Richard Rhodes has written a one-act play, Reykjavik, which is an eighty-minute dialogue based upon the actual transcripts from the conversation between the two Presidents.  Mr. Rhodes, a renowned author has chronicled the nuclear age with numerous books and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb this is his first play.

Reykjavik, the play, will be performed at 7:00 p.m. on both Tuesday, May 8th and Wednesday, May 9th at the new Cemex Auditorium at The Knight School of Management on the Stanford University campus.  After the Tuesday performance a short question and answer session will be held with the audience . Mr. Rhodes and Phillip Taubman, N.Y. Times journalist, author, professor and nuclear expert, who covered the Reykjavik Summit in person for the N.Y. Times will be on stage.

On Wednesday, May 9th the performance will be followed by comments and a question and answer by Dr. Charles Ferguson, President of the Federation of American Scientists and Dr. Sidney Drell of the Hoover Institute’s Nuclear Security Project.

Reykjavik the play will have prior to each performance a pre-show viewing of Sonya Rapoport’s “The Nuclear Family in the Atomic Age”.  Her images will be shown before each performance of Reykjavik.  Also, being shown will be a five minute video by the Nuclear Literacy Project created by Dr. Sri Devabhaktuni.”

The Reykjavik Project will also unveil a new public opinion questionnaire that will be the work of Professor Jon Krasnick  of Stanford’s Department of Political Science.  This questionnaire will be offered to all event participants and will be used in future events and made available to other non-proliferation / disarmament initiatives.  It will be a survey assessing the hopes, fears and expectations of the general public for governmental policies that will lead to a world where the elimination of nuclear weapons is valued and activity pursued.

The overall objective of the Reykjavik Project is to spark awareness and a sense of empowerment to our audience that they can speak out and demand a world that exists without nuclear weapons.  President Reagan and President Gorbachev felt this in their hears as have many world leaders prior to Reykjavik and after.  Why can’t we get this done?  The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and these steps must be taken by many not just the few.

As quoted from the Federation of American Scientists (FAS): “Public-private partnerships are vital to building peace worldwide,” said Les DeWitt. “I feel privileged to join FAS’s exciting ISP project and help raise public awareness about the importance of energy and water security issues.”

The first ISP project involves American scientists assisting Yemenis engineers in helping to alleviate Yemen’s chronic water depletion. To learn more on this particular project, visit: www.water.org.

For more information visit the FAS website: www.fas.org

More updates to follow.

By James Goodby and Les DeWitt

History is made by individuals, and once in a while events come along to remind us of that.

An example is New START, a strategic arms reduction treaty that is critical to the future of humankind and now is before the U.S. Senate. It is a relatively modest treaty in terms of the reductions in strategic nuclear weapons it will require Russia and the United States to make. But it will reinstate a monitoring process in both countries that lapsed when a strategic arms reduction treaty negotiated during the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush expired a year ago.

And here we come to that conjunction of events that ties an abstract idea to human action.

George Shultz, the former secretary of state, secretary of the Treasury and secretary of labor, turned 90 Monday. He continues to work for causes he believes in, and he enjoys considerable success in doing so.

Probably closest to his heart is the vision of a world without nuclear weapons. His advocacy of this goal, added to Reagan’s own vision, nearly led to an agreement with the Soviet Union’s last president, Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1986 in Reykjavik, Iceland. Then, the idea was attacked. Now, it is seen as a highly desirable goal around the world.

What a wonderful conjunction of events it would be if the Senate were to ratify New START this week, tying this indispensable next step in bringing nuclear weapons under control to the secretary’s momentous birthday.

Russian and American stockpiles of nuclear weapons constitute about 90 percent of all the nuclear weapons in the world today. Without cooperation between the two countries in shrinking those numbers, there is little chance that others will follow suit. In fact, there is every reason to believe that more and more nations will build, buy or steal nuclear weapons.

The threat we face is no longer Russia, of course, but nuclear-armed terrorism and rogue states. Without the New START treaty, the barriers built to block the spread of nuclear weapons to additional countries will erode. Loss of control of these deadly weapons or the materials from which they are made will certainly ensue.

A nuclear bomb sent by a terrorist will have no return address inscribed upon it, nor will it care if the Democrats or Republicans voted for or against policies based upon particular partisan concerns. This is a real threat, and it cannot be removed short of drying up the reservoir of weapons and materials to which terrorists or rogue states may gain access.

Shultz, at 90, is still working hard to prevent a nuclear catastrophe by advocating ratification of this treaty. As he frequently says, democracy is not a spectator sport. Join him in this critically important endeavor: E-mail your voice of support for Senate ratification of the New START treaty this week to Democratic Sen. John Kerry and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar. Both support ratification, and knowing that you support the treaty will strengthen their position.

Controlling nuclear proliferation is a long, hard diplomatic climb to a mountaintop that has never been scaled before. That climb must be supported and led by our country. Ratification of the New START treaty by our Senate is vital to this cause.

JAMES GOODBY is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution (www.hoover.org). LES DeWITT is the founder of the Fund for Peace Initiatives (www.ffpi.org). They wrote this article for the Mercury News newspaper.

GSN reports: Countries participating in the 2010 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review conference on Friday proposed convening an international meeting in four years to establish a time line for ridding the world of nuclear weapons, the Associated Press reported. The preliminary agreement outlines 26 steps for pursuing the abolition of nuclear weapons and avoiding conflict once global nuclear disarmament is achieved, Agence France-Presse reported. The plan, formulated by Zimbabwean Ambassador to the United Nations Boniface Chidyausiku, calls for an initial meeting next year aimed at expediting the disarmament process. The document also seeks pledges from nuclear-armed nations to halt further modernization of their nuclear arsenals; enter the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty into force; ban further production of fissile material for nuclear weapons; declare existing nuclear-weapon fuel; and establish a process for removing fissile material from all nuclear weapons under U.N. supervision.

To read the new treaty and the protocol, please click here.

The NPT is a landmark international treaty whose objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament. The NPT represents the only binding commitment in a multilateral treaty to the goal of disarmament by the nuclear-weapon States.

The Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute have produced a very useful resource on everything one needs to know about the NPT (Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty). To read the full text or download a pdf file, please click here.