The Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2023 will establish that it is the policy of the United States that no first-use nuclear strike should be conducted without an official declaration of war by Congress.

First filed by Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), this bill currently has 16 co-sponsors. It has not been introduced into the Senate yet this session, though it has been in the past. Please contact your US Representative and Senators; tell them to cosponsor the bill in the House and introduce it into the Senate.

HR669 would prohibit using federal funds to conduct a first-use nuclear strike unless Congress expressly authorizes such a strike pursuant to a declaration of war. A first-use nuclear strike is an attack using nuclear weapons against an enemy that did not first launch a nuclear strike against the US, its territories, or its allies.

A first-use nuclear strike by the US would constitute a major act of war. A first-use nuclear strike conducted without a Congressional declaration of war would violate the US Constitution, which gives Congress the right to, or not to, declare war. Congress has not officially declared war since World War II, therefore the US could not use nuclear weapons as a first strike military operation. The only situation in which the US could use nuclear weapons would be in response to a confirmed nuclear attack on itself or its allies. 

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Please call your Representative and Senator and ask them to co-sponsor HR 1134, the People Over the Pentagon Act of 2023. 

The People Over the Pentagon Act of 2023 is legislation proposed in the United States Congress that would reduce the amount authorized to be appropriated for the Department of Defense for fiscal year 2024 by one hundred billion dollars.

First introduced into Congress by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), it has 13 co-sponsors as of March 2023. The bill has not been introduced in the Senate yet. Please ask your Senators to introduce it now. And ask your Representative to co-sponsor the bill.

Bill purpose: This bill would affirm the desire of the American people to reprioritize our financial resources to build a budget that works for people like you and me instead of weapons contractors or war-hawks. By the end of this decade the annual Pentagon budget could be as high as a trillion dollars. This bill would cut the Pentagon budget for fiscal year 2024 by one hundred billion dollars ($100,000,000,000).

Application of the funding cuts: The Department of Defense shall take into consideration the findings and recommendations contained in the Congressional Budget Office report entitled "Illustrative Options for National Defense Under a Smaller Defense Budget," dated October 2021.

Funding cuts will not apply to: The Defense Health Program, each military personnel account and each account providing for pay and benefits for persons appointed into the civil services should be funded at the level provided for in fiscal year 2024. 

In our last issue of Justice Rising, Ingeborg Breines wrote about  "Neighbors as Friends Not Enemies," the person-to-person diplomacy project that seeks to bring people from Nordic countries and Russia into dialogue. If you were moved by this story, you'll be happy to know that it is not the only instance of peacebuilding at the grassroots level. In fact, a new initiative seeks to "de-demonize" across another divide: Iranian and American, and to promote non-violence within Iran itself.

The recently founded "Iranian  Nonviolence" (IN) initiative has been meeting weekly online to talk and learn about non-violence as an ethically evolved collaborative and peaceful approach to human interactions and to managing conflicts. These Sunday gatherings are held on the online Clubhouse mobile application. Participants in these live bilingual (English-Persian) waging-peace "rooms" include Iranians both in and outside Iran--and also those who do not speak Persian (Farsi). 

The guest at the group's upcoming session on Sunday, Feb. 5,  is Prof. Michael Nagler, founder of the Metta Center for Nonviolence. The Center helps people develop, sustain, and deepen their commitment to nonviolence globally, and has Special Consultative Status at the United Nations.

The session starts at 1 p.m. Eastern time. 

The meetings hope to establish a bilingual forum within which Iranian people (especially inside Iran) can build on the heritage of non-violence found in their culture and poetry to engage in peace-building, especially with American people.

For more information, including how to connect on Clubhouse, visit 
Iranian Nonviolence's web page. 

Alliance co-chair Nancy Price joined activists from across the world to call for an end to the US's foreign military presence at the inaugural conference of the Coalition against US Foreign Military Bases, held January 12 through 14 in Baltimore. The conference brought together peace, health, community and environmental activists from around the country, as well as from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Ireland, Canada, Cuba, Congo, South Korea, the Philippines, Okinawa, and Germany.

The Alliance was a conference endorser, and Nancy organized the “Environment and Health” plenary specifically to highlight health impacts on military and civilian base personnel and surrounding communities, not just from the better-known threats of nuclear weapons, Agent Orange, depleted uranium and chemical/ biological agents, but from the “alphabet soup” of air, land and water pollution from all military base activities.

Plenary speaker Patricia Hynes makes clear in The Polluter Is Not Paying that it’s almost impossible to hold the U.S. military and government responsible and accountable in the US or anywhere else. Marie Cruz on the Navy Base in Vieques, Puerto Rico and Susan Schnall on Vietnam documented the many decades it took to negotiate some clean-up and compensation, noting that as extreme weather pummels U.S. installations, contamination and buried munitions are uncovered and spread.

The United States has as many as 1,000 military bases and tens of thousands of troops in more than 170 foreign countries, especially Germany, Japan and South Korea, as well as thirty-four Naval air carriers either operational or planned, each composed of roughly 7,500 personnel and 65 to 70 aircraft—literally floating military bases.

We pay more for “defense” at an annual cost of approximately $156 billion—money that could be used to support basic human needs (for instance, heat for the Baltimore public schools, where students endured classroom temperatures in the 30s at the start of January, while parents scrambled to fundraise for space heaters and childrens' coats).

The environmental costs include radioactive and chemical contamination of water, destruction of fisheries and farmland, and disruption of climate through massive output of greenhouse gasses. The social costs overseas include disruption of local communities and higher crime rates, including prostitution, rape and sexual abuse. Human rights abuse include using bases for extra-judicial imprisonment and torture.

Ultimately, our overseas bases are not bulwarks of national security, but intended to guarantee multinationals access to markets, resources and cheap labor. As the conference unity statement says, “We must all unite to actively oppose the existence of U.S. foreign military bases and call for their immediate closure. We invite all forces of peace, social and environmental justice to join us in our renewed effort to achieve this shared goal.”

You can learn more about the conference and watch videos of the conference sessions at http://noforeignbases.org/ or see shorter highlights here. The conference program book is online here, with biographies of the speakers.