The passing of Malaysian physician Dr. Ronald Steven McCoy (1930-2026) leaves an enduring legacy in the global movement against nuclear weapons. A clinician and advocate who seamlessly integrated professional responsibility, moral courage, and strategic vision, Dr. McCoy played a pivotal role in launching one of the most consequential international initiatives aimed at ending the nuclear era. Notably, his country was also guided by another physician, Mahathir Mohamad, whose name remains inextricably linked to the building of modern Malaysia’s renaissance.
Read more…UN votes to negotiate nuclear weapons ban
Following on from the recommendation of the Open-Ended Working Group in August 2016, a major breakthrough towards a nuclear weapons‘ ban took place in the First Committee of the United Nations, on 27 October 2016. Resolution L.41 (renumbered 258 in the General Assembly Vote) was passed by a resounding majority. The resolution mandated the UN to hold a negotiating conference in 2017 for a treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons.
Read more…We remember an IPPNW giant
[Former IPPNW Co-President and “godfather” of ICAN Dr. Ron McCoy died on 1 September at the age of 96. The IPPNW family mourns his loss and celebrates his life in a tribute that can be downloaded here. Following are excerpts from a remembrance of Ron written by his colleague and close friend Tilman Ruff.]
After being told the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had helped to end the Second World War, it was only when Ron read John Hersey’s Hiroshima as a medical student that he understood the nature and significance of those two bombings. “It stirred my conscience. I began to understand the indiscriminate, disproportionately destructive nature of atomic bombs. It was clear to me that nuclear weapons are illegal weapons of war under international humanitarian law and that they must be banned.”
Read more…by Michael Christ, IPPNW Executive Director. September 29, 2026. Originally published in Vital Signs.
This month marks the 40th anniversary of the 1986 Reykjavík Summit, the historic meeting where Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev came astonishingly close to completely abolishing the nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers. While the meeting concluded without an official accord due to US insistence on pursuing the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”), it nevertheless laid the critical diplomatic foundation for future landmark nuclear disarmament treaties. It also proved that even bitter adversaries can sit at the negotiating table to tackle head-on the greatest immediate threat to human survival.
Tragically, these hard-fought gains have been lost to a steady breakdown in international diplomacy, a dangerous arms race in nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence, and a resort to threats and war to prosecute disputes. This has made the risk of catastrophic miscalculation higher than at any point since the Cold War.
Read more…Health, climate breakdown, and nuclear risks at COP31
As world leaders prepare for COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, from 9 to 20 November 2026, the climate debate must confront a central question: what does security mean when the basic conditions for human health and survival are increasingly at risk? For more than three decades, humanitarian advocates, health professionals, and disarmament campaigners have argued that true security begins with the protection of human life. Today, climate breakdown makes this argument more urgent than ever.
Read more…The International Criminal Court is under attack
On October 9, only hours after the announcement of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a former judge on the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Trump administration imposed its latest sanctions on the global judicial body. According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “we will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate.”
When the ICC became operational in 2002, it represented a major breakthrough for the human rights groups that had campaigned for it. The new organization had the mandate to prosecute individuals for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and, after 2018, the crime of aggression. Once nations ratified the ICC’s authorizing document, the Rome Statute, they took responsibility for arresting these individuals and submitting them to the Court for trial.
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by Maria Arvaniti Sotiropoulou
“Prevention is better than cure,” taught Hippocrates, the father of medicine. And this motto holds true for every illness. But is war an illness? Many philosophers regard it as a natural state in human history. The figures bear them out. Since 3600 BC, more than 14,000 wars have taken place, 3,500 of which were of major scale and significance. There have been only 292 years of peace. The 20th century alone saw two world wars in which 60 million people lost their lives. Today, with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East pushing humanity to the brink of nuclear apocalypse, peace seems like a naive utopia in an inhumane world.
For us physicians, however, peace represents the state of health of the international community. For it is only under conditions of peace that a doctor can practice their calling—that of safeguarding life on our planet.
Read more…Reykjavik Summit, 40 years on.
Michail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan famously shook hands in front of the wooden Hofdi House in Reykjavik, Iceland on 12 October 1986. Twenty years later, it was revealed that they came within inches of achieving an agreement on total nuclear disarmament, only for Reagan’s “Star Wars” to block their vision. Forty years later, Russia and the USA aren’t even talking, arms control is in tatters and first-strike weapons are back.
Read more…Goethe and the moral roots of peace and humanitarian disarmament
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe remains one of the most expansive minds in modern intellectual history. His legacy crosses poetry, literature, science, philosophy, and cultural thought, yet beneath this diversity lies a sustained concern with the development of the human being. He lived through revolution, political upheaval, nationalism, and war, but his intellectual response rarely confined itself to the political events of his time. He returned again and again to questions of human development, responsibility, culture, education, and the conditions necessary for a more just and humane society.
Read more…40 years later: The Abduction of Mordechai Vanunu
Few whistleblowers have risked as much as Mordechai Vanunu did when he handed over covertly taken photographs of the Dimona nuclear facility in Israel to The Sunday Times in 1986. 40 years ago, on 30 September 1986, he was drugged and abducted by Mossad, taken back to Israel and sentenced to 18 years in prison, 11 of them in solitary confinement. Vanunu was released in 2004 but has not been allowed to leave the country or speak to a foreign person. For 40 years he has been punished for telling the world that Israel has nuclear weapons.
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Bimal Khadka
Bjorn Hilt
Charles K. Johnson
Dr. Ghassan Shahrour
Gunnar Westberg
IPPNW
John Loretz
Lawrence Wittner
Maria Valenti
mollymcgint
Sue Wareham
Tilman Ruff
Tim Wright
Xanthe Hall
