For over 50 years, the University of California has managed the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – the "brains" of the US nuclear weapns complex – under contracts with the US Department of Energy (DOE). Every nuclear weapon in the United States arsenal was designed by a UC employee! This presents students and young people with a distinctive space to affect major change in US nuclear weapons policy -- by delegitimizing nuclear weapons at their source! Click here to read more.

The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation initiated the first Think Outside the Bomb student leadership conference in the summer of 2005 at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Since then, with NAPF sponsorship, Think Outside the Bomb has transformed into a national network of youth nuclear abolition activists and grown with a life of its own, hosting five conferences in only three years and providing a unique space for youth and students to meet and learn from each others' struggles, as well as network intimately with long-time disarmament activists. Each successive conference draws more youth and receives even more rave reviews from its participants. Click here to read more.

Today’s young people are growing up facing an increasingly uncertain future. The rising cost of a college education, “a war that won’t end in our lifetime” (in the words of current Vice President Dick Cheney), widespread environmental destruction, the growing threat of a nuclear holocaust – these are some of the many challenges confronting today’s high school-aged citizenry. Click here to read more.

Recognizing the need for a coordinated, grassroots movement to emerge against the militarization and nuclearization of the research that takes place at universities in the United States, the Youth Empowerment Initiative will be devoting itself in the spring and summer of 2006 to cultivating the framework for a national campaign to get academia out of the military-academic industrial complex. The name of this campaign, which we tentatively refer to as “Nuclear Free Universities,” is a work in progress. Click here to read more.