For over 40 years Ploughshares Fund has supported the most effective people and organizations in the world to reduce and ultimately eliminate the dangers posed by nuclear weapons.
Earlier this year, we asked our followers to tell us a little bit about themselves and what aspects of Ploughshares Fund’s work matter most to them. I’d like to share some of the highlights.
It is understandable that the American public generally doesn’t know much about nuclear weapons – how many there are, how much they cost, why we still have so many. The topic has not been “news” for most of the past fifteen years or so. Media attention on security issues instead gravitates toward the major crises of the day. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the fight against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the intermittent but predictable Israeli-Palestinian clashes.
It is already bad enough that Russia is invading its neighbors and destabilizing European security—last thing you want is for Russia to throw out U.S. nuclear inspectors, which is precisely what some critics of arms control propose to do. Rebecca Heinrichs argues in “Obama administration pursues arms control at great loss,” that the United States should suspend implementation of the New START Treaty in reaction to Russia’s violation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
69 years ago the world fundamentally changed. With a single bomb, an atom bomb, the entire city of Hiroshima was wiped out and and more than 100,000 people were killed. Nagasaki was similarly bombed three days later and again, a single bomb killed 50,000 people.
A new era had begun, one in which all humanity was just minutes from destruction.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver put the spotlight on the absurdity of the US nuclear weapons complex. It was a comic spin on a very serious issue. But, it also made me angry. The fear of mutually assured destruction is supposed to be a thing of the past. I shouldn’t have to worry that one miscalculation could mean the end of life as we know it. I shouldn’t have to worry that my child will live under the same quiet fear. But I do. I do because policymakers continue to fail to recognize what John Oliver makes so evident – nuclear weapons are only good for one thing – terror.
Nuclear weapons have been around for almost 70 years. In that time, nuclear weapons have become just a synonym for “the ultimate weapon;” Hollywood’s trump card in case of dangerous terrorists, deranged dictators or alien attack.
It’s as if we have collectively forgotten the real horror...
The international talks over Iran's nuclear program have been extended through November. Sure, we'd rather have had a deal. But as long as all sides remain committed to the process, we're still on track to achieve the objective: peacefully preventing the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon.
One trillion dollars. That is what the United States is planning to spend over the next 30 years as it refurbishes and maintains its aging Cold War nuclear arsenal. Your share as an average taxpayer: $6,789. These weapons do nothing to protect the United States in a post-9/11 world. But they still present catastrophic risk due to accident, miscalculation or (shudder) deliberate use. What can you do to help roll back the nuclear weapons tide?
Faith-based organizations are at the forefront of advocating for historical policy changes to national and foreign policy to create a more just and safer world. Ploughshares Fund sat down with Kate Gould, lead lobbyist on Middle East Policy at the Friend’s Committee on National Legislation, to learn more about their lobbying efforts, including on the current Iran nuclear negotiations.
Browsing the headlines, the world looks a dangerous place. Boko Haram is bombing its way across Nigeria, civil war in Syria, transnational terrorism and more. But the biggest danger is...
As the P5+1 negotiations with Iran continue, there are grounds for optimism that an agreement can be reached by the July 20th deadline. A deal would be a significant achievement in the ongoing battle against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. But this raises the question: what...
It started with one explosion in 1945. An explosion unlike any the world had ever seen. The first nuclear weapon, detonated by the United States, launched an era of nuclear proliferation that persists to this day. With the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons are increasingly irrelevant, but the threat they represent is still very real. The tide of proliferation has ebbed. Now we have the chance to roll it back to end the threat of nuclear weapons forever.
Some very good news has come from a very bad part of the world today. Syria’s operational chemical weapons arsenal is no more. Officials in the Syrian port of Latakia loaded the very last shipment of the declared stockpile onto a Danish freighter and sent them off for destruction at sea.
As negotiations with Iran continue into the summer, what better way to stay involved than cracking open a book on the beach? To help you parse the ongoing news around negotiations, we have updated our summer reading list with a variety of topics ranging from history to a deeper look at some of the countries at the center of nuclear tensions.
According to a recent interview, the number one worry that keeps the President up at night is "loose nukes." Speaking at the Nuclear Security Summit in March, President Obama expounded on the idea that loose nukes pose the biggest threat to our security: Russia, he says isn’t “the number-one national security threat to the United States. I continue to be much more concerned … with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan.”