The U.S. has been the only nation in the world to vote NO on a United Nations resolution to Prevent an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS). However a PAROS treaty is our best alternative to space weaponization and war in, from and through space. Critical votes on this issue will again come before the U.N. General Assembly in November and December.

WILPF created a petition addressed to United States Senators, urging them to support the UN Resolution and to vote yes when it comes up for a vote again. 

The petition was closed to new signatures on October 24, 2008 and over 190 individuals signed it.

Please click here to view the text of the petition and see the signatures.

WILPF is in the process of distributing the petition and the signatures to our Senators.

Raging Grannies protest in Livermore, California on August 9, 2008, the anniversary of the nuclear bomb in Nagasaki

Dear Reaching Critical Will friends and advisors,

The sixty-second session of the General Assembly First Committee on Disarmament and International Security closed on Friday, 2 November 2007. It was a rather uneventful session, with a few key highlights (see below). Most delegations continued to lament the lack of progress in disarmament and non-proliferation, especially in the Conference on Disarmament (CD). They called for the adoption of the comprehensive programme of work in the CD at the beginning of 2008, and expressed hope for success at the next nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Preparatory Committee. It would be preferable if First Committee itself was used more effectively to advance the cause of disarmament and international security, rather than as a stage from which to "urge" consensus in another forum. In his remarks on 18 October, Ambassador Landman of the Netherlands paraphrased Victor Hugo, announcing that the time will come when the instruments of war, and in particular weapons of mass destruction, "will be on show in museums in the same way as today one can visit and inspect instruments of torture, fashionable in the Middle Ages and thereafter. And we would all be wondering that such weapons have existed and their use ever contemplated." To reach this point, governments, diplomats, and civil society need to not just theorize about the new (collective) security environment they envision, but to work towards it.

Best wishes,
Ray Acheson, Project Associate