WILPF’s “Norton Bill” Calling for Conversion to a Peace Economy

From left, DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton and WILPF Disarm/End Wars Co-Chairs Robin Lloyd and Ellen Thomas, who met at Ms. Norton’s office on May 21, 2018, about her nuclear weapons abolition and conversion bill.

By Robin Lloyd
Co-Chair, WILPF-US Disarm/End Wars Committee

Many WILPF members may know the epic story of Ellen Thomas and her passionate commitment to abolishing nuclear weapons. She and her husband, William Thomas, demonstrated 24/7 in front of the White House for 25 years, calling for a conversion to a peace economy. (See the two-part, feature-length Aljazeera video about this prolonged peace vigil.)

In 1993 Ellen helped to coordinate the successful Washington, DC, ballot initiative for Nuclear Disarmament and Economic Conversion (NDEC). District of Columbia representative Eleanor Holmes Norton has introduced some version of this bill to Congress every session since then.

This year, Ellen and the Disarm Committee have hopes of gaining new traction for NDEC in the House of Representatives. Two factors give us the audacity of hope for a breakthrough: 1) the passage of the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty at the UN, signed by 122 countries, and 2) the election to Congress of a flock of progressive representatives calling for a Green New Deal. 

From our perspective, the “Norton bill,” if implemented, could be the essential underpinning of the Green New Deal. It liberates our tax dollars from the sinkhole of military spending and fosters the economic conversion necessary to create jobs and rebuild our infrastructure, both of which are essential to getting our society back on its feet.

This year, the Committee sent a letter to Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton congratulating her on her reelection and asking her to make several important revisions to the "Nuclear Weapons Abolition and Economic and Energy Conversion Act.”

1. The bill should encourage the US Government to provide leadership by signing and ratifying the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. (When several members of the Disarm committee met with Norton during Alliance for Nuclear Accountability  DC Days, Ms. Norton agreed to revise this section to refer to the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and was the first U.S. Congressperson to sign the ICAN Parliamentary Pledge to support the U.N Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.)
2. The bill will clarify the conversion of “nuclear weapons industry processes, plants, and programs; and in retraining employees, to shift to a constructive, ecologically beneficial Peace Economy.”
3. The bill shall take effect on the date on which the President certifies to Congress that all countries possessing nuclear weapons have begun such elimination.

What You Can Do

Please email Eleanor Holmes Norton and say you agree with the revisions in the WILPF letter, and you hope that she will introduce the bill quickly! If you live in  Washington, DC, please stop by her office and drop by a personal letter as a constituent!

Please call, email, and write to your Representative if you don’t live in DC and ask that he or she co-sponsor the bill either before or after it is introduced!  

Please send us an email to let us know when you’ve made such contacts, and what the results have been!