Commentary on disarmament and related issues from outside the Beltway and academia.

Who we are:

John Burroughs is an activist and lawyer currently serving as the executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy (LCNP) in New York City. He also sometimes teaches courses on international law as an adjunct professor at Rutgers Law School, Newark. John’s connection with LCNP began in 1995, when he served as the NGO legal coordinator during the hearings before the International Court of Justice on nuclear weapons. He subsequently wrote a book about the opinion, The Legality of Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons: A Guide to the Historic Opinion of the International Court of Justice. Prior to coming to New York in 1999, he lived for many years in Oakland, California, where he worked as a consumer class action lawyer. There he also was a sometimes compensated, mostly volunteer staffer for Western States Legal Foundation, among many other things participating in demonstrations at the Nevada Test Site, representing Test Site and other protesters, and assisting with a late 1990s lawsuit challenging the Department of Energy’s environmental review of reorganization of the nuclear weapons complex. Along the way John obtained a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, writing his dissertation about international law and nuclear weapons. In the late 1970s, he lived in Seattle and contributed to a radical community newspaper, the Northwest Passage. That was when he first became involved in opposing nuclear weapons and incurred his first protest-related arrest, in a 1979 nonviolent direct action against the Trident nuclear-armed submarines based at Bangor on the nearby Olympic Peninsula.

Jackie Cabasso moved from New York to California in the late 1960s, where as a high school student she protested the Vietnam war and became a student leader in the new ecology movement. Though she had intended to be an artist, political activism took over her life. As a consequence of her first arrest at the Livermore nuclear weapons lab and subsequent trial, Jackie became the executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation in 1984, where today, in addition to organizing, speaking, and writing, she still designs T-shirts and fliers. Deeply committed to nonviolence, Jackie has been involved in nuclear disarmament, peace and environmental advocacy for more than two decades. She is a leading voice for nuclear weapons abolition, speaking at conferences and events across north America, Europe, and Asia. Jackie has participated in numerous nonproliferation and disarmament conferences at the United Nations, and in 1995 was a “founding mother” of the Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons, the largest anti-nuclear coalition in the world. Locally, Jackie chairs the Coordinating Committee of the Peoples NonViolent Response Coalition, a multi-issue coalition of groups and individuals who united after the 9-11 attacks. At the national level, she serves on the Steering Committee of United for Peace and Justice, the largest anti-war coalition in the country, and also convenes its Nuclear Disarmament/Redefining Security working group. Jackie travels frequently, and splits her time between California and New York.

Andrew Lichterman lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has worked on peace and environmental issues since the 1960’s, having starting out as a high school anti-war activist and alternative newspaper editor. As a lawyer, he has represented peace and environmental activists in a variety of settings, and also taught law at alternative law schools for many years. Since 1983 he has worked with the Oakland, California-based Western States Legal Foundation in a various paid and unpaid capacities, including litigation director and program director. In recent years his main focus has been on the abolition of nuclear weapons, and on making connections between that work and broader movements for real human security–for peace, economic equity, and a society more in balance with the planet.

Michael Spies is program associate for the New York-based Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy (LCNP). For the past year he has carried out research and analysis projects on topics ranging from the U.S. compliance with arms control/disarmament commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to Iranian compliance with its safeguards agreement with the IAEA. Prior to joining LCNP, he worked for the Los Alamos Study Group, Albuquerque, New Mexico, a non-profit which monitors the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory. He is a 2003 graduate of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, where among other things he was an organizer for the campus branch of the New Mexico Green Party.

Institutional affiliations are for identification only. Opinions expressed here are those of the individual contributors. Postings do not necessarily reflect the views of any organization.