Why We Need to Get Knitting and Gnashing

Wild Gas Chase

Fear over chemical weapons -- the real ones -- grows

The Bush administration claimed that Iraq harbored up to 500 tons of chemical weapons, but teams of investigators came back empty-handed. Perhaps the U.S. should have invaded Australia -- or China, or Russia, or, heck, itself. These countries each possess a share of the world's estimated 8 million chemical weapons, often unaccounted for and stored in facilities of unknown safety, and environmentalists are among the many groups raising a red flag over the problem. The 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention gave signatories, which include the U.S., Russia, and India, 10 years to destroy their declared chemical munitions. How's that going? As of last year, the Russians had eliminated 1 percent, the U.S. 20 percent. Often the delays have to do with methods of disposal -- most pollute the surrounding environment and are opposed by local communities. The U.S. Army's initial cost estimate for destroying the weapons was $1.7 billion; two decades later, it's spent $25 billion and counting. Still, says Global Green USA's Paul Walker, "the cost of getting rid of them is a small fraction of what we're spending in Iraq."

From the Grist Mill

straight to the source: The State, Associated Press, Charles J. Hanley, 25 Sep 2004

Let’s Get This Ball Rolling: An Invitation to Knit

We wanted to enlist your help with a new knitting/political action/ art collaboration WMDcozy। (http://www।wmdcozy।com) WMDcozy is a public collaboration that invites anyone to help design and knit giant cozies for real weapons of mass destruction. The brainchild of artist Tracey Cockrell and writer M. C. Boyes, WMDcozy is an effort to create constructive conversations about government-sanctioned violence using knitting and art as tools to literally put weapons to bed.

The first WMDcozy is designed to fit a single ICBM Peacekeeper, the last of which was fully decommissioned on September 19, 2005. The Peacekeeper was part of a land-based intercontinental ballistic missile array designed for nuclear weapons delivery and deployed by the United States starting in 1986. At a modest 71 ft 6 in (21.8 m) in length and 7 ft 7 in (2.3 m) in diameter, the Peacekeeper requires a mighty big cozy!

We are looking for knitters to, well, knit squares for this, and artists (even bad ones--especially bad ones and children) to contribute to the design of the cozy, which we will convert into a knitting pattern and post on the Commit to Knit pattern section of our website for some lucky knitter to work on. If you could help us by visiting the site, listing us on yours or simply passing the information on, we would be grateful. (BTW, this is a collaborative DYI/art/action project and involves no profit motive.)

Best,

M. Boyes and Tracey Cockrell