Update on Back From the Brink’s New House Resolution on Nuclear Disarmament (April 2025)

by Ann Froines, Back from the Brink-CT

To all friends in the peace and nuclear disarmament community:

A new House Resolution 317 for this Congressional session (2025-27), the McGovern-Tokuda Resolution, has added further language on goals for U.S. policy regarding the nuclear weapons arms race and fears of nuclear war.

It makes the same basic arguments that were included in House Resolution 77 on the need for action by our government (Congress and the President) to take a leadership role in restoring diplomatic talks with other nations on arms control treaties, “no first use” of nuclear weapons, and other urgent actions to de-escalate this frightening nuclear arms race.

It also includes three additional clauses highlighting the current environmental and human costs of nuclear weapons production, and the need for a just economic transition to ease the economic costs to communities of converting weapons factories to peaceable productive manufacturing.

Here is the language you need to know to call or write to your Congressional representative urging support for House Resolution 317. We need to flood their offices with our message.

For more information see preventnuclearwar.org.

Thank you. Ann Froines for BftB-CT, [email protected].

Resolved, That the House of Representatives calls on the President to—

  1. Actively pursue a world free of nuclear weapons as a national security imperative; and
  2. Lead a global effort to move the world back from the nuclear brink, halt and reverse a global nuclear arms race, and prevent nuclear war by—
    1. engaging in good faith negotiations with the other eight nuclear-armed states to halt any further buildup of nuclear arsenals and to aggressively pursue a verifiable and irreversible agreement or agreements to verifiably reduce and eliminate their nuclear arsenals according to negotiated timetables, and, in particular, pursuing and concluding new nuclear arms control and disarmament arrangements with the Russian Federation to prevent a buildup of nuclear forces beyond current levels, and engaging with China on mutual nuclear risk reduction and arms control measures;
      B. leading the effort to have all nuclear-armed states renounce the option of using nuclear weapons first;
      C. implementing effective checks and balances on the Commander in Chief’s sole authority to order the use of United States nuclear weapons;
      D.  ending the Cold War-era “hair-trigger alert” posture, which increases the risk of catastrophic miscalculation in a crisis;
      E.  ending plans to produce and deploy new nuclear warheads and delivery systems, which would reduce the burden on United States taxpayers;
      F.  maintaining the de facto global moratorium on nuclear explosive testing;
      G. protecting communities and workers affected by nuclear weapons by fully remediating the deadly legacy of environmental contamination from past and current nuclear weapons testing, development, production, storage, and maintenance activities, and by providing health monitoring, compensation, and medical care to those who have and will be harmed by nuclear weapons research, testing, and production, including through an expanded Radiation Exposure Compensation Act program; and
      H. actively planning a just economic transition for the civilian and military workforce involved in the development, testing, production, management, and dismantlement of nuclear weapons and for the communities that are economically dependent on nuclear weapons laboratories, production facilities, and military bases.

Nuclear Weapons Will Be Illegal by International Law

New Haven Sunday Vigil (every Sunday 12-1 p.m. at Broadway, Park and Elm streets, NH)

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons [TPNW] opened for signature at United Nations headquarters in New York on Sept. 20, 2017. On Oct. 24, 2020, the treaty reached its 50th ratification, meaning that on Jan. 22, 2021, it will enter into force.

Nuclear weapons are the most destructive, inhumane, and indiscriminate weapons ever created. Both in the scale of the devastation they cause and in their uniquely persistent, spreading, genetically damaging radioactive fallout, they are unlike any other weapons. A single nuclear bomb detonated over a large city could kill millions of people. The use of tens or hundreds of nuclear bombs would disrupt the global climate, causing widespread famine.

This is a historic milestone for this landmark treaty. Prior to the TPNW’s adoption, nuclear weapons were the only weapons of mass destruction not banned under international law, despite their catastrophic humanitarian consequences. Now, with the treaty’s entry into force, we can call nuclear weapons what they are: prohibited weapons of mass destruction, just like chemical weapons and biological weapons.

— International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, https://www.icanw.org/. (ICAN is the international campaign to stigmatize, prohibit & eliminate nuclear weapons, a coalition of non-governmental organizations promoting adherence to and implementation of the United Nations nuclear weapons ban treaty.)

AND YET…

In the middle of a global pandemic, with all the desperate human needs it has created, General Dynamics’ Electric Boat Shipyard in Groton began construction in October of the first of two initial Columbia class ballistic missile submarines. Like its Ohio class predecessors, the fleet is designed to carry nuclear weapons. Several sections of these deadly weapons conveyors will be produced at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia. The Pentagon is spending 9.5 billion dollars from our taxes to produce these first two in a planned fleet of twelve. All of Connecticut’s Senators and Representatives have repeatedly lobbied for these contracts for many, many years. They never broach the issue of Connecticut’s economic dependency on an industry that produces weapons of mass destruction.

Plowshare Activist, Amistad Catholic Worker, Mark Colville Returns to Jail

On the night of April 4, 2018, New Haven resident and Amistad Catholic Worker, Mark Colville was arrested with 6 others at a non-violent Plowshares action at Kings Bay Naval Base, the largest nuclear submarine base in the world. The naval base has six ballistic missile submarines and two guided missile submarines.

“Nuclear weapons kill every day through our mining, production, testing, storage and dumping, primarily on Indigenous Native land. This weapons system is a cocked gun being held to the head of the planet” (from the statement of the seven arrested Plowshares activists).

Mark Colville was granted bail for skin cancer treatment that was successfully treated.

The following excerpts are from Mark before he and his wife Luz returned to Georgia, where, on Dec. 11, he self-surrendered to Georgia authorities.

Greetings in the peace that the world cannot give…

 

From the beginning, my participation in the Kings Bay Plowshares action was first of all an act of contrition for complicity in the sins of nuclearism and empire, and I’ve regarded any incarceration as penance for those sins.  But the jail has also been for me a place of ministry, personal faith-development and formation of conscience. …

With this in mind, there are no misgivings or mixed feelings about going back to Glynn County Detention Center, but rather a sense of rejoicing that, as Dan Berrigan liked to say, one has the freedom to go to jail.

A week ago, judge Cheesbro accepted a motion to return the bail money that was posted on my behalf and put me back in the jail on December 11.

This Tuesday, Luz and I will show up at the Glynn County Detention Center and part ways again, for another undetermined length of time. We will do this mindfully, reaching hands of solidarity toward our extended global family members who are now at this country’s border facing atrocities and uncertainties far beyond whatever hardships we might be obliged to bear.

…I’ll look forward to your postcards, and delight in all news of your ongoing efforts to bring about the nonviolent collapse of the U.S. empire, in defense of all creation…

Love and Prayers, Mark

[For the regulations on how to send letters to Mark, please see www.kingsbayplowshares7.org/jail-addresses]