Kimmy Igla and Ann Suellentrop report back from the Second Meeting of States Parties1 to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (2MSP TPNW).2 Margot Patterson discusses a candlelight vigil December 14 (Thursday) organized by Citizens for Justice in the Middle East to honor children killed in the war in Gaza and to call for an immediate permanent ceasefire and an end to U.S. arms transfers to Israel. Radio Active Magazine host Spencer Graves discusses the work by the US and Israeli government to criminalize nonviolent activities while clandestinely supporting agents provocateurs.3 There are currently 69 States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Those 69 countries have agreed to disallow nuclear weapons on their territory and work to compensate the victims of nuclear weapons production and testing, including people suffering delayed health problems from uranium mining and nuclear weapons testing. Those states parties had their second official meeting at United Nations Headquarters November 27 to December 1. Kimmy Igla and Ann Suellentrop with PeaceWorks Kansas City and Physicians for Social Responsibility attended as observers. Kwame Nkrumah, a leader in the struggle to end colonialism in Ghana and their first Prime Minister and President, said in 1960, “We in Africa wish to live and develop … we are not freeing ourselves from centuries of imperialism and colonialism only to be maimed and destroyed by nuclear weapons.”4 The threat Nkrumah mentioned in 1960 is a much bigger concern today than it seemed then. Major simulations of a variety of nuclear war scenarios by a team of 10 leading experts in climatology, food production and economics appeared in Nature Food in 2022 - August: They concluded that a nuclear war between the US and Russia would likely loft so much smoke to the stratosphere where it would block enough sunlight from reaching the earth that 99% of people in the northern hemisphere would starve to death if they did not die of something else sooner. Worse, the fatalities would include over 80% of people worldwide, and over 90% of those would be in countries not involved in the nuclear exchange.5 The Future of Life Institute produced a The US is now leading in a new nuclear arms race7 that increases the risks of a nuclear war with new nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles. The latter reduce the time that leaders in a nuclear weapon state would have to decide if a report of an attack in progress is real or a false alarm. This makes us all less safe.8 Such false alarms occurred during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis9 and again in 1983 when Soviet Premier Andropov and his leading advisors believed that US President Reagan was developing a nuclear first strike capability and was crazy enough to use it.10 There have been other false alarms, probably including some that are state secrets in other nuclear weapon states. The research on "system accidents" documents how it's impossible to design, build and manage any complex system to ultra-high levels of reliability, because managers learn they can engage "safely" in increasingly risky behaviors.11 Worse, research on human psychology says that expert intuition, when it exists, is learned from frequent, rapid, high-quality feedback on decisions they make. That means that the intuition of political and military leaders increasingly push them to adopt increasingly risky behaviors, thereby increasing the risk of a nuclear war.12 Report back event January 7 The public is invited in an expanded discussion of the TPNW including the