ACA is “soliciting votes”:http://survey.armscontrol.org/index.php?sid=5 for the 2007 “Arms Control Person of the Year.”
Here are the nominees:
*Jonas Gahr Støre, Foreign Minister of Norway* for spearheading his government’s initiative to negotiate a treaty banning cluster munitions after the failure of states to agree to such talks at the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in 2006.
*Representatives Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.) and David Hobson (R-Ohio)* for leading the House of Representatives and Congress to zero out funding for the controversial Reliable Replacement Warhead program.
*Prakash Karat, General Secretary of India’s Communist Party and his left parties allies* for slowing progress on the implementation of the U.S.-Indian nuclear cooperation deal.
*Former Secretaries of State George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, and former Sen. Sam Nunn* for their catalytic January 2007 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal calling for renewed U.S. leadership on practical steps “toward a world free of nuclear weapons.”
*Christopher Hill, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs,* for negotiating and keeping on track the plan to implement the six-party agreement on the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
*Margaret Beckett, former U.K. Sec. of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs,* for her June 2007 speech calling for renewed action on key nuclear disarmament steps, including the CTBT, deeper nuclear reductions, and more, as a means to strengthen global nonproliferation efforts.
*Jan Neoral, the mayor of the Czech village of Trokavec,* whose residents voted 71 – 1 against deployment of a U.S. strategic missile defense radar in their town.
*Phil Goff, New Zealand’s Disarmament and Arms Control Minister,* for his leadership on a nonbinding UN resolution calling on nuclear-armed states to lessen the alert level of their deployed weapons, which won the support of 124 countries despite U.S., British, and French opposition.
*Lulzim Basha, Albanian Foreign Minister,* for helping his country become the first to verifiably destroy its chemical weapons stockpile as part of its commitments under the Chemical Weapons Convention.
*The Scottish Parliament* for their June 14 vote in opposition of the U.K. government’s replacement of the existent Trident nuclear-armed submarine system.
My ballot is secret.