GREG MELLO
Director of the Los Alamos Study Group, Mello said today: “The Energy and Water Appropriations Bill signed by President George W. Bush yesterday is a milestone in the further nuclearization of U.S. foreign policy. The weapons to be developed are explicitly for potential use against targets in many countries, not just one or two. The fact that these weapons would add little military utility while generating large ‘collateral damage’ — medical, political, legal, and moral — suggests that they are being driven more by institutional and ideological ‘push’ than any military ‘pull.’ … It is unlikely that the drive for new nukes can be stopped unless Democrats and arms controllers are willing to rethink their support and legitimation of the other 99.9 percent of Department of Energy and Department of Defense nuclear weapons programs.”
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JOHN BURROUGHS
Burroughs is the executive director of the New York-based Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy and co-editor of “Rule of Power or Rule of Law? An Assessment of U.S. Policies and Actions Regarding Security-Related Treaties.” He said today: “The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — the same agreement the U.S. insists that North Korea and Iran respect by submitting to international inspections — requires elimination of existing arsenals through good-faith negotiation. At the UN General Assembly this fall, the U.S. voted against resolutions calling for compliance with the program for transparent, irreversible and verified reduction and elimination of nuclear forces to which it agreed at the 2000 NPT review conference.”
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JACQUELINE CABASSO
Executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation, Cabasso said today: “If the world’s only remaining superpower feels that it must threaten the first use of nuclear weapons to ensure its ‘national security,’ why shouldn’t we expect other countries to follow suit? As responsible global citizens, we must insist on a more sustainable concept of universal ‘human security.’ Nuclear weapons have no place in this new security paradigm.”
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LLOYD J. DUMAS
Dumas is the author of “Lethal Arrogance: Human Fallibility and Dangerous Technologies” and is a professor of political economy at the University of Texas at Dallas. He said today: “By signing a bill that allocates nearly $40 million for research on new nuclear weapons and readying the Nevada nuclear test site for quicker reactivation, the administration has found yet another way to weaken American security, while claiming to strengthen it…. Building these weapons can only undercut diplomatic efforts to prevent other nations from building their own. And the idea that we can protect ourselves against proliferation with nuclear ‘bunker-busters’ by going around the world blowing up underground storage sites that our intelligence reports claim contain weapons of mass destruction is too ludicrous for words. Have we learned nothing from Iraq?”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167