On zoom. Please join staff from Senator Ed Markey’s (D-MA) and Representative Ro Khanna’s (D-CA) offices for a briefing and strategy discussion on their ICBM Act (Investing in Cures Before Missiles!) to stop the Money Pit Missile and invest in Covid relief instead. With Blake Narendra, Sen. Ed Markey’s foreign policy Legislative Assistant and Geo Saba, Rep. Ro Khanna’s Chief of Staff, Peace Action leaders, Q&A. Register now, and help spread the word to colleagues, friends and family. All are welcome. The panelists’ bio’s and background info is below.

Background: Plans for a new Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) carrying nuclear warheads are underway. Dubbed the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD), or more properly the Money Pit Missile, this exorbitant boondoggle is meant to replace the Minuteman III missiles housed in silos in Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Montana and North Dakota. And it comes with an estimated price tag of $264 billion that’s sure to go up even higher.
Nuclear weapons are not the solution to our real security threats like catastrophic climate change and global health pandemics. In fact, new nuclear weapons make us less secure by destabilizing the world and launching a new arms race.

Blake Narendra is a foreign policy legislative assistant for Senator Markey (D-MA), working on issues related to his role as Chair of the East Asia Subcommittee and Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, after two years as a nuclear-security fellow for Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR).  Blake has led the drafting of several arms control and nonproliferation bills including the PLANET Act to ban nuclear testing, the Prevention of an Arms Race Act which prevented (temporarily) the deployment of INF-range missiles, and an amendment to the Fiscal Year 2019 Appropriations Act which (temporarily) blocked deployment of a low yield warhead on a strategic ballistic submarine. In addition, Blake served as a special advisor and speechwriter in the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance Bureau and was a special assistant to the Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration during the ratification debate on the New START Treaty and during the Fukushima nuclear disaster.  He received a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School and a Bachelor of Arts from the Colorado College.

Geo Saba is the Chief of Staff for Representative Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley, and previously was the Congressman’s Legislative Director and National Security Advisor. Geo helped spearhead his Yemen War Powers Resolution that passed Congress and was vetoed by President Trump. He is half Lebanese and was born and raised in the Bay Area in California. He was recently named by the think tank, New America, as a MENA National Security and Foreign Policy Next Generation Leader. He played varsity baseball at Stanford University, where he was a research assistant for former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with honors in International Security Studies. He was a Bill Gates Scholar and received an MPhil in International Relations at Cambridge University. Before that, he interned in the White House Office of Management and Administration in the Obama Administration.