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What is the Coalition to Demilitarize the UC?
Campus & Community Groups:
 UC Berkeley: Fiat Pax; Free
the UC Coalition
UC Davis: Davis Students
Against War Resource
UC Los Angeles: Students
for a Democratic Society
UC Santa Barbara: SB
Antiwar; DOELOC
UC Santa Cruz: Students
Against War
Nuclear Age Peace
Foundation (Santa Barbara)
Tri-Valley CAREs
(Livermore/Bay Area)
Western States Legal
Foundation (East Bay)
Los Alamos Study Group
(New Mexico)
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Check
out the latest UCNF Newsletter (March 2008)
 Continuing an exciting year of progress in the campaign to end UC management of nuclear weapons, the Coalition to Demilitarize the UC will be holding their next convergence at the upcoming Take Hold! University, an alternative education event at UCLA from May 13-15. Modeled after the series of Tent University protests held with great success around the US, including at Rutgers College, UCLA, and UCSB, Take Hold! will be a space for students from across the UC system to gather together to speak out about their grievances with the UC system, specifically their university's anti-democratic board of regents and it's far-reaching and systemic involvement with war and nuclear weapons. Also at UCLA, the UC Regents will be meeting on May 14-15. Students will be holding actions at the meeting on Wednesday, May 14, over student fee increases, and Thursday, May 15, when the Regents' committee on oversight of the nuclear weapons labs convenes.
Visit takeholduniversity.org for registration and more information
For help carpooling from other UC campuses, click here to contact our Youth Empowerment Coordinator
5 Years Too Many, 65 Years Too Many:
Completing the Nuclear Triangle on March 19, 2008
A special report from Steve Stormoen, Youth Empowerment Initiative Coordinator at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
On Wednesday, March 19 in the San Francisco Bay Area, the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, I visited three sites that had been subject to the use of nuclear weapons. On the news, you may not have heard about the use of these weapons – there has been a stunning indifference towards covering this story for more than 65 years. And, walking around the bay, you wouldn’t have been able to identify any of the after-effects typically associated with the use of a nuclear bomb – no mushroom cloud, no shockwave, no blast crater, fallout, or hordes of innocent victims dying of radiation sickness. For the most part it was a typical March day in San Francisco – the weather predictably schizophrenic, the morning rush hour traffic innavigable as usual. The bombs in this case were not used in the same way they were used against the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But they were used nonetheless.
Early that morning, I attended a demonstration at a University of California Regents’ meeting where chief amongst the demands of the nearly 100 students present were an end to the UC’s management of the nuclear weapons labs at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore and an overhaul of the undemocratic Board of Regents that keeps the university in that managerial position. The students’ tactic was simple: inside the meeting, they have no power, are unable to speak, and the Regents are able to make violent and destructive decisions enabling and legitimizing nuclear weapons development and production with absolutely no accountability to the rest of the world. So the students would act outside the meeting, risking their necks for justice – quite literally...
Read the full article...
Concerned scientists and scholars from the Danish National Pugwash Group have implored the UC to end its management of the nuclear weapons laboratories at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore in a recent open letter addressed to UC President Robert C. Dynes. The letter serves as a sharp criticism of the UC's primary public reason for lab management -- that lording over and revitalizing the nation's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction constitutes a public service -- and calls for a critical reassessment in UC policy, stating, "...the corrupting involvement of the University of California in the production of illegal and immoral nuclear weapons is a perversion of its true role. Instead of leading the world towards catastrophe, the scholars of your great university ought to be seeking constructive solutions to the many pressing problems that face humanity today."
This letter has been signed by over 150 Danish scientists and scholars, and is available in full here as a .pdf. President Dynes, a physicist and former advisor to Los Alamos, has not yet issued a public reply.
 At this January's meeting of the UC Regents in UCLA, members from the Coalition to Demilitarize the UC joined with representatives of the University of California Students Association (UCSA), a body of student government officials from across the UC system, to oppose increases to student fees. A collective statement written by members of the Demil coalition compared student fee increases to the UC's continued management of Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Labs, stating: "We, as students of the University of California, demand that our university ends its management of the research and design of nuclear weapons and concentrates instead on an undertaking which is not only more befitting of the nation’s greatest public university system, but which actually constitutes a public service: use the University of California to provide the public the most accessible, highest quality of education possible." As a result, all decisions about increasing student fees were successfully postponed to a future meeting.
Photos and the full statement from the Demil coalition...
The Coalition to Demilitarize the UC will be gathering in beautiful Santa Cruz on Saturday and Sunday, November 17-18, for their Fall '07 convergence. Activists from several UC campuses use these quarterly convergences to meet, discuss plans and strategies, build community and support with one another, and have a good time. Read more...
At the third Think Outside the Bomb conference in as many years
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Coalition to Demilitarize the UC had a major presence.
Among the more than 100 participants from throughout the country, roughly one-quarter were affiliated with
the UC. During a plenary on the second day titled "Localized Resistance to Militarism," UCSC graduate Steve
Stormoen and UCSC student Jamie Thompson were featured speakers. Visit thinkoutsidethebomb.org for photos, notes, and more ...
From
May 9-17, 2007, over 40 individuals at four University
of California campuses conducted the "No More
Nukes In Our Name!" Hunger Strike. Through
this bold act of civil resistance and personal sacrifice,
they demanded that the UC Board of Regents fully
and immediately withdraw their management of the
US government's two foremost nuclear weapons facilities
-- the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in
New Mexico and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
(LLNL) in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Read more ...
The UC Regents' July 19th meeting public comment period and nuclear weapons labs oversight committee
("Department of Energy Laboratory Oversight Committee"] sessions were dominated by members of the Coalition
to Demilitarize the UC. Those in attendance used the meeting as a platform to announce a forthcoming Student
Department of Energy Labs Oversight Committee-led international weapons inspection of the Los Alamos National
Laboratory, to announce a new UC alumni funding boycott, and put the heat on Regents Chair Richard Blum (to
which he attempted a response at one point, and then later resignedly accepted the public shaming he was receiving).
Read the Santa
Barbara Daily Sound article about the action.
May 9th will see the beginning of a hunger strike to demand that the University of California stop engineering, testing and manufacturing nuclear bombs. This bold act of civil resistance is being coordinated by students and community members across multiple UC campuses. Some of us have pledged to go without solid food - permanently, if necessary -- unless our demand is met!
The hunger strikers' basic position is this: At this critical time in our world, with the survival of our planetary ecosystem hanging in the balance, it is imperative for the UC Regents to stop providing a fig leaf of academic respectability to the creation of the world's most toxic and deadly weapons, and instead use their position of political leverage to spur the US toward genuine nuclear disarmament, democratization, and demilitarization. Read more...
On April 25, the UC Santa Barbara Associated Students Legislative Council unanimously approved a resolution to create a Student Nuclear Weapons Labs Oversight Committee. The committee is charged with monitoring and investigating the work of the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos nuclear weapons compounds. The creation of the committee is historic. It gives students a basis to carry out physical weapons inspections of each facility, with cooperation from high-profile advisors and specialists (such as, perhaps, United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix). Read
more...
Robert Foley, Robert C. Dynes and Richard Blum, three
of the most powerful men in the University of California, each have
extensive connections to military-industrial firms and the US nuclear
weapons complex. All three came into the university’s highest circle
of power quite recently, during a time of flagging morale at the UC’s
nuclear weapons labs, and all three have since helped to shore up the
university as a major military-industrial corporation in its own right.
Each has sought to keep their ties, financial and otherwise, with some
of the firms and institutions they worked with prior to joining UC. Read
more ...
Students,
alumni, and supporters from across the University of California will
gather to reflect on our projects of this past academic year and decide
on our next major actions in the movement to demilitarize the University
of California. The meeting will take place days prior to the UC Regents’
March meeting at UCLA. Read more ...
Solidarity Against War (SAW) at UC Santa Barbara (UC Nuclear Free’s partner group at the campus)
created a
mock “nuclear waste dump” in the campus’ Arbor (main quad) today. The waste dump is an “expansion” of the
waste dump the University of California co-manages in real life,
Area G at the UC-managed Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Read more ...
The Coalition
to Demilitarize the UC made great strides throughout
2006! The year was chock full of meetings and teach-ins
and protests and momentary disappointments and
exhilarating break-throughs. To mark the dawning
of the new year, following is a collection of collection
of some of the highlights, as well as some pictures
to accompany them. Read more ... |
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