WASHINGTON -- February 8 -- The New York Times reported Monday that U.S. scientists "have begun designing a new generation of nuclear arms meant to be sturdier and more reliable and to have longer lives, federal officials and private experts say." [See: www.truthout.org/docs_2005/020705B.shtml]

JACQUELINE CABASSO, wslf@earthlink.net, http://wslfweb.org
Executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation, which focuses on nuclear policy, Cabasso said today: "While the U.S. turns its sights on Iran, accusing that country of pursuing a covert nuclear weapons program, U.S. nuclear weapons spending has quietly grown by 84 percent since 1995 -- several years after the Cold War ended. This year the U.S. will spend nearly $7 billion to maintain and modernize nuclear warheads, usable for decades to come, and many billions more to operate and modernize its delivery and command and control systems. Altogether, the United States is spending about $40 billion annually on nuclear forces. Ten thousand nuclear warheads, with some 2,000 on hair-trigger alert, remain in the U.S. arsenal, each one many times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped 60 years ago."

ALICE SLATER, aslater@gracelinks.org, http://abolitionnow.org, http://gracelinks.org/nuke
President of the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment, Slater said today: "In this 60th anniversary year of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it boggles the mind to think that our Dr. Strangeloves are now pushing for a whole new design effort for a 'sturdier and more reliable' nuclear bomb. In 1970 the U.S., together with Russia, China, the UK, and France, signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, promising to give up our nuclear weapons if other countries promised not to acquire them. The world watched in horror the inexorable spread of nuclear weapons to India, Pakistan, and Israel and more."

Slater, who wrote an oped entitled "'Peaceful' Nuclear Strategy an Easy Target for Abuse," in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, added: "The tattered Non-Proliferation Treaty will be reviewed this May at the United Nations. The mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are bringing 100 mayors from around the world to join in their call for immediate negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons."

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