So much is happening in the world today. It might seem that focusing on nuclear weapons – in the face of the ongoing massacre of civilians in Gaza, the unchecked threat of climate change, and an economy that is failing working people – means falling short on some of the most urgent moral and political challenges of the moment. But nuclear weapons are at the destructive heart of this system. Israel’s ongoing attack on Gaza is the tragic product of an international system rooted in colonialism and cemented by the existence of nuclear weapons. Israel is the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons, and it has support from the United States, the most powerful nuclear-armed country in the world. The big promise of “deterrence” is that nuclear weapons will prevent war – that nuclear-weapons countries will be too scared of the consequences of escalation to fight one another. Yet with the wars in Ukraine and elsewhere, we’ve seen in real time how nuclear weapons perpetuate, rather than prevent, conflicts – that constantly threaten to escalate to nuclear war. Let your senators and representative know that the most dangerous nuclear weapons, ICBMs, need to be eliminated. The 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that wait in underground silos across the Great Plains are easily overlooked, as they were designed to be. But they are dangerous because hundreds of these weapons, loaded with warheads tens of times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, can be launched with only a few minutes’ notice. Once launched, they cannot be recalled, virtually locking in a reciprocal strike and the civilization-ending consequences that would come with it. Although those missiles seem remote from the battlefields and conference rooms where the U.S.-Russia conflict takes place, the grassroots effort to get rid of them is an essential part of slowing down the war machine and building a future without the threat of global war. As a constituent, please tell your members of Congress that ICBMs are an unacceptable threat to human survival. Our country’s recent actions in the Middle East show it moving further and further away from its obligations to pursue disarmament – actions that have real, profound consequences for the future of nuclear proliferation. Before October 7, the U.S. was facilitating a “normalization” deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel, as well as a U.S.-Saudi security pact and possible uranium enrichment deal with the Saudis. Meanwhile, Iran is allegedly getting closer to developing its own nuclear weapon – with a nuclear program that’s no longer limited by the Iran Deal, since President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the agreement in 2018. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has stated at least twice in U.S. news outlets that Saudi Arabia would develop a nuclear weapon if Iran developed one. This is a threat to global peace from a country with a long history of shameless human rights abuses that have been supported by the United States government. And it means that soon, there could be three nuclear-armed countries in the Middle East. All this is a great example of why an anti-war movement with the staying power to shift the status quo must be founded on a commitment to eliminating nuclear weapons. In the coming months and beyond, RootsAction will be working to help grow the movement to build a future beyond endless war and the peril of nuclear annihilation, beginning with the elimination of ICBMs. You can learn more at the Defuse Nuclear War website.