Traprock Web Manager

Here is Traprock’s testimony to the Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee on S.1649

September 8, 2025

As of late 2024/2025, 94 countries have signed the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, a global lifeboat for the world. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2026 budget request for nuclear weapons’ upgrade is more than $25 billion.  Stack this up against the same department’s 2026 budget request for energy efficiency and renewable energy—$888 million—and we see the future: nuclear weapons trump energy efficiency and wind turbines.

Moreover, the government’s budget has no line items for the massive existential costs of nuclear weapons.  Hanford, Washington was the site of the largest plutonium-production reactors in the world from 1944 to 1987 (including for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki). The Hanford land, bordering the Columbia River, was effectively stolen from four Indigenous tribes and peasant farmers by the federal government and is now “arguably the most contaminated place on the planet,” according to Joshua Frank, author of Atomic Days.

While nuclear weapons governments and their bomb-making industries are criminally sleepwalking into what could mean the end of our planet’s life, many others—scientists, high-level military, citizens, and whole countries—are countering the weapons holders’ political idiocy with principled intelligence:

  • At their 40th reunion in Los Alamos, New Mexico, 70 of 110 physicists who worked on the atomic bomb signed a statement supporting nuclear disarmament. When have the brightest scientists of their day ever admitted that their most notable work was a colossal mistake? 
  • On February 2, 1998, retired General George Butler, former commander of U.S. Strategic Air Command, addressed the National Press Club: “The likely consequences of nuclear weapons have no… justification. They hold in their sway not just the fate of nations but the very meaning of civilization.” Sixty other retired generals and admirals joined him in calling for nuclear weapons abolition.
  • At the heart of the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) is an explicit ethical goal: to protect the world’s peoples from the humanitarian catastrophe that would ensue were nuclear weapons employed. 
  • Mayors for Peace from over 8,000 global cities call for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

The U.N. treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons bolsters the hope that the United States and the eight other nuclear giants will grow up into pragmatic, if not ethical, adult governments and eliminate forever their genocidal weapons. One nation did so: South Africa developed nuclear weapons capability and then voluntarily dismantled its entire program in 1989. 

May the Massachusetts legislature have the same foresight and care for their citizens as Mayors for Peace and the ethical courage of South Africa in publicly supporting the UN Treaty Ban on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

The Road Less Taken

In June 1963, President John Kennedy gave at American University’s commencement what has been deemed the most important speech by a U.S. president—a speech on peace with the Soviet Union. But “What about the Russians?” everyone asked. Kennedy responded: “What about us… Our attitude [toward peace] is as essential as theirs.” According to historian Jim Douglass, “John Kennedy’s strategy of peace penetrated the Soviet government’s defenses far more effectively than any missile could have done.” Promoted across the Soviet Union, Kennedy’s speech and his behind-the-scenes diplomacy with Nikita Khrushchev led toward defusing Cold War tension and planted the seed of a world without nuclear weapons and war. Help this seed, by your example to other state legislatures, to germinate.