Tri-Valley CAREs works to strengthen global security by stopping the development of new nuclear weapons in the US and by promoting the elimination of nuclear weapons globally. Tri-Valley CAREs monitors nuclear weapons and environmental clean-up activities throughout the US nuclear weapons complex, with a special focus on the Lawrence Livermore Lab and surrounding communities.
WMD: We Must Disarm: Get it Right by 2020
Aug4
Release Date:
08-03-2009
Thursday, August 6, 2009 - Hiroshima/Nagasaki Commemoration and Protest
7:30 a.m. at the Livermore Lab, corner of Vasco Rd. and Patterson Pass Rd.
March to the West Gate at 8:45 a.m.
Livermore, CA - Thursday, August 6, the 64th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, communities of conscience will gather at the gates of Livermore Lab to commemorate victims of nuclear carnage and call for the global elimination of nuclear weapons by 2020.
Peace, environmental, and social justice activists will gather at the corner of Vasco Road and Patterson Pass Road in Livermore with the urgent appeal, “We Must Disarm.”
The commemoration will begin at 7:30 a.m. with music, followed by remarks by Marylia Kelley, Livermore resident and executive director of Tri-Valley CAREs, and Andrew Lichterman, longtime abolitionist and attorney with Western States Legal Foundation. At 8:45 a.m. participants will march to the West Gate of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to issue their demand for the global abolition of nuclear weapons. It is anticipated that some people will risk arrest with non-violent acts of witness.
“It’s imperative that we gather at Livermore Lab,” explains Adrian Drummond-Cole, organizer with Livermore-based Tri-Valley CAREs, “Many of the nuclear weapons in the United States arsenal were designed in Livermore, so nuclear abolition has to begin here.”
This year, organizers join with the Mayors for Peace, an association of 2,963 mayors in 134 countries " 146 in the U.S. " to call for the global elimination of nuclear weapons by 2020.
“We are in good company,” says Jackie Cabasso, executive director of the Oakland-based Western States Legal Foundation and North American Coordinator of Mayors for Peace. “In 2003, Mayors for Peace, led by the Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, launched its ‘2020 Vision Campaign’ for the global elimination of nuclear weapons by the year 2020. Their call has been taken up by a growing international campaign that is gaining momentum. This June, the prestigious U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously adopted a resolution which ‘calls on President Obama to announce at the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference the initiation of good faith multilateral negotiations on an international agreement to abolish nuclear weapons by the year 2020’.”
“We applaud President Obama for committing the US to achieving a nuclear weapons free world in his April 5, 2009 speech from Prague,” says Cara Bautista, Peace Action West’s Deputy Political Director. “We now have to move beyond words to action. The Obama administration is conducting a review that will set US nuclear weapons policies for the next decade. He must make steps toward global disarmament a central part of his review.”
The commemoration is cosponsored by American Friends Service Committee, Ecumenical Peace Institute/CALC, Livermore Conversion Project, Peace Action West, Tri-Valley CAREs, Western States Legal Foundation, and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
Driving directions: Take I-580, exit south at Vasco Road and park at Patterson Pass Rd.
More information: www.trivalleycares.org