President Biden, Reverse Course on Nuclear Weapons

Dear President Biden,
The signers of this petition/letter want to communicate our grave concerns about the nuclear posture of the United States acknowledging that you come into office with a long record on this issue as a member of Congress and as vice-president.
• We want your administration not to predicate any standing down or decommissioning of our nuclear forces on the actions of other countries, especially those which don't have nuclear weapons. The United States has no moral right to demand that others disarm or renounce nuclear weapons first because we started and first industrialized the nuclear arms race.
• We therefore call on you to discontinue the long-standing but contradictory position, that as long as nuclear weapons are possessed by others, then the United States must have them and continue to update their components and systems.
• We celebrate the recent coming into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), but we sadly note your past belittling of the TPNW, and we decry the history of opposition to this treaty by the United States and the other eight nuclear weapons states. This must change!
• The military budget must be mined in order to fund real needs. With the Pentagon budget dwarfing those of other governmental departments and the military expenditures of the rest of the world, the United States must reorient its spending to match our stated goals of peace, prosperity, justice and equality.
• We call on you to end the US-Israeli-Saudi efforts to isolate Iran internationally and to stop attacks on their people and infrastructure.
• We call on you to remove the deadly and immoral sanctions against Iran immediately. Iran should not be treated as a nuclear weapon state to be threatened and attacked by nuclear weapon states like the United States or Israel.
• We call on you to shift US precedent and to pressure US ally Israel to be forthright with the world about its nuclear arsenal.
• We want you to hear, respect and heed the voices of the non-nuclear world even if other nuclear states hesitate or refuse.
• As parents, many of us teach that “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” Rather than abandon this lesson in time of national fear or stress, we implore you to scale it up and to be guided by this basic value as you govern.
• A large scale shift in priorities and direction will be necessary to steer our nation and the world away from a devastating nuclear cliff and conflagration. We call on you to take the wheel and turn now, before it is too late.
Sincerely,