Advocates for nuclear disarmament hope this year will be different.
For the last few legislative sessions, a resolution in the Massachusetts State House calling on the federal government make moves to reduce the threat of nuclear war and eventually embrace a treaty prohibiting the weapons died in committee.
This time, however, advocates say the bill is before a different committee in the Senate, which may increase its chances of passage to the full legislative body. And state Sen. Jo Comerford, D-Northampton, who introduced the resolution, said the bill (S.1649) received a favorable report early in the session.
“The prospects, I think, are better than we’ve had,” Comerford said.
For some advocates of nuclear disarmament, resolutions such as the one pending in the State House are a key strategy to petition the federal government.
“It creates a national consensus if enough people do it,” said Dr. Ira Helfand, a longtime advocate for nuclear disarmament who lives in Northampton. Helfand helped found two groups that won Nobel Peace Prizes over the years for their work to prevent nuclear war.
He now volunteers with Back from the Brink, a grassroots campaign started in Northampton and Amherst that has since gone national, Helfand said.
Municipalities from around the country, including 21 in Massachusetts, have issued resolutions that urge the U.S. government to adopt a handful of policies espoused by Back from the Brink, such as limiting the president’s power to order a nuclear attack.
Five state legislatures have also issued resolutions of their own. In the case of the Rhode Island Senate, it passed its resolution in 2022 in a matter of days, according to Helfand.
In Massachusetts?
“You would assume that because we have pretty vocal politicians who are very open minded in a lot of ways you would think that it would move quickly,” said Anna Linakis, executive director for Great Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility.
But the wheels of legislation move slowly here. In the past, the resolution calling for nuclear disarmament was sent to the Senate Committee on Ways and Means, where “it would get bottlenecked,” Linakis said. Lawmakers, facing a glut of bills to work through, would never get to the resolution.
This time, the resolution was sent to Senate Committee on Rules on Jan. 15.
Linakis said she’s encountered little opposition to the resolution, only pushback from some saying the state should not weigh in on federal issues.
Should nuclear war come to the state, Linakis said, it would quickly become a local concern as hospitals would be overwhelmed.
“If there were to be a nuclear war in Massachusetts,” Linakis said, “we’d be talking about thousands upon thousands of burn victims. … There’s no way anybody could argue that if a nuclear war or nuclear bomb hit Massachusetts, it wouldn’t be the most local problem you can imagine.”
Michael Moran, who volunteers with Back from the Brink, said the resolution comes at a time of an increased threat of nuclear war. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight, nuclear-armed Russia continues its war in Ukraine, and a treaty between the U.S. and Russia that placed limits on their nuclear arsenals expired recently.
“I think all of us who feel strongly that the bill should be enacted are hoping that just the increasing risk of nuclear war that becomes clearer pretty much every day will change some minds that may have felt differently in the past,” Moran said.
As for Sen. Comerford, she said recently lawmakers have been navigating a host of issues, from food security to health care, while facing “a volatile federal government.”
The conversations she’s been having with her fellow lawmakers about the resolution have been about why nuclear policy, set by the federal government, is a state issue.
She said the resolution is not unlike when a municipality communicates with the legislature about its concerns.
“Just because we don’t set nuclear policy,” Comerford said, “we absolutely should and can have a voice about what happens at the federal level. … This is a way for an organized government, a commonwealth, to speak and to convey, that among many priorities, this is a priority to protect us at this time.”
