This article was originally published by Counterpunch.
1) That Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s past will not become any other city’s future.
2) That the new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons will get at least 50 ratifications and enter into force.
3) That there will be no further proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries.
4) That no insane leader will initiate a nuclear war and leaders of nuclear-armed countries will stop taunting each other.
5) That nuclear deterrence will be recognized for the fraud that it is.
6) That there will be no accidents or miscalculations leading to nuclear catastrophe.
7) That the parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty will engage in good faith negotiations, as the treaty requires, for an end to the nuclear arms race and for nuclear disarmament.
8) That there will be no cyber-attacks on nuclear weapons systems, leading to the launch of nuclear weapons.
9) That the nuclear weapons states will halt their plans to spend hundreds of billions, even trillions, of dollars to modernize their nuclear arsenals.
10) That people everywhere will realize the necessity for peace in the Nuclear Age and will demand that their governments seek peace and the abolition of nuclear weapons.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) received the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 2017.
Your Majesties,
Distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee,
My fellow campaigners, here and throughout the world,
Ladies and gentlemen,
It is a great privilege to accept this award, together with Beatrice, on behalf of all the remarkable human beings who form the ICAN movement. You each give me such tremendous hope that we can – and will – bring the era of nuclear weapons to an end.
I speak as a member of the family of hibakusha – those of us who, by some miraculous chance, survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For more than seven decades, we have worked for the total abolition of nuclear weapons.
We have stood in solidarity with those harmed by the production and testing of these horrific weapons around the world. People from places with long-forgotten names, like Moruroa, Ekker, Semipalatinsk, Maralinga, Bikini. People whose lands and seas were irradiated, whose bodies were experimented upon, whose cultures were forever disrupted.
We were not content to be victims. We refused to wait for an immediate fiery end or the slow poisoning of our world. We refused to sit idly in terror as the so-called great powers took us past nuclear dusk and brought us recklessly close to nuclear midnight. We rose up. We shared our stories of survival. We said: humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.
Today, I want you to feel in this hall the presence of all those who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I want you to feel, above and around us, a great cloud of a quarter million souls. Each person had a name. Each person was loved by someone. Let us ensure that their deaths were not in vain.
I was just 13 years old when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb, on my city Hiroshima. I still vividly remember that morning. At 8:15, I saw a blinding bluish-white flash from the window. I remember having the sensation of floating in the air.
As I regained consciousness in the silence and darkness, I found myself pinned by the collapsed building. I began to hear my classmates’ faint cries: “Mother, help me. God, help me.”
Then, suddenly, I felt hands touching my left shoulder, and heard a man saying: “Don’t give up! Keep pushing! I am trying to free you. See the light coming through that opening? Crawl towards it as quickly as you can.” As I crawled out, the ruins were on fire. Most of my classmates in that building were burned to death alive. I saw all around me utter, unimaginable devastation.
Processions of ghostly figures shuffled by. Grotesquely wounded people, they were bleeding, burnt, blackened and swollen. Parts of their bodies were missing. Flesh and skin hung from their bones. Some with their eyeballs hanging in their hands. Some with their bellies burst open, their intestines hanging out. The foul stench of burnt human flesh filled the air.
Thus, with one bomb my beloved city was obliterated. Most of its residents were civilians who were incinerated, vaporized, carbonized – among them, members of my own family and 351 of my schoolmates.
In the weeks, months and years that followed, many thousands more would die, often in random and mysterious ways, from the delayed effects of radiation. Still to this day, radiation is killing survivors.
Whenever I remember Hiroshima, the first image that comes to mind is of my four-year-old nephew, Eiji – his little body transformed into an unrecognizable melted chunk of flesh. He kept begging for water in a faint voice until his death released him from agony.
To me, he came to represent all the innocent children of the world, threatened as they are at this very moment by nuclear weapons. Every second of every day, nuclear weapons endanger everyone we love and everything we hold dear. We must not tolerate this insanity any longer.
Through our agony and the sheer struggle to survive – and to rebuild our lives from the ashes – we hibakusha became convinced that we must warn the world about these apocalyptic weapons. Time and again, we shared our testimonies.
But still some refused to see Hiroshima and Nagasaki as atrocities – as war crimes. They accepted the propaganda that these were “good bombs” that had ended a “just war”. It was this myth that led to the disastrous nuclear arms race – a race that continues to this day.
Nine nations still threaten to incinerate entire cities, to destroy life on earth, to make our beautiful world uninhabitable for future generations. The development of nuclear weapons signifies not a country’s elevation to greatness, but its descent to the darkest depths of depravity. These weapons are not a necessary evil; they are the ultimate evil.
On the seventh of July this year, I was overwhelmed with joy when a great majority of the world’s nations voted to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Having witnessed humanity at its worst, I witnessed, that day, humanity at its best. We hibakusha had been waiting for the ban for seventy-two years. Let this be the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons.
All responsible leaders will sign this treaty. And history will judge harshly those who reject it. No longer shall their abstract theories mask the genocidal reality of their practices. No longer shall “deterrence” be viewed as anything but a deterrent to disarmament. No longer shall we live under a mushroom cloud of fear.
To the officials of nuclear-armed nations – and to their accomplices under the so-called “nuclear umbrella” – I say this: Listen to our testimony. Heed our warning. And know that your actions are consequential. You are each an integral part of a system of violence that is endangering humankind. Let us all be alert to the banality of evil.
To every president and prime minister of every nation of the world, I beseech you: Join this treaty; forever eradicate the threat of nuclear annihilation.
When I was a 13-year-old girl, trapped in the smouldering rubble, I kept pushing. I kept moving toward the light. And I survived. Our light now is the ban treaty. To all in this hall and all listening around the world, I repeat those words that I heard called to me in the ruins of Hiroshima: “Don’t give up! Keep pushing! See the light? Crawl towards it.”
Tonight, as we march through the streets of Oslo with torches aflame, let us follow each other out of the dark night of nuclear terror. No matter what obstacles we face, we will keep moving and keep pushing and keep sharing this light with others. This is our passion and commitment for our one precious world to survive.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) received the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in Oslo on December 10, 2017.
Your Majesties,
Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee,
Esteemed guests,
Today, it is a great honour to accept the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of thousands of inspirational people who make up the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
Together we have brought democracy to disarmament and are reshaping international law.
__
We most humbly thank the Norwegian Nobel Committee for recognizing our work and giving momentum to our crucial cause.
We want to recognize those who have so generously donated their time and energy to this campaign.
We thank the courageous foreign ministers, diplomats, Red Cross and Red Crescent staff, UN officials, academics and experts with whom we have worked in partnership to advance our common goal.
And we thank all who are committed to ridding the world of this terrible threat.
__
At dozens of locations around the world – in missile silos buried in our earth, on submarines navigating through our oceans, and aboard planes flying high in our sky – lie 15,000 objects of humankind’s destruction.
Perhaps it is the enormity of this fact, perhaps it is the unimaginable scale of the consequences, that leads many to simply accept this grim reality. To go about our daily lives with no thought to the instruments of insanity all around us.
For it is insanity to allow ourselves to be ruled by these weapons. Many critics of this movement suggest that we are the irrational ones, the idealists with no grounding in reality. That nuclear-armed states will never give up their weapons.
But we represent the only rational choice. We represent those who refuse to accept nuclear weapons as a fixture in our world, those who refuse to have their fates bound up in a few lines of launch code.
Ours is the only reality that is possible. The alternative is unthinkable.
The story of nuclear weapons will have an ending, and it is up to us what that ending will be.
Will it be the end of nuclear weapons, or will it be the end of us?
One of these things will happen.
The only rational course of action is to cease living under the conditions where our mutual destruction is only one impulsive tantrum away.
__
Today I want to talk of three things: fear, freedom, and the future.
By the very admission of those who possess them, the real utility of nuclear weapons is in their ability to provoke fear. When they refer to their “deterrent” effect, proponents of nuclear weapons are celebrating fear as a weapon of war.
They are puffing their chests by declaring their preparedness to exterminate, in a flash, countless thousands of human lives.
Nobel Laureate William Faulkner said when accepting his prize in 1950, that “There is only the question of ‘when will I be blown up?’” But since then, this universal fear has given way to something even more dangerous: denial.
Gone is the fear of Armageddon in an instant, gone is the equilibrium between two blocs that was used as the justification for deterrence, gone are the fallout shelters.
But one thing remains: the thousands upon thousands of nuclear warheads that filled us up with that fear.
The risk for nuclear weapons use is even greater today than at the end of the Cold War. But unlike the Cold War, today we face many more nuclear armed states, terrorists, and cyber warfare. All of this makes us less safe.
Learning to live with these weapons in blind acceptance has been our next great mistake.
Fear is rational. The threat is real. We have avoided nuclear war not through prudent leadership but good fortune. Sooner or later, if we fail to act, our luck will run out.
A moment of panic or carelessness, a misconstrued comment or bruised ego, could easily lead us unavoidably to the destruction of entire cities. A calculated military escalation could lead to the indiscriminate mass murder of civilians.
If only a small fraction of today’s nuclear weapons were used, soot and smoke from the firestorms would loft high into the atmosphere – cooling, darkening and drying the Earth’s surface for more than a decade.
It would obliterate food crops, putting billions at risk of starvation.
Yet we continue to live in denial of this existential threat.
But Faulkner in his Nobel speech also issued a challenge to those who came after him. Only by being the voice of humanity, he said, can we defeat fear; can we help humanity endure.
ICAN’s duty is to be that voice. The voice of humanity and humanitarian law; to speak up on behalf of civilians. Giving voice to that humanitarian perspective is how we will create the end of fear, the end of denial. And ultimately, the end of nuclear weapons.
__
“We physicians protest the outrage of holding the entire world hostage. We protest the moral obscenity that each of us is being continuously targeted for extinction.”
Those words still ring true in 2017.
We must reclaim the freedom to not live our lives as hostages to imminent annihilation.
Man – not woman! – made nuclear weapons to control others, but instead we are controlled by them.
They made us false promises. That by making the consequences of using these weapons so unthinkable it would make any conflict unpalatable. That it would keep us free from war.
But far from preventing war, these weapons brought us to the brink multiple times throughout the Cold War. And in this century, these weapons continue to escalate us towards war and conflict.
In Iraq, in Iran, in Kashmir, in North Korea. Their existence propels others to join the nuclear race. They don’t keep us safe, they cause conflict.
As fellow Nobel Peace Laureate, Martin Luther King Jr, called them from this very stage in 1964, these weapons are “both genocidal and suicidal”.
They are the madman’s gun held permanently to our temple. These weapons were supposed to keep us free, but they deny us our freedoms.
It’s an affront to democracy to be ruled by these weapons. But they are just weapons. They are just tools. And just as they were created by geopolitical context, they can just as easily be destroyed by placing them in a humanitarian context.
__
That is the task ICAN has set itself – and my third point I wish to talk about, the future.
I have the honour of sharing this stage today with Setsuko Thurlow, who has made it her life’s purpose to bear witness to the horror of nuclear war.
She and the hibakusha were at the beginning of the story, and it is our collective challenge to ensure they will also witness the end of it.
They relive the painful past, over and over again, so that we may create a better future.
There are hundreds of organisations that together as ICAN are making great strides towards that future.
There are thousands of tireless campaigners around the world who work each day to rise to that challenge.
There are millions of people across the globe who have stood shoulder to shoulder with those campaigners to show hundreds of millions more that a different future is truly possible.
Those who say that future is not possible need to get out of the way of those making it a reality.
As the culmination of this grassroots effort, through the action of ordinary people, this year the hypothetical marched forward towards the actual as 122 nations negotiated and concluded a UN treaty to outlaw these weapons of mass destruction.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons provides the pathway forward at a moment of great global crisis. It is a light in a dark time.
And more than that, it provides a choice.
A choice between the two endings: the end of nuclear weapons or the end of us.
It is not naive to believe in the first choice. It is not irrational to think nuclear states can disarm. It is not idealistic to believe in life over fear and destruction; it is a necessity.
__
All of us face that choice. And I call on every nation to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
The United States, choose freedom over fear.
Russia, choose disarmament over destruction.
Britain, choose the rule of law over oppression.
France, choose human rights over terror.
China, choose reason over irrationality.
India, choose sense over senselessness.
Pakistan, choose logic over Armageddon.
Israel, choose common sense over obliteration.
North Korea, choose wisdom over ruin.
To the nations who believe they are sheltered under the umbrella of nuclear weapons, will you be complicit in your own destruction and the destruction of others in your name?
To all nations: choose the end of nuclear weapons over the end of us!
This is the choice that the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons represents. Join this Treaty.
We citizens are living under the umbrella of falsehoods. These weapons are not keeping us safe, they are contaminating our land and water, poisoning our bodies and holding hostage our right to life.
To all citizens of the world: Stand with us and demand your government side with humanity and sign this treaty. We will not rest until all States have joined, on the side of reason.
__
No nation today boasts of being a chemical weapon state.
No nation argues that it is acceptable, in extreme circumstances, to use sarin nerve agent.
No nation proclaims the right to unleash on its enemy the plague or polio.
That is because international norms have been set, perceptions have been changed.
And now, at last, we have an unequivocal norm against nuclear weapons.
Monumental strides forward never begin with universal agreement.
With every new signatory and every passing year, this new reality will take hold.
This is the way forward. There is only one way to prevent the use of nuclear weapons: prohibit and eliminate them.
__
Nuclear weapons, like chemical weapons, biological weapons, cluster munitions and land mines before them, are now illegal. Their existence is immoral. Their abolishment is in our hands.
The end is inevitable. But will that end be the end of nuclear weapons or the end of us? We must choose one.
We are a movement for rationality. For democracy. For freedom from fear.
We are campaigners from 468 organisations who are working to safeguard the future, and we are representative of the moral majority: the billions of people who choose life over death, who together will see the end of nuclear weapons.
To participants in the international symposium “Prospects for a World Free of Nuclear Weapons and for Integral Disarmament,” sponsored by the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development
10 November 2017
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
I offer a cordial welcome to each of you and I express my deep gratitude for your presence here and your work in the service of the common good. I thank Cardinal Turkson for his greeting and introduction.
In this Symposium, you have met to discuss issues that are critical both in themselves and in the light of the complex political challenges of the current international scene, marked as it is by a climate of instability and conflict. A certain pessimism might make us think that “prospects for a world free from nuclear arms and for integral disarmament,” the theme of your meeting, appear increasingly remote. Indeed, the escalation of the arms race continues unabated and the price of modernizing and developing weaponry, not only nuclear weapons, represents a considerable expense for nations. As a result, the real priorities facing our human family, such as the fight against poverty, the promotion of peace, the undertaking of educational, ecological and healthcare projects, and the development of human rights, are relegated to second place (cf. Message to the Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, 7 December 2014).
Nor can we fail to be genuinely concerned by the catastrophic humanitarian and environmental effects of any employment of nuclear devices. If we also take into account the risk of an accidental detonation as a result of error of any kind, the threat of their use, as well as their very possession, is to be firmly condemned. For they exist in the service of a mentality of fear that affects not only the parties in conflict but the entire human race. International relations cannot be held captive to military force, mutual intimidation, and the parading of stockpiles of arms. Weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, create nothing but a false sense of security. They cannot constitute the basis for peaceful coexistence between members of the human family, which must rather be inspired by an ethics of solidarity. Essential in this regard is the witness given by the Hibakusha, the survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, together with other victims of nuclear arms testing. May their prophetic voice serve as a warning, above all for coming generations!
Furthermore, weapons that result in the destruction of the human race are senseless even from a tactical standpoint. For that matter, while true science is always at the service of humanity, in our time we are increasingly troubled by the misuse of certain projects originally conceived for a good cause. Suffice it to note that nuclear technologies are now spreading, also through digital communications, and that the instruments of international law have not prevented new states from joining those already in possession of nuclear weapons. The resulting scenarios are deeply disturbing if we consider the challenges of contemporary geopolitics, like terrorism or asymmetric warfare.
At the same time, a healthy realism continues to shine a light of hope on our unruly world. Recently, for example, in a historic vote at the United Nations, the majority of the members of the international community determined that nuclear weapons are not only immoral, but must also be considered an illegal means of warfare. This decision filled a significant juridical lacuna, inasmuch as chemical weapons, biological weapons, anti-human mines and cluster bombs are all expressly prohibited by international conventions. Even more important is the fact that it was mainly the result of a “humanitarian initiative” sponsored by a significant alliance between civil society, states, international organizations, churches, academies and groups of experts.
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Encyclical Letter Populorum Progressio of Pope Paul VI. That Encyclical, in developing the Christian concept of the person, set forth the notion of integral human development and proposed it as “the new name of peace.” In this memorable and still timely document, the Pope stated succinctly that “development cannot be restricted to economic growth alone. To be authentic, it must be integral; it must foster the development of each man and of the whole man” (No. 14).
We need, then, to reject the culture of waste and to care for individuals and peoples laboring under painful disparities through patient efforts to favor processes of solidarity over selfish and contingent interests. This also entails integrating the individual and the social dimensions through the application of the principle of subsidiarity, encouraging the contribution of all, as individuals and as groups. Lastly, there is a need to promote human beings in the indissoluble unity of soul and body, of contemplation and action.
In this way, progress that is both effective and inclusive can achieve the utopia of a world free of deadly instruments of aggression, contrary to the criticism of those who consider idealistic any process of dismantling arsenals. The teaching of John XXIII remains ever valid. In pointing to the goal of an integral disarmament, he stated: “Unless this process of disarmament be thoroughgoing and complete, and reach men’s very souls, it is impossible to stop the arms race, or to reduce armaments, or – and this is the main thing – ultimately to abolish them entirely” (Pacem in Terris, 11 April 1963).
The Church does not tire of offering the world this wisdom and the actions it inspires, conscious that integral development is the beneficial path that the human family is called to travel. I encourage you to carry forward this activity with patience and constancy, in the trust that the Lord is ever at our side. May he bless each of you and your efforts in the service of justice and peace.
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation presented Dr. Ira Helfand and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War with the 2017 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award. Dr. Helfand’s acceptance speech is below. You can also download a MP3 audio file of the speech here.
Thank you very much. The work of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has been so important in the movement to eliminate nuclear weapons for so many decades, it is a particular honor for us to receive this award from Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. And on behalf of all of the many thousands of doctors in IPPNW and in, especially, our American affiliate Physicians for Social Responsibility, thank you so much for giving us this award tonight.
The citations of the Nobel Committee both in 1985 and in 2017 essentially spoke to the same issue, which was not the organizational effectiveness of the groups that they were awarding the prize to but the message that they brought to the world. The simple message that nuclear weapons pose an existential threat to human survival and must be abolished. That message I think is more important today than it’s ever been. There was a time about a generation ago in the 1980s when almost everybody understood this. People all around the world knew what was going to happen if there was a nuclear war. That was in part due to the educational work that we did then, but it was also due to just the constant attention that the nuclear question received in the media, and the obsessive concern about nuclear weapons that dominated the lives of so many of us at that time. When the Cold War ended, we, all of us, including people who are active in this movement, started to act as though the problem had gone away. As we know, it didn’t. There are still 15,000 nuclear warheads in the world today, several thousand on a hair-trigger alert, ready to be fired in less than 10 minutes’ notice.
And in addition to that fundamental fact, we have to recognize that the danger of nuclear war has increased dramatically in the last few years. The situation in North Korea of course is in the news every day, and we cannot ignore this. There is the real possibility that there will be a war which will almost certainly turn nuclear between the United States and North Korea sometime in the very near future. It could happen this month, next month, the beginning of next year. But that’s only one of the flashpoints that exist in the world today. Relations between the United States and Russia are at the worst point in three decades. Relations between the United States and China are at the worst point in four decades. There is fighting every single day on the border between India and Pakistan, which are armed with significant and growing arsenals of nuclear weapons.
In addition to these geopolitical flashpoints, there are several other factors that increase the risk of nuclear war. There is the danger of cyber terrorism. We used to think that the worst thing a terrorist could do would be to get a single nuclear warhead and bring it into New York or London or Tel Aviv or Bombay and set it off. Now we understand that the far greater danger is of a cyber attack. The terrorist will hack into the command and control systems of the United States or Russia, or possibly one of the other nuclear states, and either directly set off the launch of nuclear armed missiles or, perhaps more likely, create a false warning under which the country that’s being hacked thinks it’s being attacked by nuclear weapons from the other side and responds with a nuclear attack of its own.
There is also the Trump phenomenon, and we simply cannot ignore this either. The US and other nuclear weapon states have predicated their policies over the last decades, their insistence on maintaining nuclear arsenals, on the assumption that the leadership of the nuclear-armed states would be composed of wise, temperate, well-informed people. It’s not my judgement, but the judgement of the experts in his own party, that Donald Trump possesses none of these qualities. And the fact that he is in charge of 6,800 nuclear warheads should be a cause of great concern to all of us. And it should also lead us to having a very different view of the whole nuclear enterprise.
Finally, among the factors that are increasing the danger of nuclear war is the issue of climate change. We are told by the United States repeatedly that it seeks the abolition of nuclear weapons sometime in the future when conditions are safer. Conditions are not getting safer. Climate change is making large parts of this planet essentially uninhabitable by their current populations. And as this process progresses, and it will even if we take drastic action now, there’s going to be an increase in conflict in these regions that are facing severe environmental stress. There is going to be mass migration on a scale which absolutely dwarfs what has taken place so far in the last decade, and the possibility of conflict escalating to nuclear conflict is going to grow and grow and grow, unless the weapons are removed.
The central concept behind PSR and IPPNW’s work has always been that, if people understood how bad nuclear war would be, how likely it was to happen, and the fact that this is not the future that needs to be, they would act to get rid of nuclear weapons. I want to spend a few minutes reviewing for you the part that has been our central piece of this message: What happens if there is a nuclear war? And I do apologize, this has been a lovely evening, everyone’s been enjoying a wonderful meal in great fellowship, but we do need to remind ourselves regularly of what it is that we are facing. So let me talk a little bit first about limited nuclear war.
We have looked in great detail at the possibility of a war between India and Pakistan. Each of these countries has about 130 nuclear warheads at this point and they’re adding to their arsenals every month. The studies that we have done have been based on a model in which these countries use only 50 warheads each and use relatively small bombs, Hiroshima-sized weapons. They have weapons that are bigger. But it was intentionally a conservative model, so that we couldn’t be accused of overestimating the situation. The effect of a war between India and Pakistan, each using 50 Hiroshima-sized weapons in South Asia is unbelievably devastating. Twenty million people die in the first week as a result of the explosions, the fires, the direct radiation coming out of these bombs. To put that in perspective, during all World War II, 50 million people died across the whole planet over the course of eight years. In this situation, we would have a like number, 20 million people, dying in the course of a single week in one very constrained geographic area. But this local devastation is only part of the story, because these 100 bombs exploding over cities would cause 100 fire storms, and they’d put about 6.5 million tons of soot into the upper atmosphere. And that would block out the sun across the entire planet, dropping temperatures, shortening the growing season, drying the planet and causing a dramatic decrease in food production.
We’ve looked at what the impact would be on food production here in the United States and in China, the world’s two largest food producers, and the results are frankly terrifying. The food production of major grain crops like corn and wheat and rice go down anywhere from 15% to 39% for a full decade after this conflict. And the world today simply cannot absorb a decline in food production of that magnitude. There are already 719 million people in the world who are malnourished, who are just getting by. They cannot afford any further decrease in their food consumption. There are 300 million people in the world today who are well-nourished, but live in countries where much of the food is imported, and this includes a number of very wealthy countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, many of the countries in North Africa and the Middle East. Under the circumstances that would pertain after a limited nuclear war and a worldwide decline in food production, those food imports would not be available.
There are a billion people in China today who are well-nourished, who live in a country where most of the food is grown in country, but who are poor, who have not shared in the great economic progress that China has made. There are a billion people who live on less than $5 a day. And given the dramatic increase in food prices that would follow a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan, they would not be able to buy food. And so we have concluded that worldwide, over two billion people would be at risk of starvation as a result of a limited nuclear war in one corner of the globe involving less than 0.03% of the world’s nuclear weapons. The death of two billion people would not be the extinction of our species, but it would be the end of modern civilization as we know it. No civilization in human history has ever withstood a shock of this magnitude, and there is no reason to think that the very intricate, interdependent economic system that we all depend on would fare any better.
That’s a limited nuclear war. Let me talk to you for a few minutes about a large-scale nuclear war. And I want to start by describing what an attack on a single city would look like. Most of us are familiar with images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the warning that we received in Japan in 1945 is one which we must take to heart. But we also have to understand that Hiroshima and Nagasaki do not begin to prepare us for what will happen if nuclear weapons are used again, because it will not be one or two small bombs on one or two cities. It’ll be large numbers of much larger bombs on many, many cities. We don’t know the exact targeting strategy of the United States or Russia, but I have been told recently by someone who is familiar with US military planning that the US still targets Moscow with 100 nuclear weapons. And that doesn’t count the French and the British weapons which are also targeted on Moscow, and for that matter the Chinese weapons that are targeted on Moscow.
So, I’m going to use a model that is much smaller than 100 nuclear warheads. I’m going to use one single very large bomb. The destruction I’m going to describe is much less than will befall Moscow or New York or Washington, but I think it gives us an adequate understanding of the enormity of the danger that we face. I’m talking about a 20 megaton bomb. Within one-thousandth of a second of the detonation of this weapon, a fireball would form, reaching out for two miles in every direction, four miles across. Within this area the temperatures would rise to 20 million degrees Fahrenheit, which is hotter than the surface of the sun. And everything would be vaporized, the buildings, the people, the trees, the upper level of the earth itself would disappear.
To a distance of four miles in every direction, the explosion would generate winds greater than 600 miles per hour. Mechanical forces of that magnitude destroy anything that people can build. To a distance of six miles in every direction, the heat would be so intense that automobiles would melt. And to a distance of 16 miles in every direction, the heat would still be so intense that everything flammable would burn: paper, cloth, wood, gasoline, heating oil. It would all ignite into a giant firestorm 32 miles across, covering over 800 square miles. Within this entire area, the temperature would rise to a 1400 degrees Fahrenheit. All of the oxygen would be consumed and every living thing would die. The bacteria and the viruses would die. The area would be sterilized of all life.
In the case of New York, we’re talking about 12 to 15 million people dead in half an hour. And if this attack were part of a large-scale war between the United States and Russia, this level of destruction would visit every major city in both countries. In addition, the entire economic infrastructure of the country would be destroyed, and all the things that the rest of the population depend on to keep themselves alive would be gone. There’d be no electric grid, no internet, no public health system, no food distribution system, no fuel distribution system. And over the months following this attack, the vast majority of the people who did not die in the initial wave would also die; between the United States and Russia, something like 500 million people.
But again, this is only part of the story. A limited war in South Asia puts six-and-a-half million tons of soot into the upper atmosphere. A large war between the United States and Russia puts about a 150 million tons of soot into the upper atmosphere. And that drops temperature across the planet, an average of 14 degrees Fahrenheit. In the interior regions of North America and Eurasia, the temperatures drop 45 to 50 degrees. We essentially create an instant ice age, conditions that have not existed on the planet in 18,000 years, since the coldest point of the last ice age. In the Northern Hemisphere there would be three years without a single day free of frost. That means that at some point every day, the temperature would go below freezing. And under those conditions, all the ecosystems which have evolved over the last 10,000 years since the last ice age ended, they would all collapse. Food production would stop. The vast majority of the human race would starve to death, and we might become extinct as a species.
This is not some nightmare scenario. This is the danger that we live with every day as long as these weapons exist, that we have been living with for 70 years, and that we will continue to live with until we get rid of these weapons. But this is the future that will be if we don’t take action, and I believe we are essentially living on borrowed time. It is extraordinary good luck that has saved us from this fate until this point.
Still, this is not the future that must be. Nuclear weapons are not a force of nature, they are not an act of God. We have made them with our own hands and we know how to take them apart. We’ve already dismantled more than 50,000 of them. The only thing that’s missing is the political will and commitment to do this. And that’s where all of us come in. We have allowed our governments to maintain this insanely dangerous situation year after year, exposing us to this unspeakable risk, and we have to make them stop. The good news is we can do this, we’ve done it once before.
In the early 1980s, the United States and the Soviet Union were racing towards nuclear war. There were 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world and we were building 3,000 more every year. We were talking here in the United States about fighting and winning a nuclear war in Europe. And in response to that situation, an incredible movement grew up in this country. Millions of people marched across the country, gathered in Central Park in New York, petitioned their legislators, forced Congress to speak out on this. And in an extraordinary moment, we won. The Cold War arms race was stopped. And it happened so suddenly that I think most of us didn’t even realize when it took place.
In 1983, two of the many episodes where we almost blew the planet up occurred. And in January of 1984, Ronald Reagan, who until then had been the most hawkish president regarding nuclear weapons in our history, said in the State of the Union Address, “Nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.” We thought this was just rhetoric, that the guy was just making a speech for the 1984 election season that was starting. But we were wrong. We’d actually won, we had changed his mind. And it turns out we changed Gorbachev’s mind too. Over the two or three years that followed, the Cold War arms race came to an end, the Cold War itself came to an end, and frankly, all of us who were a part of this, and I suspect that’s almost everybody in this room who’s old enough, we saved the world.
So, we can do this. We’ve done it once before; we just need to do it again. And the conditions that we face now, as dangerous as they are, provide us with the opportunity to do it because the great enemy of progress on this issue has been inattention, has been the fact that the media doesn’t care about nuclear war, that the vast majority of the population doesn’t pay any attention to that. But that situation is changing, because between the crisis in North Korea and the extraordinary anxiety that Donald Trump is provoking with his behavior, people are focusing on this issue again. There are other some positive developments, which also help us. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is a huge step forward, a real milestone in our effort to get rid of these weapons. And that’s going to help us. The recent Nobel Prize will also give a greater platform to all of us across the world, all 500 NGOs who are part of this network, who were trying to alert people to the danger we face.
And so, each of us needs to look at the situation and figure out what we can do. No one of us is expected to solve this problem all by ourselves. But each one of us needs to figure out what it is that we can do, who of our friends and neighbors we can mobilize, how we can work, what contribution we can make to get rid of these weapons. One of the things that happens whenever I give a talk is that people put up their hands at the end and say, “What can I do?” which is the obvious question. I want to offer something of an answer to that.
We had a symposium in Western Massachusetts a few weeks ago about the link between climate change and nuclear war, and at the end of the symposium, at one of the workshops, there were a number of people present who had been a part of the original freeze movement in 1980s, which, as you may remember, started in the small hill towns of Western Massachusetts, with people going to their town meetings and then to city councils with a simple resolution calling for the US and Soviet Union to freeze the arms race. And what these people said is, “The time is ripe for a similar initiative, not to freeze the arms race, but to eliminate nuclear weapons.” And they came up with a simple statement, modeled on the freeze, with a plan to use it like the freeze was used, to make this sort of a tool usable by everybody, owned by no organization, so that hopefully all the peace groups in the country will take this up. A simple vehicle that we can all use is to go to our towns, our cities, our labor unions, our professional associations, our churches, our civic groups, and get them all to express the need to change US nuclear policy.
I want to read it to you, it’s quite short. It’s called “Back From The Brink: A Call To Prevent Nuclear War.” “We call on the United States to lead a global effort to prevent nuclear war by [1] renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first; [2] ending the President’s sole unchecked authority to launch nuclear attack; [3] taking US nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert; [4] cancelling the plan to replace its entire arsenal with enhanced weapons; [5] and perhaps most importantly, actively pursuing a verifiable agreement among nuclear arms states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.”
It’s simple, it’s direct, and it gives every constituency in this country the opportunity to raise their voice to call for an end to the nuclear weapons era. There are copies of this on the literature table out in the hallway. I hope you’ll all take a copy, sign it, and most importantly, think who it is that you can mobilize with this. How do you reach the California State Legislature? How do we ultimately reach the US Congress? How do we create a totally different view of what nuclear policy should be? I think we have a three-and-a-half year window to solve this problem. I don’t expect we’re going to see any real progress under the current administration even if Trump is removed from office; Pence, I don’t think would be any better. But in January of 2021, a new administration will take office in Washington, and our job is to create a fundamental change in US nuclear policy by that date, so that the new administration, the new President who takes office, is committed to the elimination of nuclear weapons, and to ensure that she appoints to all of the key places in the Defense Department, in the State Department, in the National Security Council, people who are likewise committed to working for the abolition of nuclear weapons. It’s an ambitious goal that we set ourselves, but we turned the world around once before in this timeframe, and I don’t think we have any choice. As I said before, I believe that we are living on borrowed time and we have a very limited window of opportunity to get rid of these weapons, and we need to seize that opportunity.
When I describe the effects of nuclear war as I did for you all tonight, I do feel a certain sense of guilt, even if I’m not ruining a lovely dinner. I’m placing on your shoulders, and on my own shoulders listening to this again, a terrible responsibility. Once we know about this, we have to act. You can’t see somebody fall down and just step over them. If you know the whole world is at risk in this terrible way, you have to do something about it. And there’s no question, this responsibility is a burden, but I think it is something much more than that. I think this is a very great gift that we have all been given. Every one of us wants to do something good with our life. We have been given the opportunity to save the world and there’s absolutely nothing better that someone can do with their life than that. So it’s in that spirit that I urge you all to take up with renewed energy, because I know you’ve all been working on this issue for years, but with renewed spirit, with renewed commitment, this task. It says in the Hebrew Bible that God said “Behold, I have put before you life and death, therefore, choose life, that you and your children might live.” That is literally the choice before the world today. And so let’s all pledge tonight that we will choose life, that we will act with courage and determination and perseverance, so that indeed our children might live. Thank you.
This article was originally published by The Hill.
The 2017 Nobel Peace Prize does not go to a politician or political leader. In fact, it does not single out any individual. Rather, it goes to a campaign, the International Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), composed of more than 450 civil society organizations in some 100 countries around the globe. It goes to a broad base of civil society organizations working in coalition to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons.
In this sense, the award goes to the extraordinary people (“We, the People…”) throughout the world who have stepped up to end the threat to all humanity posed by the nearly 15,000 nuclear weapons still remaining on the planet.
In announcing the award to ICAN, the Norwegian Nobel Committee stated, “The organization is receiving the award for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.”
ICAN was launched in 2007. It worked with many of the world’s countries in organizing three conferences on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear war. These meetings took place in Oslo, Norway (2013), in Nayarit, Mexico (2014) and in Vienna, Austria (2014). At the Vienna conference, Austria offered a pledge to the countries and civil society representatives in attendance. When it was opened for signatures to other countries, it became known as the “Humanitarian Pledge.” The pledge has now been formally endorsed by 127 countries.
After laying out the threats and dangers of nuclear weapons in the Humanitarian Pledge, the pledge concluded: “We pledge to cooperate with all relevant stakeholders, States, international organizations, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movements, parliamentarians and civil society, in efforts to stigmatize, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons in light of their unacceptable humanitarian consequences and associated risks.”
In 2016, the United Nations General Assembly agreed to an ICAN-supported resolution to negotiate a treaty outlawing nuclear weapons. These negotiations took place in March, June and July of 2017 at the United Nations in New York. On July 7, 2017, 122 countries adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This treaty banning nuclear weapons was opened for signatures on September 20, 2017. So far, 53 countries have signed the treaty and three have ratified it. It will enter into force 90 days after the 50th country deposits its ratification of the treaty with the United Nations.
ICAN has accomplished a great deal in moving the world forward toward banning and eliminating nuclear weapons. It has helped states articulate the dreadful humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons use. In doing so, it has worked with survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and also with countries that suffered from nuclear testing, such as the Marshall Islands.
ICAN also spearheaded the drafting and adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and is currently working on getting countries to sign and ratify the treaty so that it can enter into force.
ICAN stands in stark contrast with those national leaders and their allies who possess nuclear weapons and have been unwilling to give up their claim on them for their own perceived national security. But ICAN is on the right side of history, because those with nuclear weapons threaten the future of civilization, including their own populations.
ICAN well deserves the Nobel Peace prize. The campaign is effective. It is youthful. It is hopeful. It is necessary. May the Nobel Peace Prize propel it to even greater accomplishments. And may it awaken people everywhere to the threat posed by nuclear weapons, and the need to ban and eliminate them.
David Krieger is a founder and president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The Foundation has been a partner organization of ICAN since 2007.
The world’s most prestigious prize for peace, the Nobel Peace Prize, has been awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). This award will help shine a light on the passion and commitment of this worldwide movement to abolish nuclear weapons. It will also draw attention to the goals ICAN has enthusiastically sought to achieve. First, a public awakening of concern for the dangers to humankind and to all that each of us loves and treasures posed by nuclear weapons. Second, the entry into force of the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Third, the abolition of nuclear weapons.
ICAN has brought considerable youthful energy to the issue of nuclear disarmament. It also operates as a global campaign involving some 400 civil society organizations from more than 100 countries. The campaign began ten years ago, and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF) was one of its initial members. We’ve been a part of the campaign from the beginning. We are proud to stand with the other civil society groups throughout the world in working with ICAN to achieve its goals, which are also our goals.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was drafted by states with the participation of civil society. On July 7, 2017 it was adopted by 122 countries. The treaty bans, among other things, the possession, use and threat of use of nuclear weapons. NAPF lobbied for the treaty to include “threat of use” as well as “use” of the weapons. Rick Wayman, our Director of Programs, delivered a speech at the United Nations treaty drafting meeting arguing this point, and it was adopted in the final text. On September 20, 2017, the treaty was opened for signature at the United Nations. Fifty countries signed the first day and subsequently three more countries have signed the treaty.
The treaty will enter into force 90 days after the fiftieth country ratifies it. So far, there are three ratifications. ICAN will be working to see that the treaty gets more signatures and ratifications, including the support of the nine nuclear-armed countries, which boycotted the treaty negotiations. On the day the treaty was adopted, the U.S., UK and France issued a joint statement in which they said, “We do not intend to sign, ratify or ever become a party to it.” ICAN represents the will of the people to pass the planet on intact to new generations, while the nuclear-armed countries reflect an outdated concept of security in which they are willing to threaten the future of civilization for their own misguided concepts of security.
In the mid-1980s, there were 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Today there are just under 15,000. ICAN’s goal and NAPF’s goal is a world with zero nuclear weapons. This must also become the goal of all humanity. The great hope in the Nobel Peace Prize going to ICAN is that it will help draw global attention and concern to the ongoing threats posed by nuclear weapons and tip the scales toward ending the nuclear weapons era with its abundant dangers to all humanity.
David Krieger is a founder and president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).
This article was originally published by Common Wonders.
Suddenly it’s possible — indeed, all too easy — to imagine one man starting a nuclear war. What’s a little harder to imagine is one human being stopping such a war.
For all time.
The person who came closest to this may have been Tony de Brum, former foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, who died last week of cancer at age 72.
He grew up in the South Pacific island chain when it was under “administrative control” of the U.S. government, which meant it was a waste zone absolutely without political or social significance (from the American point of view), and therefore a perfect spot to test nuclear weapons. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 such tests — the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima blasts every day for 12 years — and for much of the time thereafter ignored and/or lied about the consequences.
As a boy, de Brum was unavoidably a witness to some of these tests, including the one known as Castle Bravo, a 15-megaton blast conducted on Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954. He and his family lived about 200 miles away, on Likiep Atoll. He was nine years old.
He later described it thus: “No sound, just a flash and then a force, the shock wave . . . as if you were under a glass bowl and someone poured blood over it. Everything turned red: sky, the ocean, the fish, my grandfather’s net.
“People in Rongelap nowadays claim they saw the sun rising from the West. I saw the sun rising from the middle of the sky. . . . We lived in thatch houses at that time, my grandfather and I had our own thatch house and every gecko and animal that lived in the thatch fell dead not more than a couple of days after. The military came in, sent boats ashore to run us through Geiger counters and other stuff; everybody in the village was required to go through that.”
The Rongelap Atoll was inundated with radioactive fallout from Castle Bravo and rendered uninhabitable. “The Marshall Islands’ close encounter with the bomb did not end with the detonations themselves,” de Brum said more than half a century later, in his 2012 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award acceptance speech. “In recent years, documents released by the United States government have uncovered even more horrific aspects of this burden borne by the Marshallese people in the name of international peace and security.”
These included the natives’ deliberately premature resettlement on contaminated islands and the cold-blooded observation of their reaction to nuclear radiation, not to mention U.S. denial and avoidance, for as long as possible, of any responsibility for what it did.
In 2014, Foreign Minister de Brum was the driving force behind something extraordinary. The Marshall Islands, which had gained independence in 1986, filed a lawsuit, both in in the International Court of Justice and U.S. federal court, against the nine nations that possess nuclear weapons, demanding that they start living up to the terms of Article VI of the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which includes these words:
“Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
Right now, Planet Earth could not be more divided on this matter. Some of the world’s nine nuclear powers, including the United States, have signed this treaty, and others have not, or have withdrawn from it (e.g., North Korea), but none of them has the slightest interest in recognizing it or pursuing nuclear disarmament. For instance, all of them, plus their allies, boycotted a recent U.N. debate that led to the passage of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which calls for immediate nuclear disarmament. One hundred twenty-two nations — most of the world — voted for it. But the nuke nations couldn’t even endure the discussion.
This is the world de Brum and the Marshall Islands stood up to in 2014 — aligned with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, an NGO that provided legal help to pursue the lawsuit, but otherwise alone in the world, without international support.
“Absent the courage of Tony, the lawsuits would not have happened,” David Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, told me. “Tony was unequaled in being willing to challenge nuclear weapon states for their failure to fulfill their legal obligations.”
And no, the lawsuits didn’t succeed. They were dismissed, eventually, on something other than their actual merits. The U.S. 9th District Court of Appeals, for instance, eventually declared that Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty was “non-self-executing and therefore not judicially enforceable,” which sounds like legal jargon for: “Sorry, folks, as far as we know, nukes are above the law.”
But as Krieger noted, referring to the recent U.N. vote calling for nuclear disarmament, de Brum’s unprecedented audacity — pushing the U.S. and international court systems to hold the nuclear-armed nations of the world accountable — may have served as “a role model for courage. There might have been other countries in the U.N. who saw the courage he exhibited and decided it was time to stand up.”
We do not yet have nuclear disarmament, but because of Tony de Brum, an international movement for this is gaining political traction.
Perhaps he stands as a symbol of the anti-Trump: a sane and courageous human being who has seen the sky turn red and felt the shockwaves of Armageddon, and who has spent a lifetime trying to force the world’s most powerful nations to reverse the course of mutually assured destruction.
Tony de Brum, former Foreign Minister of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), passed away on August 22, 2017. He was a powerful and inspiring voice for the abolition of nuclear weapons as well as climate sanity. He was a visionary leader, respected and admired throughout the world for his strength, wisdom, warmth and unceasing optimism.
Born in 1945, de Brum was one of the first Marshall Islanders to graduate from college. He played a key role in the negotiations that led to the first compact of free association between the U.S. and the RMI, and participated in the development of the Constitution of the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
Between the years 1946 and 1958, the U.S. used the Marshall Islands as a nuclear testing ground, detonating 67 nuclear and thermonuclear weapons in the atmosphere and under the waters of this small island nation. Tony de Brum was a “nuclear witness” to many of them.
As a nine-year-old boy living on Likiep Atoll at the time of the Castle Bravo nuclear test – an explosion 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, de Brum remembered, “Bravo went off with a very bright flash, almost a blinding flash; bear in mind we were almost 200 miles away from ground zero. No sound, just a flash and then a force, the shock wave – as if you were under a glass bowl and someone poured blood over it. Everything turned red: sky, the ocean, the fish, my grandfather’s net. People in Rongelap claim they saw the sun rising from the West.”
De Brum worked selflessly throughout his life for the people of the Marshall Islands. Eventually, his vision and efforts for peace, justice and a world without nuclear weapons extended to people everywhere.
“Tony and I first met at the University of Hawaii in the mid 1960s. We reconnected later when Tony was an official of the RMI and we were both working to abolish nuclear weapons,” said David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF). “I was impressed by his commitment to go beyond his island nation and play a leadership role in ending the nuclear weapons era.”
In 2012, NAPF honored de Brum with its Distinguished Peace Leadership Award for his exceptional efforts on behalf of the Marshall Islands victims of nuclear testing. De Brum accepted the award in Santa Barbara at the Foundation’s annual Evening For Peace. This led to further collaboration with de Brum and brainstorming about what meaningful steps could be taken to awaken the world to the need for nuclear abolition.
In 2014, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, led by Minister de Brum, filed the Nuclear Zero Lawsuits in the International Court of Justice, landmark cases against the nine nuclear-armed nations “for failing to comply with their obligations under international law to pursue negotiations in good faith for the worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons.” NAPF was a consultant to the RMI on the cases, working side by side with de Brum and a pro bono legal team for more than four years. Krieger noted, “Tony demonstrated courage and integrity in his willingness to hold the nine nuclear-armed nations to account in fulfilling their legal obligations to rid the world of nuclear weapons. These lawsuits would never have occurred without the courage of Tony de Brum.”
In 2015, De Brum and the people of the Marshall Islands received the Right Livelihood Award “in recognition of their vision and courage to prosecute nuclear powers that do not respect their disarmament obligations under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.” De Brum and the Marshall Islanders were voted “2016 Arms Control Persons of the Year” by the Arms Control Association. Lastly, Minister de Brum and the Marshall Islanders were nominated for the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize.
De Brum was also well known in international circles for his strong advocacy for curtailing climate change, which disproportionally affects small island states like the RMI. He spoke on these issues at the United Nations and was the keynote speaker for the Seventh Regional Conference on Island Sustainability last year in Guam.
Throughout his life, Tony de Brum never wavered from his commitment to abolish the weapons that damaged his country and its people, and continues to threaten all of humanity. He showed the world that even a leader from a tiny island nation, with vision and persistence, could have significant global impact.
Tony de Brum was a warrior for peace, disciplined and committed to overcoming all obstacles on the path to a better world. He will be sorely missed, but his words will continue to inspire: “We will never give up. We have a voice that will not be silenced until the world is rid of all nuclear weapons.”
# # #
To read Tony de Brum’s acceptance speech from the 2012 Evening For Peace, click here.
To arrange an interview with David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, please contact Sandy Jones at sjones@napf.org or (805) 965-3443.
About the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation:
Founded in 1982, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s mission is to educate and advocate for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons and to empower peace leaders. The Foundation is a non-partisan, non-profit organization with consultative status to the United Nations and is comprised of individuals and groups worldwide who realize the imperative for peace in the Nuclear Age. For more information, visit www.wagingpeace.org
Friends, seventy-two years ago today, on August 6, at 8:15 a.m., absolute evil was unleashed in the sky over Hiroshima. Let’s imagine for a moment what happened under that roiling mushroom cloud. Pika—the penetrating flash, extreme radiation and heat. Don—the earth-shattering roar and blast. As the blackness lifts, the scenes emerging into view reveal countless scattered corpses charred beyond recognition even as man or woman. Stepping between the corpses, badly burned, nearly naked figures with blackened faces, singed hair, and tattered, dangling skin wander through spreading flames, looking for water. The rivers in front of you are filled with bodies; the riverbanks so crowded with burnt, half-naked victims you have no place to step. This is truly hell. Under that mushroom cloud, the absolutely evil atomic bomb brought gruesome death to vast numbers of innocent civilians and left those it didn’t kill with deep physical and emotional scars, including the aftereffects of radiation and endless health fears. Giving rise to social discrimination and prejudice, it devastated even the lives of those who managed to survive.
This hell is not a thing of the past. As long as nuclear weapons exist and policymakers threaten their use, their horror could leap into our present at any moment. You could find yourself suffering their cruelty.
This is why I ask everyone to listen to the voices of the hibakusha. A man who was 15 at the time says, “When I recall the friends and acquaintances I saw dying in those scenes of hell, I can barely endure the pain.” Then, appealing to us all, he asks, “To know the blessing of being alive, to treat everyone with compassion, love, and respect—are these not steps to world peace?”
Another hibakusha who was 17 says, “I ask the leaders of the nuclear-armed states to prevent the destruction of this planet by abandoning nuclear deterrence and abolishing immediately all atomic and hydrogen bombs. Then they must work wholeheartedly to preserve our irreplaceable Earth for future generations.”
Friends, this appeal to conscience and this demand that policymakers respond conscientiously are deeply rooted in the hibakusha experience. Let’s all make their appeal and demand our own, spread them throughout the world, and pass them on to the next generation.
Policymakers, I ask you especially to respect your differences and make good-faith efforts to overcome them. To this end, it is vital that you deepen your awareness of the inhumanity of nuclear weapons, consider the perspectives of other countries, and recognize your duty to build a world where all thrive together.
Civil society fully understands that nuclear weapons are useless for national security. The dangers involved in controlling nuclear materials are widely understood. Today, a single bomb can wield thousands of times the destructive power of the bombs dropped 72 years ago. Any use of such weapons would plunge the entire world into hell, the user as well as the enemy. Humankind must never commit such an act. Thus, we can accurately say that possessing nuclear weapons means nothing more than spending enormous sums of money to endanger all humanity.
Peace Memorial Park is now drawing over 1.7 million visitors a year from around the world, but I want even more visitors to see the realities of the bombing and listen to survivor testimony. I want them to understand what happened under the mushroom cloud, take to heart the survivors’ desire to eliminate nuclear weapons and broaden the circle of empathy to the entire world. In particular, I want more youthful visitors expanding the circle of friendship as ambassadors for nuclear abolition. I assure you that Hiroshima will continue to bring people together for these purposes and inspire them to take action.
Mayors for Peace, led by Hiroshima, now comprises over 7,400 city members around the world. We work within civil society to create an environment that helps policymakers move beyond national borders to act in good faith and conscience for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
In July, when 122 United Nations members, not including the nuclear-weapon and nuclear-umbrella states, adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, they demonstrated their unequivocal determination to achieve abolition. Given this development, the governments of all countries must now strive to advance further toward a nuclear-weapon-free world.
The Japanese Constitution states, “We, the Japanese people, pledge our national honor to accomplish these high ideals and purposes with all our resources.” Therefore, I call especially on the Japanese government to manifest the pacifism in our constitution by doing everything in its power to bridge the gap between the nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear-weapon states, thereby facilitating the ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. I further demand more compassionate government assistance to the hibakusha, whose average age is now over 81, and to the many others also suffering mentally and physically from the effects of radiation, along with expansion of the “black rain areas.”
We offer heartfelt prayers for the repose of the atomic bomb victims and pledge to work with the people of the world to do all in our power to bring lasting peace and free ourselves from the absolute evil that is nuclear weapons.
It is a great privilege to accept this award, together with Beatrice, on behalf of all the remarkable human beings who form the ICAN movement. You each give me such tremendous hope that we can – and will – bring the era of nuclear weapons to an end.
Today, it is a great honour to accept the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of thousands of inspirational people who make up the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
I offer a cordial welcome to each of you and I express my deep gratitude for your presence here and your work in the service of the common good. I thank Cardinal Turkson for his greeting and introduction.
The 2017 Nobel Peace Prize does not go to a politician or political leader. In fact, it does not single out any individual. Rather, it goes to a campaign, the International Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), composed of more than 450 civil society organizations in some 100 countries around the globe. It goes to a broad base of civil society organizations working in coalition to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons.
The person who came closest to this may have been 
Friends, seventy-two years ago today, on August 6, at 8:15 a.m., absolute evil was unleashed in the sky over Hiroshima. Let’s imagine for a moment what happened under that roiling mushroom cloud. Pika—the penetrating flash, extreme radiation and heat. Don—the earth-shattering roar and blast. As the blackness lifts, the scenes emerging into view reveal countless scattered corpses charred beyond recognition even as man or woman. Stepping between the corpses, badly burned, nearly naked figures with blackened faces, singed hair, and tattered, dangling skin wander through spreading flames, looking for water. The rivers in front of you are filled with bodies; the riverbanks so crowded with burnt, half-naked victims you have no place to step. This is truly hell. Under that mushroom cloud, the absolutely evil atomic bomb brought gruesome death to vast numbers of innocent civilians and left those it didn’t kill with deep physical and emotional scars, including the aftereffects of radiation and endless health fears. Giving rise to social discrimination and prejudice, it devastated even the lives of those who managed to survive.