Keynote speaker will be head of the nation’s largest disarmament and peace group
Ashland.news staff report
The United States is currently engaged in a $1.7 trillion total upgrade of its nuclear arsenal. Of that, Kevin Martin, president of the nation’s largest peace and disarmament organization Peace Action, said, “I can’t think of a worse misappropriation of our tax dollars. And predictably, every other nuclear-weapon state has followed suit, saying that they are going to upgrade their nuclear weapons as well.”
Martin will be the keynote speaker at “The New Nuclear Arms Race,” a symposium scheduled for Friday, April 25 at Southern Oregon University. Participants will explore the dimensions and the implications of this nuclear upgrade and consider ways ordinary people can oppose it.
The symposium will run from 9:45 a.m. to 3 p.m. in SOU’s Stevenson Union Room 323 with a catered lunch at noon. It’s being presented by Peace House and SOU’s Department of History, Economics and Politics.
Attendance is free. An RSVP is not required but is appreciated. This can be done through Event Brite here or by leaving a message at Peace House, [email protected] or 541-531-2848.
The program will begin with a letter from Oregon’s U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley about the importance of addressing the threat of the renewed arms race. Then, in his keynote speech, Martin will give a broad overview of the mounting threats and the organizing taking place to counter them.
Later in the morning, local nuclear disarmament activists will speak of the way the politically powerful military-industrial complex is driving the remaking of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and why land-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) present the greatest risk of a nuclear catastrophe.
One intention of the symposium is to educate younger individuals who have no memory of the Cold War and its dangers to human existence. To that end, the afternoon session will begin with a presentation by Eddie Laiché with Students for Nuclear Disarmament. Laiches is a civil engineering student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Ever since he learned about the devastating health impacts of a modern-day nuclear weapon attack, he’s been advocating extensively with the Back from the Brink Coalition and Students for Nuclear Disarmament to raise awareness of the danger of nuclear weapons and the urgency to abolish them.
The last activity will be discussions among those in attendance about their responses to what they’ve learned and what they want to do as a consequence.
Source: Herbert Rothschild news release. Email Ashland.news at [email protected].
