A New Generation Emerges

"We are demanding an end to all weapons of mass destruction," Tara Dorabji, a UCSC graduate and Tri-Valley CARES staff member, told a crowd of 200 who had turned out for a “weapons inspection” at the gates of Livermore lab in September 2002, "whether developed in the suburbs by the University of California scientists or in Iraq.”(69)

In 2002, the fervor of the student movement against the current Iraq War, combined with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s new UC Nuclear Free campaign and Tri-Valley CAREs’ Project Exodus, helped give rise to a new generation of student and alumni disarmament activists. The above-mentioned “weapons inspection” was one of the first events the newly-formed Coalition to Demilitarize the UC had a hand in organizing.

The coalition has gone on to organize a handful of notable actions, which you can read about on this site’s Coalition to Demilitarize page. At this point, our activities are mainly driven by a handful of core non-profits and students in Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Santa Barbara. Our recent efforts to increase both the depth and breadth of the coalition, to expand to new campuses and increase the size of our constituencies at campuses where we already have a presence, have been highly successful, and we anticipate being able to significantly expand the scope of our activities in coming months.

The bid for the Los Alamos National Laboratory provides a new context for our efforts, making the campaign relevant on a nationwide scale for the first time. Our November 30 “Universities Out of Bed with Bombs” day of action was perhaps the largest single youth disarmament protest of the past 20 years.

The Coalition has big plans for 2006, many of which hinge on the outcome of the Department of Energy’s upcoming decision regarding the bid for the Los Alamos lab. Our primary immediate goal is to build a mass movement that wields the type of people power that can effect meaningful, long-term change.

Navigation

Introduction
Part 1 - Los Alamos: "Born at the Crosshairs"
Part 2 - The First Disarmament Movement Wave and the ‘60s
Part 3 - Challenging the UC's “Mantle of Legitimacy”
Part 4 - The Early-‘80s: A Series of Radical and Creative Actions
Part 5 - The Rise of Faculty Activism
Part 6 - A New Generation Emerges
Part 7 - Moving Forward
Works Cited