“In a real, practical sense,” says Arjun Makhijani, “the first arms control treaty was an environmental one.”

Public protests in the 1950s about contamination of breast milk and babies’ teeth with strontium-90 were central to the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty. It is no surprise, then, that the near-total cessation of new nuclear weapons production in the U.S. over the past two decades has come largely in response to the people and organizations who have challenged the production and testing of nuclear weapons on the basis of the environmental devastation they cause.

Makhijani himself is a key reason these challenges have succeeded. A physicist whose Institute for Energy and Environmental Research conducts its own rigorous independent investigations into nuclear programs and their environmental liabilities, Makhijani has trained hundreds of activists who live in the shadows of nuclear weapons facilities, providing them with everything from a basic grasp of nuclear physics to more advanced understandings needed to engage the weapons establishment with sound, scientific arguments.

“It is a remarkable fact of nuclear weapons history that every nuclear weapon state has first of all harmed its own people in the name of national security,” he says. From leaking underground waste tanks at Hanford in Washington, to radioactive tritium contaminating the Savannah River in South Carolina and Georgia, to new threats of environmental damage from reprocessing waste, Makhijani has documented the threats and questioned the standards used to measure risk. Most importantly, he has stood side by side with local groups who have worked to shut down the offending facilities and ensure that contaminated soil and waterways are cleaned up.

—Excerpt from Ploughshares Fund, Annual Report 2005-2006, on the Web at www.ploughshares.org/annual_reports.php .