Press Release: [Catchy, timely title]

Contact [your email and phone]

 

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[Date]: The [organization] is [doing/has done this action] in [place] on [time].

 

It’s part of a global movement to abolish nuclear weapons. “We’re doing this because [personal or global reason],” said organizer/participant name].

 

“We’re [hoping/expecting/demanding] that [outcome],” said [another organizer/participant name].

 

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons now puts nuclear weapons in the same prohibited category as chemical and biological weapons. 122 nations agreed the Treaty at the United Nations, 86 have already signed it, and 54 have ratified it. (Updates at www.icanw.org/signature_and_ratification_status) But the nine nuclear-armed nations (USA, Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea) haven’t joined the treaty yet.

 

It’s never been legal to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against cities or civilian populations. But now it’s also illegal to develop, test, produce, manufacture, transfer, station, possess, or stockpile nuclear weapons. Significantly, under this treaty, it’s also illegal to “assist, encourage, or induce” anyone else to do any of those things. That may include financing them, and many investors, pension funds, and financial institutions are already divesting from the industry.

 

The treaty represents an absolute rejection of “deterrence theory” by most of the world. It stigmatizes nuclear weapons as a grave danger to all humanity, whether they are used as designed or detonate by accident. And it lays out a pathway for the elimination of all nuclear weapons from all countries, in line with existing legal obligations to disarm, under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, that the US and other nuclear-armed nations have already committed themselves to.

 

Pending federal legislation called “H.R. 2850: Nuclear Weapons Abolition and Economic and Energy Conversion Act,” would shift federal funds from nuclear weapons to green technologies that address climate change and other pressing social needs.

 

Learn more at [your organization], NuclearBan.US, TreatyAlignment.US, ICANW.org and DontBankOnTheBomb.com.