Amanda Waldron

In 2007, a high school student by the name of Jennifer Barlow created the global phenomenon known as Dark Sky Week, urging people to reduce human-produced light pollution and to preserve the brilliance of the Milky Way. As we celebrate the end of this year’s Dark Sky Week, we couldn’t help but wish that nuclear testing hasn’t been lighting the skies ablaze with thermal radiation for 69 years.

Tomorrow, April 19, marks the eighth consecutive international Record Store Day, a tribute to the over 1000 independently-owned businesses that continue to sell good ole phonograph discs. In an age of instant downloading and the digital revolution, the world is making an effort to revive a unique technology of the past. At the same time, the topic of many vinyl records, nuclear weapons, is being forgotten.

On April 5th 2009, Barack Obama gave an unprecedented speech in Prague, in which he dedicated his presidency to laying the ground work for a world without nuclear weapons. “As the only nuclear power to have ever used a nuclear weapon,” he said, “the United States has a moral responsibility to act.” Today, an out-of-control nuclear weapons budget threatens that vision.

While the rest of the nation is concerned with shrinking budgets, incompetence among the nuclear personnel, and pullback from wars abroad, the Obama Administration’s FY 2015 budget inexplicably calls for an increased nuclear weapons budget. Even more disturbingly, the Administration is calling for a decrease in programs to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and a slowdown in the dismantlement of nuclear weapons that we’ve already committed to destroying.

Recent discoveries of fraud and cheating among U.S. nuclear personnel stand in stark contrast to the  Pentagon’s continued support for nuclear weapons programs and budgets. Why do we insist on keeping these obsolete weapons despite their fading utility? To get some answers, we reached out to our grantee, Stephen Young, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Here, he gives us the expert scoop on how and why the U.S. can get rid of the weapons we don’t need and take better care of the stockpile while it remains.

Ploughshares Fund prides itself on working with some of the nation’s smartest individuals from both sides of the aisle. As news breaks, we look to our grantees to give us a ground up interpretation of events.

It was three weeks ago today that the unpopular government shutdown came to a bittersweet end.

Ploughshares Fund President Joe Cirincione went live on KCBS News San Francisco to commend the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the international chemical weapons watchdog that has played a huge part in helping to eliminate Syria&rsquo

Tomorrow, between 12:30 and 1:00pm ET (9:30-10:00am PT), Middle East expert and Ploughshares Fund policy director Joel Rubin will sit down to chat LIVE on Facebook and respond to any questions you may have on nuclear negotiations with Iran.