On January 22nd, we celebrated the 5th year of the nuclear ban in international law. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which entered into force on January 22, 2021 is a beacon of hope and progress for disarmament and international law. The TPNW’s 5th anniversary is a big moment to celebrate and raise the calls for disarmament and nuclear justice around the world. Warheads to Windmills members joined the global celebrations with coast to coast protests at nuclear weapons companies,webinars, and other demonstrations. The key theme of the coalition: it is time to divest from illegal nuclear weapons.
From Massachusetts
Protesting at L3Harris in Northampton, MA
Report by Timmon Wallis, NuclearBan.US and Massachusetts Warheads to Windmills
About 35 people braved the snow and ice to mark the 5th anniversary of the TPNW’s entry into force at L3Harris in Northampton, Mass, on January 22nd. The event was organized by the Massachusetts Warheads to Windmills Coalition, and included activists from NuclearBan.US, Pax Christi Massachusetts, Jewish Voice for Peace, Demilitarize Western Mass, Northampton Quakers and other local groups.
Dressed in white “radiation” suits, members of the Treaty Compliance Unit staked the grounds of the nuclear weapons contractor with notices saying, “This corporation is engaged in activities PROHIBITED by the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.” Portions of the treaty were read out while staff from L3Harris watched from a safe distance inside their glass-fronted building.
Other groups used the megaphone to highlight the role L3Harris has played in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the recent bombing of Venezuela, and the use of ICE on the streets of Minneapolis. L3Harris, the sixth largest military contractor in the US, makes the rocket motors for all US nuclear missiles, numerous parts for the F-35 fighter-bomber, parts for Israel tanks and warships used in the attacks on Gaza, and surveillance equipment used by ICE to spy on people in this country.
The L3Harris plant in Northampton, formerly Kollmorgen, is the sole source of periscopes and their modern equivalent, photonic masts, which are used on all US submarines. The latest photonic mast technology is one of the key upgrades going into a new generation of Columbia-class nuclear missile submarines that are being to built to replace the entire US fleet of nuclear missile submarines at a cost of over $100 billion.
Each one of these submarines carries between 600 and 2,000 times the destructive power of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing well over 100,000 people each. There is more than enough nuclear weaponry on board a single one of these submarines to wipe out every major city on the planet and kill billions of people. And they are building 12 of them.
To California
Protesting Lockheed Martin in Palo Alto, CA
Report by Cherrill Spencer, WILPF US, co-chair of the DISARM/END WARS Committee of WILPF US
The Peninsula and Palo Alto branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom US section holds a weekly vigil for an hour at a very busy intersection in Palo Alto, California. On Friday 23rd January branch members were joined by members of the Pacific Life Community from Redwood City, California to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Entry Into Force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. To catch the eye of the people in the thousands of vehicles that passed us we displayed a couple of banners and several signs. One banner (see photo) is very large and says “LOCKHEED WEAPONS TERRORIZE THE WORLD” and belongs to the Pacific Life Community. They sometimes unfurl it outside the Lockheed Martin factory in Sunnyvale. The other banner used the new design provided by Warheads to Windmills (see photo), with the headline: TIME TO DIVEST FROM ILLEGAL WEAPONS. Our WILPF branch members paraded that banner across the four crosswalks several times so the people in the vehicles stopped at the traffic lights could really read it.
At the end of our hour in Palo Alto we lent the smaller banner to a WILPF member from the San Jose branch, who had attended our action and she took it and used it at their demo that evening along a busy San Jose street leading to a major freeway at heavy commuter traffic time.
At both events we handed out to passing pedestrians a trifold flyer made by the WILPF US DISARM Committee called “END THE WHOLE NUCLEAR ERA.”