December 2020
Dear Friend of Nukewatch,
As a watchdog organization it is Nukewatch’s duty and promise to speak truth to power and to report the facts. While billionaires of the nuclear weapons and power industry get richer selling lies to the 99%, we work to confront and expose their dangerous myths and endless scandals. Unfortunately that doesn’t make us very popular with major foundations, traditional funding groups, or industry sponsors. In fact, one-percenters hoping to preserve the status quo would rather we don’t get the story out or ever confront the war makers and polluters.
Can we count on you to help us balance the scales with a DONATION?
Nukewatch’s start emanated from the famous Progressive Magazine article, “The H-Bomb Secret – How We Got It; Why We’re Telling It.” It made a splash in a struggle over First Amendment rights and nuclear industry secrecy. Sam Day had been in the thick of the first amendment legal fight. After the feds retreated, Sam co-founded Nukewatch and decided to take head-on the challenge of nuclear news blackouts, industry cover-ups, and a general lack of information by developing and organizing projects to expose nuclear facts and figures.
Nukewatch went on to reveal the locations of the 1,000 US land-based missile silos with the Missile Silo Mapping Project in the 1980s, which is updated in our recent book, Nuclear Heartland, Revised. The good news is that the number has now been cut to only 400 missiles—one of the far-reaching victories of which we’ve been, a part and a testament to our longevity.
Nukewatch exposed the hidden transports of semi-trucks that hauled warheads and component parts.
Nukewatch created the Train Watch to reveal shipments of the Navy’s deadly used shipboard reactor fuel rods being transported through cities across the country.
Over the past few years we have increased pressure on the US to remove the nuclear weapons that it still stations in Germany as part of a NATO nuclear-sharing agreement. We have dug up the manuals, articles, and reports that prove that US nuclear weapons are still there. Official government sources want this kept secret and has only accidentally revealed the locations of these weapons, but Nukewatch has shown a spotlight on this shadowy policy.
Just open up your newsletter to read what you won’t find anywhere else: the heavy news, the good news—and what you can do about it. You’ll find out that:
• The new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons will enter into force this coming year!
• Nuclear weapons accidents, like the one in Palomares, Spain in 1966 and many more, do happen.
• Fukushima’s poisons are still wreaking havoc almost ten years after the disaster.
• and there are 21 Fukushima-style reactors in the US.
You’ll learn that people like the Kings Bay Plowshares-7, the community around the Churchrock, NM radioactive waste spill, Germany’s Nonviolent Action to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (GAAA), the Movement for Black Lives, and others, along with you, are standing up to oppose nuclear madness. We are not alone in our truth telling. You make it possible for us to continue working and writing and organizing.
We are also part of a worldwide movement that has reached an enormous milestone; on October 24, 2020 the 50th ratification was submitted to the United Nations for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The Treaty will now go into effect January 22, 2021, and nuclear weapons will assume their rightful place under international law along with chemical weapons, biological weapons, anti-personnel land mines, and cluster bombs—illegal. We banned the bomb!
Donate now to support our work!
Nukewatch will be marking this momentous occasion with an international celebration-both in the US and Germany. And we’re working with the nationwide coalition including Nuclear Resister, Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance and Alliance for Nuclear Accountability to shine a light on the world on January 22, 2021—the day nukes will be banned. Look for an action near you at www.icanw.org/events, or plan your own and let us know what you’re up to by emailing us at <nuclearbantreatyEiF@gmx.com>.
Reporting the facts and resisting the recklessness of nuclear power and weapons is what we have done for over 40 years, and that’s what we’ll continue to do. The truth is that nukes do no good on this Earth. From the first shovelful of dirt from a uranium mine, to machining into the most dangerous weapons in the world, from the wasted trillions of dollars stolen from the homeless, hungry and unhealthy, to the deadly wastes leaving a radioactive environment for hundreds of thousands of years, nukes only hurt.
The military-industrial complex and nuclear power industry don’t like it, but we will never stop confronting nuclear madness.
Help us continue to do so with your financial support. DONATIONS are 100% tax deductible.
For a nuclear-free world,
John LaForge, for Nukewatch