The Senate is about to vote on the Pentagon’s budget for next year.
Right now, there is $98 million to maintain an obsolete nuclear weapon that was going to be discontinued until Donald Trump stuck it back into the military budget.
As Public Citizen — along with three dozen allies including American Friends Service Committee, Council for a Livable World, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Ploughshares Fund, and Union of Concerned Scientists — notes in an open letter to all 100 members of the United States Senate:
The B-83 is an insanely dangerous relic of the Cold War. Just *one* B-83 bomb has the explosive potential of nearly half of *all* explosives (including the atomic bombs) used in World War II.
Senators Jeff Merkley and Elizabeth Warren have proposed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would reallocate the $98 million toward global COVID-19 vaccine access instead.
Because the ongoing coronavirus pandemic is a public health and national security threat that can’t be fought with guns or tanks or nuclear weapons.
Tell the Senate:
Vaccinating the world is in the obvious interest of our security — to prevent the emergence of dangerous new variants, to save trillions of dollars in the global economy, and to at last get the pandemic under control. Reallocate the $98 million in the National Defense Authorization Act for the obsolete B-83 nuclear bomb to global COVID-19 vaccine access instead.
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For progress,
- Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen
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