India deal undermines U.S. nonproliferation policies We can fix the US-India nuclear trade agreement! Ask your Representative to cosponsor the bipartisan H. Res. 711. Prevent the dangerous concessions made to India that undermine nonproliferation efforts.

Also, keep an eye out for the president's proposed federal budget, which he will release early February. It's impossible to say for sure, but it's a fair bet we can expect more of this type of thing:

WAND participates in Diverse Coalition in Campaign to Stop U.S. Nuclear Deal with India
WAND joins others in saying proposed agreement would dangerously undermine national security, global stability. More here.

WAND thanks Rep. Lantos (CA) for years of service
Marie Rietmann, our Public Policy Director, laments the stepping down of Tom Lantos: "Mr. Lantos has been a tireless advocate for human rights, and his wife, Annette, was very kind to attend the WAND reception in 2007 because, as she told us, she is a strong believer in advancing women."

In his notice of resignation, he had this to say: "It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family, and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a member of Congress. I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country."

FEDERAL BUDGET WATCH

NUCLEAR NOTES

2007: Reassertion of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and practical measures toward achieving that goal would be, and would be perceived as, a bold initiative consistent with America's moral heritage. The effort could have a profoundly positive impact on the security of future generations. Without the bold vision, the actions will not be perceived as fair or urgent. Without the actions, the vision will not be perceived as realistic or possible.

We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal, beginning with the measures outlined above.

2008: The accelerating spread of nuclear weapons, nuclear know-how and nuclear material has brought us to a nuclear tipping point. We face a very real possibility that the deadliest weapons ever invented could fall into dangerous hands.

The steps we are taking now to address these threats are not adequate to the danger. With nuclear weapons more widely available, deterrence is decreasingly effective and increasingly hazardous.

One year ago, in an essay in this paper, we called for a global effort to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons, to prevent their spread into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately to end them as a threat to the world. The interest, momentum and growing political space that has been created to address these issues over the past year has been extraordinary, with strong positive responses from people all over the world.

Off Target
Mother Jones | By Kurt Pitzer | January/February 2008 Issue

Dropping The Bomb
Five ways the Bush administration has thwarted nuclear nonproliferation
1 - Treaty Busting: Despite paying lip service to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the United States has quietly backed away from it. In May 2005, 153 countries met at the U.N. for a routine review of the treaty. Many sent a foreign minister or a top diplomat; the United States dispatched a mid-level Bolton ally.
Fallout: "[Bush appointees] have undermined the institutional structures, so that we are increasingly left only with the alternative to use force." —Jonathan Granoff, Global Security Institute

2 - The India Deal: In July 2005, President Bush and Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh announced that the United States would end sanctions against India for refusing to sign the npt and would supply it with nuclear technology. As part of the deal, which even John Bolton reportedly opposed, New Delhi would decide which facilities the iaea could monitor, and two reactors that can produce weapons-grade plutonium would not be inspected at all.
Fallout: "The India deal signals to the world that if you want strong commercial relations with the U.S., go ahead and develop nuclear weapons. It's a message I'm confident Iran hasn't overlooked. The North Koreans are probably thinking, 'The Indians got rewarded—why shouldn't we?'" —Linda Gallini, former nonproliferation official

3 - Soviet Nukes: For three years, the Bush administration has proposed cuts to the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, a Pentagon-led effort to secure the massive former Soviet nuclear arsenal.
Fallout: "[Donald Rumsfeld] had it in his head that it was a wimpy thing to have the Pentagon involved in." —Kenneth Adelman, former member of the Defense Policy Board

4 - Back to Square One: In 1994, the Clinton administration and North Korea signed the Agreed Framework, freezing Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program in exchange for oil and civilian nuclear technology. The deal fell apart in 2002. For five years after that, Bush talked tough about Kim Jong Il and North Korea tested its first nuclear bomb. Last October, North Korea and the United States announced a nukes-for-fuel deal that closely resembled the Agreed Framework.
Fallout: "My only regret is that we didn't agree to this six years ago when we had the opportunity to do so, because we might not then have had the number of nuclear weapons and the nuclear tests that occurred." —Former Democratic Senator George Mitchell

5 - Lost in Transit: A Bolton brainchild, the Proliferation Security Initiative bets on legally murky high-seas police work to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, encouraging nations to board and inspect ships suspected of smuggling. No successful wmd seizures have been announced.
Fallout: "The psi by itself is a silly thing. The important thing is to catch wmd before they get on ships." —Former top American nonproliferation official

Nuclear war: the threat that never went away
Nature | January 2008 | Declan Butler

...New reductions in arms remain important, but more crucial in the short term is ‘outlawing’ not the nuclear weapons themselves but any active role for them in policy. The goal is to reach a norm where it is as unacceptable for a country to have any active role for nuclear weapons as it is now to invoke the use of chemical or biological weapons. This issue of de-emphasis is key for non-weapons states such as South Africa, says du Preez. “If you only have a dozen weapons, but you say you are willing to use them and are making threatening postures, it is the opposite of the modus operandi of the cold war where nukes were a weapon of last resort. There is now a crossing of the line between conventional and nuclear weapons,” he says.

Complex Transformation: What's in store for 2008

The Bush administration and the US Department of Energy (DOE)’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) are proposing to spend an estimated $150 billion to rebuild the US nuclear weapons complex to “transform the nuclear stockpile through development of Reliable Replacement Warheads.” This renovated complex would include a major new facility—the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement (CMRR) at Los Alamos National Lab—to build 50-80 warhead cores (plutonium “pits”) per year, and the future nuclear arsenal would include new Reliable Replacement Warheads (RRWs) with “enhanced safety, security, and use-control features.”

There are at least two major problems with this plan.

1. First, and most important, there is no rush to rebuild the complex. NNSA has time to wait for a new administration to review US nuclear policy before moving ahead. For example, there is no rush to build the new CMRR at Los Alamos—in fact, it can wait decades.

2. Second, there is no need to “transform” the stockpile by building RRWs. The current nuclear arsenal meets modern safety and reliability standards. Designing and building new warheads for safety and reliability reasons is therefore unnecessary—and dangerous. In a world without nuclear testing, abandoning well-tested warhead designs in favor of new, untested designs is asking for trouble. Even if technically feasible, the deployment of new, untested warheads may over time lead to political pressures to resume testing. Instead, we should be maintaining current warheads and extending their useful lifetimes, as is being done under DOE’s Lifetime Extension Program. Indeed, Congress cancelled the $88 million RRW program in 2007, finding that the administration should instead prepare “a comprehensive nuclear weapons strategy for the 21st century."

ANA encourages you to organize your own COMMUNITY HEARING IN YOUR LOCATION, and posts resources to help you do this. The ‘Bombplex’ affects all communities, so all of our communities should be heard.

IRAQ UPDATES

WAND's own president emerita Sayre Sheldon starts the new year off with a bang with a piece about what to expect from the war in 2008...

The War in 2008: What Can We Expect and What Can We Do About It?
by Sayre Sheldon, National WAND Board Member and NGO Representative for WAND at the U.N. | Full piece on our blog.

Who could have predicted when the invasion began in March of 2003 that we would still be at war in Iraq? Or that almost 4,000 U.S. soldiers would have died and as many as 60,000 come back wounded, many so severely that they will have to be taken care of for the rest of their lives? Or that the cost of the war has swelled to an ungraspable over one half a trillion?

The answer is of course: all of us who opposed the war from the start and predicted much if not all of what would inevitably go wrong.

What we didn’t predict was that the American public would have lost interest in the war.

Surge to Nowhere
Don't buy the hawks' hype. The war may be off the front pages, but Iraq is broken beyond repair, and we still own it.

By Andrew J. Bacevich | Washington Post | January 20, 2008

...What exactly has the surge wrought? In substantive terms, the answer is: not much.

As the violence in Baghdad and Anbar province abates, the political and economic dysfunction enveloping Iraq has become all the more apparent. The recent agreement to rehabilitate some former Baathists notwithstand ing, signs of lasting Sunni-Shiite reconciliation are scant. The United States has acquired a ramshackle, ungovernable and unresponsive dependency that is incapable of securing its own borders or managing its own affairs. More than three years after then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice handed President Bush a note announcing that "Iraq is sovereign," that sovereignty remains a fiction...

In only one respect has the surge achieved undeniable success: It has ensured that U.S. troops won't be coming home anytime soon. This was one of the main points of the exercise in the first place. As AEI military analyst Thomas Donnelly has acknowledged with admirable candor, "part of the purpose of the surge was to redefine the Washington narrative," thereby deflecting calls for a complete withdrawal of U.S. combat forces. Hawks who had pooh-poohed the risks of invasion now portrayed the risks of withdrawal as too awful to contemplate. But a prerequisite to perpetuating the war -- and leaving it to the next president -- was to get Iraq off the front pages and out of the nightly news. At least in this context, the surge qualifies as a masterstroke. From his new perch as a New York Times columnist, William Kristol has worried that feckless politicians just might "snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory." Not to worry: The "victory" gained in recent months all but guarantees that the United States will remain caught in the jaws of Iraq for the foreseeable future...

But how exactly do these sacrifices serve the national interest? What has the loss of nearly 4,000 U.S. troops and the commitment of about $1 trillion -- with more to come -- actually gained the United States?...

In reality, the war's effects are precisely the inverse of those that Bush and his lieutenants expected. Baghdad has become a strategic cul-de-sac. Only the truly blinkered will imagine at this late date that Iraq has shown the United States to be the "stronger horse." In fact, the war has revealed the very real limits of U.S. power. And for good measure, it has boosted anti-Americanism to record levels, recruited untold numbers of new jihadists, enhanced the standing of adversaries such as Iran and diverted resources and attention from Afghanistan, a theater of war far more directly relevant to the threat posed by al-Qaeda. Instead of draining the jihadist swamp, the Iraq war is continuously replenishing it.

IRAN HAPPENINGS

Preventive war? Preventive action.
The time to stop the next war is now.
While Congress wrangles over funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many believe that the administration is considering undertaking yet another military action on foreign shores -- this time, in Iran. This, despite the fact that the situation in Iraq has clearly shown that using force before we have exhausted every other alternative is foolish, deadly, and counterproductive.

NEWS FROM WiLL

WiLL mourns the sudden passing of MD State Sen. Gwen Britt
A State Senator for Maryland's 4th District, Britt had a long history in the struggle for civil rights and for justice. She was one of the first members of the Capitol Area WAND chapter, and the WiLL State Director for Maryland.

Democratic lawmakers say Iraq war costs hurt Colorado
Colorado Daily Camera | January 8, 2008

Bringing the lowdown on the federal budget and the costs of war to state capitols and state legislators...

Some Democratic legislators said today the war in Iraq and the military budget are draining money from Colorado and other states, and they want people to know about it.

“We have to start telling people why we don’t have money to do things,” state Rep. Alice Borodkin said....

Georgia state Sen. Nan Grogan Orrock, who spoke to Colorado lawmakers today at Borodkin’s invitation, estimated that Colorado taxpayers have paid about $7 billion toward the nearly $500 billion the federal government has spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Orrock, a Democrat and a member of the nonpartisan Women Legislators’ Lobby, said the Iraq war is drawing more attention to the proportion of the budget that has gone to the military under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

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WiLL thanks all the women legislators who worked with retired Senator Dorothy Rupert, a National WAND board member and WiLL Trailblazer, to make this briefing a big success. Dozens of legislators and members of the media turned out to welcome Sen. Orrock and participate in the forum.

Faith in Action