By Bette McDevitt

While we’ve been paying attention to a few other things — the shutdown, the climate, the chaos of the last few years in the U.S. – nuclear weapons profiteers have been cooking up something new. It’s called the B61-12: a gravity bomb dropped from fighter jets and heavy bombers, currently in design and set for mass production in 2020. In the photo below, we see a mockup of the planned tool of mass incineration, rolled into a hearing room of Congress. Consider the privilege that allows these corporations who promote death and destruction to pull off a trick like that. Only with the help of their congressional puppets.

I learned about this latest evil act, only on January 3 of this year, in an email from the Women’s League for Peace and Freedom. John LaForge, on the staff of Nukewatch, took on a tedious task of documenting the corporations who are involved in the making of this weapon, along with phone numbers and addresses. He suggests that readers contact them, shame them, protest in front of their offices, and call for divestiture by individuals and institutions. A list of the complicit companies and what contact information could be found is in an accompanying article. We invite you to put pressure on them.

It’s a tradition in our town and in our movement to protest publicly. One of our founders, Molly Rush, went after GE as a maker of nuclear weapons in the 1980’s, and we in Pittsburgh continue a very public protest with the Stop Banking the Bomb campaign focused on the massive PNC Bank. PNC has given loans and/or underwritten bonds to two of the companies scheming up this latest tool of death and destruction, Bechtel and Orbital ATK. A list of the remaining death dealers with whom PNC does business appears below.

Keep in mind that there will be a shareholders’ meeting in April.

You can follow PNC Stop Banking the Bomb” events on Facebook.

PNC Financial Services has made an estimated US$1.186 billion available to the following nuclear weapons companies, and has also provided loans for an estimated amount of US$ 752 million to nuclear weapon companies. The table shows all loans closed since January 2013 or maturing after August 2016.

PNC has underwritten bonds for the following companies who participate in making nuclear weapons:

Finally, shareholdings of Northrop Grumman in the amount of $181 million are managed by PNC.

Information for these charts comes from the stopbankingthebomb.org website.

Bette McDevitt is a member of the Editorial Collective and the Raging Grannies