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Stopping the New Arms Race
Join Us November 16th at UCLA!
Students and community members are mobilizing to prevent the UC Regents from building the new nuclear weapons arsenal.
Because the University of California manages the nation’s two nuclear weapons research and design laboratories it stands at the center of an unfolding political and ecological crisis of unprecedented proportions. The UC Regents have recently entered into a for-profit business partnership to operate these weapons labs with the Bechtel Corporation. UC’s new mission here includes two dangerous new developments: (1) researching and designing a new nuclear weapons arsenal and, (2) manufacturing the central component for these weapons, the plutonium pit.
This is a crisis. The manufacturing of weapons by our university will constitute a resumption of nuclear weapons primary production, something the US has not done since 1989 and something the UC hasn’t done since 1949. The weapons produced by UC are intended to be more usable against so-called “rogue nations” or “terrorists.” This new arms race that the Regents are actively supporting will likely consume tens of billions of dollars in the short term, produce tons of highly radioactive waste and violate the legal obligation and possibility of moving toward global nuclear disarmament as required under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Most importantly it will further endanger the world with the threat of nuclear war.
The Coalition to Demilitarize the UC1 calls upon students, staff, faculty, and community members to attend the UC Regents’ meeting in Los Angeles on November 16 to demand that the Regents divest the university’s good name and intellectual resources from the new arms race. We need peaceful, just, and ecologically sustainable solutions to the global problems we face, not nuclear weaponry, something that can only exacerbate these threats.
Finally, the Coalition stands united with UC workers in their struggle for economic justice, with people of color and working class students to open the university for all, and with all others who seek a more democratic institution that pursues the public good.
