August 6: Day of Action Against the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Arsenal

Updated, 8/1: Joint press release by Occupy Wall Street Environmental Solidarity Working Group, Occupy San Francisco, Occupy Santa Fe, and (Un)Occupy Albuquerque added at bottom of article, with updated information on actions occurring in NYC and and the San Francisco Bay Area.

(un)Occupy Albuquerque and allies are organizing a civil disobedience action on Hiroshima Day, August 6th, in Los Alamos as part of the wider three-day events planned by the Occupy Santa Fe Nuke Free Now Coalition. See here for a full events list for August 3-6 in Santa Fe and Los Alamos.

There is no single institution on earth that undermines the well-being of the world more than the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Northern New Mexico.

NUCLEAR WAR
As a tool of the U.S. empire, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) developed the only nuclear bombs to be used as weapons of war—in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and three days later in Nagasaki. At least 225,000 civilians were killed. Hundreds of thousands died later of cancers, and thousands more inherited birth defects. Today, the U.S. nuclear stockpile contains enough warheads to destroy 159,000 Hiroshimas. With threats of a U.S. strike against Iran and Israel’s U.S.-backed hegemony in the Middle East, it is time to shut down the war machine.

TOXIC EARTH
The development and maintenance of nuclear weapons displaces indigenous people, pollutes air, water, and land & degrades the health of all life on Earth. The U. S. has exploded over 1100 nuclear weapons in tests above and underground and in the ocean, exposing millions of unsuspecting humans and animals to damaging radiation. LANL is built on and is contaminating indigenous land “borrowed” by the U.S. government and never returned.

CORPORATE GREED
Los Alamos is NO LONGER operated by the U.S. government. In an egregious breach of world security, U.S. nuclear weapons industry operations have been managed by private, for-profit corporations since

1. Among the largest of these, Bechtel Corporation—the engineering firm that built almost half of the nuclear plants in the world as well as the oil infrastructure of Saudi Arabia—now runs daily operations at LANL, and last year was awarded more than $55 million in pure profit for LANL management alone.

LOST EXPERTISE
The resources and scientific expertise devoted to nuclear bombs are critically needed to address such pressing issues as global warming, declining fossil fuel supply, overpopulation, species extinction, and poverty.

Join us in Los Alamos, NM Aug. 6, 2012 to put the Empire on notice:
No more nuclear weapons!
No more corporate greed! No more war!
!Ya Basta U.S. global domination!

Some facts on the U.S. nuclear weapons system, via the Environmental Solidarity Working Group at Occupy Wall Street:

• The U.S. maintains more than 10,000 nuclear warheads.
• Obama's FY 2012 budget request designates over $7.6 billion to programs directly related to nuclear warheads. This is an 8.9% increase from the previous year. The increase will be sustained and then increased further "in the later out years."
• Accord to a White House fact sheet: "The plan includes investments of $80 billion to sustain and modernize the nuclear weapons complex" ... and "well over $100 billion in nuclear delivery systems to sustain existing capabilities and modernize some strategic systems" by the year 2020.
• Federal spending for nuclear weapons between 1940 and 2007 was about $7.2 trillion, exceeding "the combined total federal spending for education; training, employment, and social services; agriculture; natural resources and the environment; general science, space, and technology; community and regional development, including disaster relief; law enforcement; and energy production and regulation."
• Nuclear weapons' relationship to human security was put on display in Japan 67 years ago. We know what they do.

For even more facts about nuclear weapons, see NukeFreeNow.org:

Every facet of the nuclear industry poisons our planet. The nuclear business is wildly profitable, yet it collects billions in taxpayer subsidies.

Nuclear subsides go beyond mere money. The biosphere and creatures who depend on a living planet pay the largest subsidy through illness and premature death.

Nuclear weapons manufacturing and testing has poisoned millions, but secrecy has keep us misinformed. Secrecy has blocked accurate measures of how much radiation we have been exposed to. Misinformation has allowed downwinders, uranium miners, defense workers and the subjects of secret tests to suffer and die without medical attention or compensation. The lack of medical care given to nuclear victims has impeded scientific study of the long-term effects of weapons development and testing.

In spite of this neglect, scientists do know that exposure to the fallout from nuclear weapons testing causes cancers, tumors, genetic damage, infertility, birth defects and death.

Plutonium is so poisonous that one inhaled microscopic particle can cause lung cancer.

A few reap billions in profits, while we, the 99%, have diminished futures. There is always money for more bombs and new wars, but we’re told there isn’t enough for healthcare, education, housing, pensions. Sustainable-energy projects languish. We live with the nightmare of nuclear war.

A major nuclear war — between the US and Russia —would leave Earth virtually uninhabitable. A regional war — limited to India and Pakistan would cause a global famine that would kill one billion people, according to Alan Robock and Brian Toon, two of the foremost experts on the climatic impact of nuclear war.

It’s time. We must make this end. Read the rest at NukeFreeNow.org

Occupy Nukes: Hiroshima Day - August 6, 2012
A National Day of Action Against the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Arsenal
NO 80 billion dollar modernization of facilities in Los Alamos, NM, Kansas City, MO, or Oak Ridge, TN!

The 99% will be confronting the US's massive nuclear weapons arsenal on August 6, Hiroshima Day. Occupy Nukes demonstrations will be held in the San Fransisco Bay Area, Los Alamos, and New York City

Where and When:
30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, New York, 5:30 PM;
Japanese Consulate at 50 Fremont Street, San Francisco, 2 PM;
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, all day.

August 6 will be a day of solemn remembrance of those who suffered and perished in one of the most horrific and genocidal war crimes ever committed; the dropping of the atomic bomb on the civilian population of Hiroshima in 1945, equal only to the atomic bombing Nagasaki three days later. At least 225,000 civilians were killed in the Hiroshima bombing. Hundreds of thousands died later of cancers, and thousands more inherited birth defects. But August 6 will also be a day in which the 99% took action to ensure such destruction is never wrought on anyone ever again.

Nuclear weapons allow us to gauge the full extent of brutality that the 1%, which rules through exploitation, coercion and violence, is capable of committing. Money spent on nukes is irradiating social programs for the 99%.

We further recognize that nuclear weapons have a bastard twin; nuclear power. So called “safe”, “civilian” nuclear technology is used to justify the fossil-fuel intensive mining of uranium in some of the worlds most economically decimated regions, in country's such as Romania and Niger, and on indigenous lands in South Australia and the American West. Continued reliance on nuclear power has led the people of earthquake-prone Japan to experience the radioactive horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki all over again with the continuing disaster at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant.

On August 6, people power challenges nuclear power. The Occupy Movement stands in solidarity with those threatened, poisoned and murdered the globe over by the 1%'s nuclear fueled rule.

Occupy activists in New Mexico, ground zero for US nuclear weapons development, will hold a series of film screenings, teach-ins, and rallies, culminating in a mass, non-violent direct action at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Un)Occupy Albuquerque says “No more nuclear weapons!
No more corporate greed! No more war!
!Ya Basta US global domination!”

In the San Fransisco Bay Area, Occupy activists will be gathering in hazmat suits at the Japanese Consulate, drawing connections between nuclear weapons and nuclear power, Hirsohima and Fukushima, Japanese and US reactors, as well as drawing attention to the near eternal life of nuclear waste. Occupy Oakland says, “Our government disregards radioactive pollution from the corporations that fund elections, and the people are unprotected from the nuclear threat.”

Occupy Wall Street and affiliate groups in NYC will be congregating at 30 Rockeller Plaza, headquarters of General Electric, the world's biggest company and builders of the melted-down reactors at Fukushima. Demonstrators will be staging a die-in or, melt-in, calling attention to the costly and continued development of nuclear weapons and nuclear power technology in concert between the government and corporations.

GE brings good things to death. The mega-corporation, along with its Japanese nuclear partner Hitachi, is seeking permission from the industry-captured US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a new uranium enrichment facility in Wilmington, NC. The facility will utilize new laser technology that makes the processing of nuclear fuel swifter and more convenient for the 1%'s weapons and power plants.

OWS Environmental Solidarity says, “The 99% possess tools to transform waste and danger of the Nuclear Industrial Complex into structures that meet our real needs: true sustainability and security, just food production, jobs, renewable energy, affordable housing, education, and economic justice.”

No Nukes Now!

Occupy! Resist!

Groups taking part in Occupy Nukes: OWS Environmental Solidarity, (Un)Occupy Albuquerque, Occupy Santa Fe, Occupy SF Environmental Justice Working Group, Coalition Against Nukes, No Nukes Action, Green Action for Health and Environmental Justice, Nuke Free Now!, War Resisters League, Catholic Worker Movement, Shut Down Indian Point Now! Abolition 2000, Brooklyn for Peace, Pax Christi, Todos Somos Japon.