About the Western States Legal Foundation

About WSLF

Board and Staff

What they are saying about WSLF

WSLF History

WESTERN STATES LEGAL FOUNDATION
Board of Directors and Staff

President
Phyllis Olin serves as WSLF's Board President. After many years of anti-nuclear activism as a co-founder, with her late husband, Bill, of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility, Ms. Olin spent a semester working as a legal intern at WSLF, joining its Board in 1995. She is now an attorney in private practice. Ms. Olin has played a leading role in WSLF's work on nuclear transportation, opposition to “Urban Warrior” military combat exercises in Oakland, opposition to a military charter school in Oakland and environmental litigation challenging the California Department of Toxic Substances Control's failure to do adequate environmental review in connection with the issuance of a permit for Livermore Lab's hazardous waste management facility. She has represented WSLF at national and international conferences, including Alliance for Nuclear Accountability and Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conferences. Ms. was a member of the Coordinating Committee of the People's NonViolent Response Coalition (PNVRC). WSLF was a co-founder of PNVRC, a multi-issue coalition of groups and individuals who came together in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks to formulate and promote nonviolent alternatives to the “war on terrorism” both at home and abroad. She currently represents WSLF in the New Priorities Campaign to re-direct bloated military spending to social needs. Ms. Olin does volunteer mediation for SEEDS, a community-based non-profit organization, and volunteers with the Alzheimer's Association, doing advocacy and lobbying.

Treasurer
Heather Davisonserves as WSLF's Treasurer. She has been involved in anti-nuclear activism since the late 1980's. She lived and worked for years with Seeds of Peace, a collective dedicated to providing logistical and organizing support for large-scale peace movement demonstrations, walks and encampments. Much of her organizing efforts have focused around demonstrations and domestic and international conferences at or near the Nevada Nuclear Weapons Test Site. She has been a member of several "affinity groups" - close-knit community models strategizing and working for peace on a local level. In addition to her experience with community organizing and events production, Ms. Davison brings to WSLF her extensive background in administrative management. She was the Administrative Director for Berkeley's Feldenkrais Professional Training Program, as well as Business Manager for two international educational materials distributors. She has been a working musician for 20 years, responsible for all aspects of band management, booking, promotion and composition and runs a small home business.
Ms. Davison has worked as a core volunteer with WSLF since 1994, joined the board in 1998, and served as Board Secretary. From 1998 – 2004 she managed a significant portion of the WSLF's administration. Ms. Davison is married to Julian Borrill, a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and is the mother of a 7 year old daughter, Lily.

Secretary
Sherry Larsen-Beville is a longtime peace and social justice activist. She became active in the early 1980's when she took nonviolence training for planned actions at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab. To this day she continues to be involved and is usually seen at the gates of Livermore Lab on Good Friday and during the Hiroshima/Nagasaki days. In the 1980s and early 1990s Ms. Larsen-Beville was very involved with The Sanctuary Movement, Office on Accompaniment, Ecumenical Peace Institute, The Pledge of Resistance and other organizations working toward a peaceful resolution to the conflicts in Central America. In December 1984 she joined La Marcha for La Paz in Centro America, and in 1993 participated in Mir Sada, a march for peace to Sarajevo. During the 1980s and 1990s Ms. Larsen-Beville helped organize and accompany several delegations to El Salvador. One of her favorite trips was the Atomic Mirror Pilgrimage to Japan in 1995 to commemorate the 50 year anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1997 Ms. Larsen-Beville and her late husband Frank moved to downtown Oakland where she joined the First Unitarian Church of Oakland. The church was a member congregation of the Oakland Coalition of Congregations (OCC). Ms. Larsen-Beville dedicated much of her free time to the work of the church, mostly through OCC both as an officer and an activist. When Ms. Larsen-Beville and Frank married they already had 7 children between them and together had 2 daughters. She has 7 grandchildren. For personal enjoyment Ms. Larsen-Beville enjoys spending time with her family and friends, going to movies and playing duplicate bridge.

Executive Director
Jacqueline Cabasso moved with her family from New York to California in the late 1960s, where as a high school student she protested the Vietnam War and became a student leader in the new ecology movement. Though she had intended to be an artist, political activism took over her life. In the late 1970s, she became active in the grassroots California movement against nuclear power. Through the anti-nuclear power movement, she learned about the horrors of nuclear weapons and discovered the existence of one of the two main U.S. nuclear weapons research and development laboratories in her own backyard. As a consequence of her first trial stemming from an arrest while nonviolently blocking the gates to the Livermore nuclear weapons lab, she became the Executive Director of WSLF in the spring of 1984, where today, in addition to organizing, speaking, and writing, she still designs T-shirts, banners and brochures,

Deeply committed to nonviolence and international law, she has been continuously active in nuclear disarmament, peace and environmental advocacy for more than three decades. I has had the opportunity to travel widely and has spoken at public hearings, legislative symposia and conferences around the United States, across Europe and Scandinavia, in Japan, Korea, Russia, Kazakhstan, Polynesia, Costa Rica, Mexico, India, China and Brazil, and has addressed rallies and gatherings at the Livermore and Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratories, the Nevada and Semipalatinsk nuclear test sites, the French nuclear weapons laboratories, and in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She has been arrested approximately 50 times in acts of nonviolent resistance to U.S. nuclear weapons and foreign policy at the Livermore Lab, the Nevada Test Site, the White House, and other U.S. military and government facilities.

In 1991, she was a member of the first international nongovernmental delegation (one of three Americans) ever to tour the then-recently closed Soviet nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk. During the 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference at UN Headquarters in New York, she was a “founding mother” of the Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons. That year she also worked with the World Court Project in The Hague, during historic hearings before the International Court of Justice on the legal status of nuclear weapons. In 1997 she spoke at the first international NGO-government conference on nuclear weapons ever held in China, in Beijing. In 2000 she took part in the founding meeting of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace in India. In 2007 she was the first NGO speaker to address the United Nations General Assembly First Committee on nuclear disarmament. In 2010, she was a featured speaker at an official public hearing on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in Brasilia, the first such event of its kind, sponsored by the Foreign Relations Committee of the Brazilian Senate, the Brazilian Center for Peace and Solidarity (Cebrapaz) and the University of Brasilia. In 2011 she represented Mayors for Peace at the gala opening at UN Headquarters in New York of the first permanent exhibit dedicated to the work of civil society, featuring a display of over one million signatures collected on the Mayors for Peace petition demanding an end to the nuclear threat. In December 2013, she took part in the first public conference in Israel, featuring an unprecedented assembly of current and former Israeli Knesset members and local and international peace and human rights activists, to call for a zone free of nuclear weapons and all other weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East and for a world free of nuclear weapons.

She was an accredited NGO participant in the Partial Test Ban Treaty Amendment Conference at UN Headquarters in New York in 1991. She participated as an accredited NGO representative in NPT Preparatory Committee meetings and Review Conferences in 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2013, in New York, Geneva, and Vienna. She was an accredited NGO participant in the 2001 Conference on Facilitating Entry-Into-Force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) at the UN in New York and the 1994 CTBT negotiations at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. In 1996, she was a presenter at an international symposium on Science, Ethics and Society, organized by the World Federation of Scientific Workers under the patronage of UNESCO, at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. In 1999, she was an accredited NGO participant in the negotiations on the establishment of the International Criminal Court, at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization headquarters in Rome. In 2008 she was a presenter at the 20th annual United Nations Disarmament Conference in Saitama, Japan. In 2009 she was a plenary speaker at the United Nations 62nd Annual Department of Public Information/Non-Governmental Organizations Conference in Mexico City. In November 2013 she was a presenter at the 5th Global Citizens' Assembly for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons in Nagasaki. And in February 2014 she was an accredited NGO participant in the Second Conference on the Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons, hosted by the Mexican government in Nayarit.

In connection with the 2005 and 2010 NPT Review Conferences, in 2005, with Abolition 2000 and United for Peace and Justice, she was a core organizer of the May 1 No Nukes! No Wars! March and rally in New York City, which attracted some 40,000 participants. In 2010 she was a core organizer of the “International Conference for a Nuclear-Free, Peaceful, Just and Sustainable World,” at the historic Riverside Church in New York City, followed by a rally and march from Times Square to UN Plaza that drew some 15,000 participants.

She received the International Peace Bureau's Sean MacBride Peace Award in 2008 and the Agape Foundation's Enduring Visionary Prize in 2009.

Senior Research Analyst
Andrew Lichterman is a lawyer and activist who has served in various capacities at WSLF since 1983, and has served on its board since 1985. He began his association with WSLF as a volunteer attorney, and was Litigation Director from 1986 to 1989. He was Program Director at WSLF from 1998 to 2005, and returned in 2012 as Senior Research Analyst, the position he currently holds. He is the principal author of most of WSLF's Briefing Papers and Information Bulletins. In 1998-1999, he split his time between WSLF and the Los Alamos Study Group in New Mexico, a citizen group which monitors U.S. nuclear weapons programs with particular attention to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. As a lawyer, Mr. Lichterman has represented peace and environmental activists in a variety of settings, and also taught law at alternative law schools for many years. His legal work for WSLF has ranged from representing peace and environmental activists in cases arising out of non-violent protests to representing coalitions of groups in environmental proceedings concerning a number of nuclear weapons research-related projects at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the deployment of nuclear cruise missile-armed Navy ships in San Francisco Bay. Mr. Lichterman's writings have appeared in a variety of venues, from local newspaper op-eds to the UN Disarmament Institute's Disarmament Forum to Frontline of India. In recent years his work has focused on the purposes and impacts of U.S. nuclear and other strategic weapons programs, including their effect on global disarmament efforts, and on the relationship between nuclear technologies, militarism, and the global economy. He also writes about the politics of disarmament efforts and the relationship between disarmament work and other social movements. He is a member of the Global Council of the Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons and the Coordinating Committee of United for Peace and Justice. He holds a J.D. from Boalt Hall, U.C. Berkeley, and a B.A. from Yale. He has two children, Marc and Anna.

John Burroughs is Executive Director of the New York-based Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, the UN office of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms. Among other publications, he is co-editor and contributor, Nuclear Disorder or Cooperative Security? U.S. Weapons of Terror, the Global Proliferation Crisis, and Paths to Peace (2007); author of The Legality of Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons: A Guide to the Historic Opinion of the International Court of Justice (1997); and has published articles and op-eds in various journals and newspapers, including Fordham International Law Journal, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Newsday. Prior to 1999, when he assumed his current position at LCNP, for more than a decade Dr. Burroughs was an attorney, mostly on a pro bono basis, for WSLF. Among other things, he represented Nevada Test Site and other protesters, helped defend the Oakland Nuclear Free Zone Act, and assisted with a late 1990s lawsuit challenging the Department of Energy's environmental review of reorganization of the nuclear weapons complex. LCNP and WSLF have collaborated on numerous projects over the years and continue to do so. Dr. Burroughs has a J.D. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and a B.A. from Harvard.

Marcia Campos is a Chilean born U.S. citizen who was an active participant in the students' movement that supported the government of President Salvador Allende in the 1970s. She was a political exile in Mexico after the military coup of September 11, 1973. In Mexico, Ms. Campos was involved in the international solidarity movement with the victims of the military regime of Augusto Pinochet. Ms. Campos was a tenured Professor-Researcher in the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico specializing in Latin American studies. She has been a resident of California since 1986, where she continues her lifelong work as a human rights activist. She has supported legislative work and developed national and international campaigns for disabilities awareness and prevention in partnership with the University of California Berkeley's Health Initiative of the Americas. She is currently adjunct faculty for the Western Institute of Social Research (WISR), for Latin American topics. Ms. Campos joined the WSLF board in 2009, and has been instrumental in expanding the Latin American connections of WSLF both inside and outside of the US. She is a campaigner for the Vision 20/20 Campaign of Mayors for Peace.

Dannette Lambert is a political consultant and community organizer with Artos Consulting in Oakland, CA. She holds a BA in Anthropology from Howard University and MA in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley, with a specialty in Environmental Justice and Social Movement Theory. Dannette has a diverse and varied background. For six years she worked as an ESL teacher in Hiroshima, Japan, where she was an active leader in the anti-nuclear movement and head of the Global Peacemakers Organization, a grassroots organization that teaches atomic bomb survivors how to tell their stories in English for an international audience. Her Master's research focused on the Jharkhand Organization Against Radiation in Jadugoda, India and their fight to combat uranium mining in their village. Dannette has also worked as a community organizer, tenant advocate, environmental consultant and, most recently, as the Community Services Coordinator for Oakland City Councilmember Dan Kalb. She is a regular contributor to Oakland Local, where she blogs about the intersection between politics, race, and community empowerment and is a founder and co-chair of New Leaders Council Oakland. Ms. Lambert did an internship with WSLF in 2007 and joined the Board after completing her Masters degree.

Wilson Riles Jr. was appointed Administrative Assistant to newly elected Alameda County, California Supervisor John George in 1976. He worked with George fighting for a decent health care system, alternatives to incarceration, against apartheid in South Africa, for bi-lingual education in schools, and housing and services for the homeless. In 1979, Mr. Riles ran and was elected to the Fifth District seat on the Oakland City Council, where he served for 13 years. He is the son of Wilson Riles Sr. who was elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of California in 1970 and served for three terms until 1982. As an Oakland City Council Member, Riles engineered the City's commitment of $1.3 million from the Redevelopment Agency for the schools' Academies programs. He was instrumental in the defeat of the INS establishment of a privately run detention facility in Oakland. Riles was the principal Council member responsible for both Oakland's Anti-apartheid Ordinance and Oakland's Nuclear Free Zone Ordinance. Mr. Riles served as Regional Director of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Pacific Mountain Regional Office, from 1991 to 2001. He currently runs the Nafsi Ya Jamii urban retreat center in Oakland with his partner Patricia St. Onge, with the goal of creating a sustainable community through restoring and practicing traditional indigenous ways in a 21st Century context. He is the father of six daughters and grandfather of seven.

In Memoriam

Dale Nesbitt, WSLF treasurer. Dale was a long-time peace and environmental advocate active with a number of groups, is an engineer, retired from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). There, for many years he served as Mechanical Project Engineer/Manager for a number of research projects in the areas of high energy particle physics, energy, the environment and astronomy. On one project he was the principle Engineer and collaborated directly with Dr. Owen Chamberlain a veteran of the Manhattan project and a Nobel Prize recipient. Owen was a long time opponent of Nuclear weapons and Mr. Nesbitt learned a great deal from him. In the 1980s Mr. Nesbitt was a local organizer in the successful nation-wide scientists' campaign against "Star Wars," begun at LBNL, where more than 50% of the professional staff, at LBNL signed pledges not to solicit or work on any "Star Wars" projects. Prior to LBNL, Mr. Nesbitt worked as Principal Engineer and Project Manager at Singer Corporation, and Project Engineer at American Optical and Ampex. With the Kaiser Activation Group, he served as Site Mechanical Engineer on a Titan Missile Site. He also worked as an Engineer for General Electric. Mr. Nesbitt earned a B.S.M.E. from the University of Idaho, Sigma Tau Honorary. He was an alumnus of General Electric's graduate level Advanced Technical Course and Creative Engineering Program. Mr. Nesbitt holds three patents. Through his professional associations and his membership in the Union of Concerned Scientists, Mr. Nesbitt had extensive contacts in the scientific community. Mr. Nesbitt contributed substantially to WSLF's technical understanding of nuclear weapons programs and influence of the national laboratories. He currently serves as Treasurer for WSLF.

Michael Veiluva, Foundation Counsel. Mike was WSLF's Foundation Counsel for over thirty years. He represented WSLF in litigation and on governmental and nongovernmental advisory boards. He spoke and wrote on behalf of WSLF in a variety of forums. Mr. Veiluva was raised in an Air Force family and grew up on nuclear bases around the globe. He became actively involved in social movements around nuclear weapons and nuclear power in the late 1970s, initially as a legal worker supporting mass demonstrations at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California (the Abalone Alliance), and later on the legal team supporting hundreds of demonstrators arrested at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory in the 1980s. He represented groups such as Sierra Club and Greenpeace in environmental litigation; delivered numerous comments before federal and state agencies; and served on advisory panels for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Environmental Protection Agency on radiation standards; and attended environmental conferences abroad.

In the 1980s Mr. Veiluva worked on litigation arising from the campaign against the homeporting of the battleship Missouri in San Francisco, and WSLF's successful challenge to the University of California's 1987 environmental impact report for the Livermore Lab. Later, he was the lead attorney in WSLF's lawsuit to compel environmental review of a prototype uranium enrichment facility at Livermore. Mr. Veiluva served as co-counsel in the lawsuit brought by Representative Dennis Kucinich (Ohio) and 31 members of Congress in their challenge to President George W. Bush's unilateral abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Mr. Veiluva was the principal author of a groundbreaking 1995 monograph produced jointly by Greenpeace and WSLF entitled Laboratory Testing in a Test Ban/Nonproliferation Regime. He also published in journals including Social Justice and Nature Medicine. In 2009 he published Burdens of Proof: Iran, the United States, and Nuclear Weapons, a WSLF sourcebook, and in 2010 was a contributing author in Beyond Arms Control published by the Reaching Critical Will project of the International Women's League for Peace and Freedom. He earned a J.D. from Boalt Hall, U.C. Berkeley (1981) and a B.A. from Stanford (1978).

HISTORY
WESTERN STATES LEGAL FOUNDATION (WSLF) grew out of the movement against nuclear power and weapons in the early 1980's. Founded in 1982 to provide legal assistance to nonviolent peace and environmental activists, WSLF has helped build both national and international nuclear abolition networks while remaining firmly based in a local organizing context. WSLF strives to provide information, analysis, and advocacy which is professional in quality but grounded in the values of the social movements we serve.

HIGHLIGHTS

1982: WSLF represented nonviolent protesters at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant on the central coast of California.

1983: WSLF defended hundreds of nonviolent protesters in an unusual "representative" trial arising out of a massive protest at the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory in Livermore, California, in which over a thousand people were arrested.

1984: WSLF stopped a food irradiation facility proposed for Dublin, California.

1984-1989: WSLF provided legal assistance to activists in cases arising out of nonviolent direct actions at the Livermore Lab, Nevada Test Site and the Concord Naval Weapons Station in Concord, California.

1985: WSLF released Risking Peace: Why We Sat in the Road, an account of the huge 1983 nonviolent protest at the Livermore Lab and the subsequent mass trial conducted by WSLF, published by Open Hand Books.

1985-1988: WSLF provided information and legal representation to a coalition of peace and environmental groups which stopped the homeporting of the Battleship Missouri and 16 other warships, many armed with nuclear-capable cruise missiles, in San Francisco Bay.

1987-1988: WSLF represented local groups in a lawsuit which resulted in both federal and state environmental reviews of Livermore National Laboratory nuclear activities.

1988-1989: WSLF, with other groups, successfully halted construction of an incinerator for hazardous and radioactive waste at Livermore Lab and stopped development of a pilot project at the Lab to purify weapons-grade plutonium using laser technology.

1989- present: WSLF continues to monitor U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) plans to modernize its nuclear weapons research, production, and testing facilities across the nation. WSLF has participated in numerous environmental review proceedings and has worked with grassroots groups nationwide to press for cleanup of DOE's contaminated weapons sites.

1989-1992: WSLF represented local citizens in a case in which Oakland's tough Nuclear Free Zone ordinance was challenged by the U.S. government. Although the federal government prevailed, WSLF worked with the Oakland City Attorney to draft a replacement ordinance, adopted by the City Council, which remains in effect.

1990: WSLF traveled to Kazakhstan where,with other organizations advocating for a Comprehensive Test Ban and abolition of nuclear weapons, they began to forge international alliances among groups calling for the closure of the Soviet nuclear weapons test site at Semipalatinsk and groups working to end testing at the U.S. test site in Nevada and the French nuclear test site in Polynesia.

1993-present: WSLF was one of the first organizations to challenge the "Stockpile Stewardship" program, a mammoth effort to maintain and modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal after the cessation of underground nuclear testing. WSLF's research and advocacy efforts have played a leading role in building opposition to this dangerous program within the U.S. and internationally.

1994-present: WSLF has presented information about U.S. weapons programs and analysis of their status under international law at the 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conferences and annual Preparatory Committee meetings at the United Nations in New York, Geneva and Vienna.

1995: WSLF staffed the World Court Project in The Hague, Netherlands, during historic hearings before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the legal status of nuclear weapons. In its 1996 Advisory Opinion, the ICJ affirmed, "there exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations on nuclear disarmament."

1995-present: WSLF co-founded the Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons, which has grown to more than 2000 groups in over 90 countries.

1996-97: WSLF contributed to the drafting of a Model Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC), a draft treaty for the abolition of nuclear weapons. The Model NWC was accepted by Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and circulated to the member states as an official UN document.

1997: WSLF was a lead organizer of the Abolition 2000 Annual General Meeting held on the first anniversary of the last French nuclear test in Tahiti and Moorea, French-occupied Polynesia, followed by a major northern California Abolition 2000 conference at Laney College in Oakland.

1997: WSLF participated in the first international NGO-government conference on nuclear weapons ever held in China, in Beijing.

1997-1998: WSLF provided legal information and support to a regional coalition opposing shipment of spent nuclear fuel from foreign research reactors through California and Nevada.

1997-2000: WSLF and 38 other groups sued DOE over inadequate environmental review of its nuclear weapons programs, waste management, and cleanup. Settlement in 1998 resulted in extensive new information on environmental impacts and a $6.25 million fund for technical aid to affected communities and tribes.

1999: WSLF took part in the Hague Appeal for Peace, a massive gathering in the Netherlands of peace activists from around the world commemorating the centennial of the first International Peace Conference, held there in 1899, followed by a United Nations conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.

1999: WSLF contributed comments and critical questions to a book, Security and Survival: The Case for a Nuclear Weapons Convention, a joint project of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms, and International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation. WSLF also was the lead drafter of a Resolution introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by 21 members of Congress that "welcomes the Model Nuclear Weapons Convention as a discussion document intended to further negotiations on complete nuclear disarmament; and urges the President to initiate multilateral negotiations leading to the early conclusion of a nuclear weapons convention."

2000: WSLF took part in the founding meeting of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace in Delhi, India.

2000-2003: WSLF participated in Moving Beyond Missile Defense, an initiative coordinated by the International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation to raise awareness of the dangers of both continuing ballistic missile development and testing and of missile defenses.

2000 – 2003 – 2006 – 2010: WSLF addressed and served as a member of the drafting committee at the four sessions of the Nagasaki Global Citizens Assembly to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in Nagasaki, Japan.

2001-2007: WSLF responded to the 9-11 attacks by co-founding the Peoples NonViolent Response Coalition, a local multi-issue coalition promoting nonviolent alternatives to the rush to war. WSLF took an active role in opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including providing analysis of relevant international law issues.

2000-present: WSLF has taken a leading role in efforts to oppose National Missile Defense and the development of new offensive strategic weapons by supporting nonviolent protests at Vandenberg Air Force Base, and by exposing the connections between Stockpile Stewardship and other high-tech weapons programs, including ballistic missile defense and space-based weapons research and development.

2003: WSLF speaks on "Nuclear Threats and Counter-Threats; Implications of U.S. Nuclear Policy for the Korean Peninsula (and the World)"at the International Symposium for World Peace in Seoul and the Demilitarized Zone, Korea.

2003-present: WSLF joined with groups across the country to establish United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), to oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to connect issues of peace, economic justice, and ecological sustainability. WSLF continues to serve on UFPJ's national Coordinating Committee and convenes its Nuclear Disarmament/Redefining Security working group.

2004-2005: WSLF served as U.S. Coordinator for the international Abolition Now! campaign, supporting the Mayors for Peace Emergency Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons in the run up to the 60th anniversary year of the U.S. A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. WSLF was instrumental in realizing the huge May 1, 2005 No Nukes! No Wars! march and rally in New York City, which attracted some 40,000 participants.

2005: WSLF was part of the Abolition 2000 delegation to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

2006-2007: WSLF broke the story of the Divine Strake test to simulate low-yield nuclear explosions and played a leading role in the successful campaign for cancellation of the test.

2007: WSLF contributed several chapters to Nuclear Disorder or Cooperative Security: U.S. Weapons of Terror, the Global Proliferation Crisis, and Paths to Peace, an assessment of the Final Report of the WMD commission headed by Hans Blix, former head of the IAEA; co-published with Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy and the Reaching Critical Will project of WILPF.

2007-present: WSLF is appointed by the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation as North American Coordinator of Mayors for Peace. WSLF's work with Mayors for Peace led to the passage by the U.S. Conference of Mayor of strong annual resolutions calling for U.S. leadership in global negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons and deep cuts in nuclear weapons spending and redirection of those funds to meet the needs of cities.

2006-2008: WSLF worked with colleagues in South Asia to oppose the U.S.-India nuclear trade deal, educating the U.S. public about the deal's broader context and traveling to India to learn from disarmament organizations there, and to provide information of the significance of the deal in U.S. security policy and in the efforts of U.S. economic elites to expand their reach in South Asia.

2008-present: WSLF initiated and continues to facilitate Nuclear Free Future Month for United for Peace and Justice, bringing together through a web site and common national calendar annual August observances of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with other events aimed at the abolition of nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

2008: WSLF, together with Mayors for Peace, Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy, the Office of the Mayor of Des Moines, and a number of other groups, organized a conference in Des Moines, Iowa, on Nuclear Abolition, Climate Protection, and Our Cities' Future.

2008: WSLF addressed the 20th United Nations (UN) Disarmament Conference in Saitama, Japan and the UN First Committee on Disarmament and International Security at UN Headquarters in New York City.

2008: WSLF Executive Director Jacqueline Cabasso was awarded the International Peace Bureau's 2008 Sean McBride Peace Award.

2009: WSLF published a Sourcebook, Burdens of Proof: Iran, the United States, and Nuclear Weapons: a Global View.

2009: WSLF, together with the Liberty Tree Foundation, Mayors for Peace, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, and other peace and environmental groups organized the Future Cities 2009 conference in Madison, Wisconsin, exploring paths to a post-carbon, post-nuclear, greener world.

2009: WSLF addressed the 62nd United Nations Department of Public Information/NGO conference, "For Peace and Development: Disarm Now," in Mexico City.

2009: WSLF Executive Director, Jacqueline Cabasso was the recipient of the Agape Foundation's Enduring Visionary Peace Prize.

2010: WSLF was a core organizer, with other organizations from the U.S. and around the world, of the "International Conference for a Nuclear-Free, Peaceful, Just and Sustainable World" at Riverside Church in New York City, followed by a rally and march from Times Square to UN Plaza that drew 15,000 participants.

2010: WSLF contributed several chapters to Beyond Arms Control: Challenges and Choices for Nuclear Disarmament, published by the Reaching Critical Will project of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

2010: WSLF provided information on U.S. nuclear weapons programs and modernization efforts at a hearing in Brasilia on "Challenges to Peace and National Sovereignty – The NPT Review," convened by several Brazilian public and private organizations, including Brazil's Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and National Defense and the University of Brasilia.

2011-present: WSLF, together with other organizations across the country founded the New Priorities Network, to focus attention on the need to cut runaway military spending and redirect public spending to serve human needs. WSLF serves on the national and Bay Area Coordinating Committees for the Network.

2011-2012: WSLF works with Reaching Critical Will on a project designed to bring together perspectives across generations and across issue boundaries to better understand where disarmament fits in broader efforts to create a more fair, peaceful, and ecologically sustainable society, including meetings in New York and the Bay Area and panels at the Left Forum in New York.

2011-present: WSLF, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, provides information about the nature of nuclear technologies and institutions through a number of gatherings and speaking events, and joins in the new Nuclear Free California network working to close the two nuclear power plants still operating in California, San Onofre and Diablo Canyon.

2011 – present: WSLF joins the U.S. Working Group for Peace and Demilitarization in Asia and the Pacific, focusing on the effects of the U.S. "strategic pivot" to the Pacific and the rising dangers of military confrontations in the region.

2012: WSLF participated with Occupy San Francisco in the January Occupy Wall Street West day of occupation, drafting a flyer and providing a speaker in a demonstration in front of the Bechtel Corporation headquarters making connections between the financial crisis and a two-tier global economy in which nuclear weapons and nuclear power are profit centers allowing a select few to profit while everyone bears the risk.

2012: WSLF become the fiscal sponsor for the Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons.

2012: WSLF contributed chapters on U.S. nuclear weapons programs and on creating the political will necessary for disarmament progress to Assuring Destruction Forever: Nuclear weapon modernization around the world, published by the Reaching Critical Will and launched at an NGO event at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Preparatory Committee Meeting in Vienna.

2012: WSLF served on the organizing committee for the Counter-Summit for Peace and Economic Justice held in Chicago, Illinois at the time of the NATO official meeting there.

WSLF's activities have evolved to encompass a broad range of research, advocacy and organizing. WSLF does extensive original research and analysis and produces in-depth issue briefs, as well as shorter fact sheets and guides. WSLF staff also write articles and chapters for books and other publications, and speak extensively at events in the Bay area, throughout the country and around the world. From WSLF's local work with the Peoples NonViolent Response Coalition, to our national work with United for Peace and Justice, to our international work with the Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons, WSLF has been instrumental in raising the visibility and importance of nuclear disarmament as a central issue in the struggle against U.S. empire and global military-industrial complexes.

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