better, even in places like Eastern Kentucky or South Carolina. It hasn't happened yet, but if you look at the Department of Energy complex, I like to call them socialist fiefdoms. And Aiken, South Carolina, Livermore, California, the other sites, Pantex, Amarillo, Los Alamos, they were all created by the Department of Energy and they're heavily dependent or totally dependent on DOE funding. And outside those areas, I find that people are not so sympathetic. And we just need to do a better job that of telling people what's going on with our money getting transferred into contractors that are based in these hot spots, DOE sites, and the DOD production sites around the country. That's not a great answer because I suffer under this one every day. I wish we had more involvement, but stuff like this helps a lot. Thank you. Well, thank you. We have a question in here about is there a possibility of suing somewhere for the violation of U.S. obligations under the non-proliferation treaty where we're supposed to move towards the elimination of nuclear weapons, but we're doing the opposite. And I typed a partial answer in there, which is Article 6 does commit all of the signatory states with nuclear weapons to negotiating good faith for their elimination. And the International Court of Justice did rule in 1996 that that meant not just negotiate forever, but to actually achieve the elimination of nuclear weapons. That said, Article 6 is written with a few weasel words and some commas. And the Marshall Islands did sue in U.S. federal court in the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco where I am. We were a small part of that for U.S. non-compliance with Article 6 of the non-proliferation treaty, but unfortunately it was not successful. And the Marshall Islands also sued in the International Court of Justice in the Hague. All of the nuclear weapons states for their lack of compliance with disarmament. I think that's one thing that the oversight committee could look into as well. How is building new nuclear weapons in compliance with Article 6? I mentioned I was active in the nuclear freeze in 1990. I'm sorry, it was 1980. Oh my God. We're going to pretend we were really young when we did that. Well, you know, that's our action tonight. And before we go into that action in terms of reaching out to the oversight committee, if Shea's available, Shea, there, she was involved in the meetings with the staffers for Carolyn Maloney. She's the representative in New York who chairs the House Committee, the Oversight and Reform Committee. And also we had a meeting with the staffer for Congressman Ro Khanna, who's been a great ally on many fronts. He chairs the subcommittee over the environment for the House Oversight Committee. So our ask is that they conduct hearings. And the response was that, well, it was cautious. I'll say that it was cautious and engaged, but cautious. They wanted to know more about the lawsuit. They wanted to know what kinds of questions we would want them to ask. So we did provide them with lots of information on that front. The staffer for Congressman Khanna said that there were steps that would be taken before hearings were held and writing, talking to the Department of Energy, which we certainly do welcome. The bottom line is that they need to hear from more of us. We had constituents in both of those meetings, but there needs to be a much, a thunderous call for sunshine on this issue. So with that, let's go to our action. Shay, if you are available and can post the action in the chat and on the screen, that would be terrific. We're going to be calling into the House Oversight and Reform Committee staffers over the subcommittees on the environment and national security, because this is a national security issue, asking for the hearings and writing to them as well.