[The following statement, adopted by the IPPNW Board during the 23rd World Congress in Mombasa, was not endorsed by Japanese Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (JPPNW)]
Medical call to Japan to abandon the planned release of over 1.3 million tons of radioactively contaminated water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster into the Pacific Ocean
As physicians with professional responsibility to promote and protect long-term human and planetary health, we urge the Government of Japan to stop the planned release of large amounts of radioactively contaminated water from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean. We consider that the plan to use the Pacific Ocean has a radioactive waste dump involves risks to oceanic and human health and is neither responsible nor sustainable.
Instead we urge full, evidence-based and transparent consideration of several viable alternative approaches, including storage in purpose-built seismically safe tanks, possibly after initial purification, subsequent use in concrete for structural applications with little or no potential for contact with humans and other organisms, and bioremediation for some important isotopes such as strontium-90. All the proposed alternatives would have orders of magnitude less impact and avoid transboundary impacts.
Read more…by Carlos Umaña
[Co-President Carlos Umaña delivered the following remarks during the opening plenary of IPPNW’s 23rd World Congress in Mombasa, Kenya, on April 26.]
Climate change and nuclear weapons are the 2 existential threats to life on Earth. They are referred to as the twin existential threats, for they are intricately linked and mutually reinforcing. With the world’s climate being as unpredictable and changing as it currently is, the climate crisis is impossible to ignore. However, most people do ignore how serious the risk of nuclear war is, and how working in nuclear abolition can help solve the climate crisis.
Read more…[The following demand for a ceasefire in Ukraine and negotiations for a peaceful solution to a war that risks escalation to a nuclear catastrophe was issued by IPPNW’s International Council and Board of Directors at the conclusion of the 23rd IPPNW World Congress in Mombasa.]
At our 23rd World Congress in Mombasa in April 2023, we, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, discussed the risks and impending consequences of the current, crisis situation on our planet. The war in Ukraine bears enormous costs for people mainly, but not only in Ukraine and causes unspeakable suffering. So many civilians and soldiers from both sides have lost their lives, health and livelihoods. In addition, global food supplies have already suffered and prices for essential goods are rising. According to current figures, hunger in Africa threatens to increase by 117% if the war is not stopped immediately.
Crucially there is a real and growing risk that the world will enter a nuclear war in the near future. With every day of the ongoing war in Ukraine, this risk increases.
Read more…The world urgently needs to change course
[The following Congress Declaration was published at the conclusion of IPPNW’s 23rd World Congress in Mombasa, Kenya, 27-29 April 2023.]
We are honored to gather in Mombasa, one of Africa’s oldest and most historic cities, for the first IPPNW World Congress on the continent. As physicians, medical students, and health professionals committed to a peaceful and equitable world for all people, we join in solidarity with our African colleagues, who struggle on many fronts to erase the vestiges of colonialism, to end the post-colonial conflicts that have killed millions, and to advocate for policies that will provide health, true security, economic justice, and environmental protection not only for Africa but also for the world as a whole.
Read more…Nuclear weapons: a big threat to Africa, too
by Sally Ndung’u
7th July 2017 the United Nations adopted a new nuclear ban treaty- the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
A single nuclear bomb detonated in any part of the world could kill millions of people with the destruction extending far beyond the area of explosion. Those who remain would be at increased risk of cancer and chronic diseases over time and suffer genetic mutations that would persist through generations. If there were a nuclear war, even a limited one, the main cause of human fatalities would however not be the blast or radiation effects but mass starvation, and this brings the issue of nuclear weapons closer to you and I here in Africa!
Read more…[On 13 April, IPPNW co-president Ira Helfand was awarded the prestigious “Gandhi, King, Ikeda Community Builders’ Prize” from Morehouse College. The award was given “to recognize and pay tribute to [his] passionate and nonviolent struggle to prevent humanity from falling victim to the horrors of nuclear disaster.” Dr. Helfand gave the following address at the award ceremony in in Atlanta, Georgia.]
President Thomas, Dean Carter, thank you for the great honor you have bestowed on me today with this Award.
You know, in past years Morehouse has presented this Award to icons of the Civil Rights Movement, to statesmen and world leaders. So this year’s choice is a bit of an anomaly, a bit of an outlier. I am none of these things. I’m just a medical doctor who has spent most of the last 45 years working in the ER of a community hospital and in a small urgent care who tried to raise my voice, as a doctor, about the greatest threat to human health and survival in the world today.
Read more…From nationalist isolation to global citizenship
For many years, a portion of the world public has sought to wall itself off from people abroad by hiding behind national borders.
In the United States, this tendency became an important element in American politics. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Republican Party embraced isolationism and spurned the new League of Nations. Indeed, for a time, President Warren G. Harding’s State Department refused to even acknowledge correspondence from the League. Republican leaders also played a key role in the America First Committee, founded in 1940 to oppose US aid to Britain in its lonely resistance to the fascist military onslaught. Admittedly, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the GOP shifted course, backing US participation in World War II and the development of the United Nations. In the postwar years, however, this internationalist approach gradually dissipated, especially as the Republican Party lurched rightward. Increasingly, the GOP portrayed international treaties and foreigners as threats to “the American way of life.”
Read more…Why do we still have nuclear weapons?
The danger of nuclear war is growing. With the aid of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, a chorus of voices delegitimising nuclear weapons may be helping.
Two months ago, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the increased risk of nuclear escalation, which by accident, intention, or miscalculation could spin out of anyone’s control. The Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been. Knocking at Doomsday’s door is an alarming place to be, no less than 38 years after Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, at their Geneva summit in 1985, agreed that “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
Read more…Uranium mining harms people and the environment
[Anthony Bonifasi Lyamunda received the Nuclear Free Future Award in the resistance category. He lives in Dodoma, the Capital City of Tanzania and he is the founder of the NGO CESOPE. His organization has long supported the people of Bahi, an administrative district very close to Tanzania´s capital Dodoma and the place where he grew up. Bahi is among the places in Tanzania that have known uranium deposits. Patrick Schukalla, an advisor with IPPNW-Germany on energy issues and climate, spoke with the environmental justice activist who will participate at the IPPNW World Congress in Mombasa, Kenya in April.]
You won the NFF Award in the resistance category, congratulations!
I would like to thank the Nuclear Free Future Foundation for considering me and my organization for this award. I see it not only as recognition of my personal work but of the work of many Tanzanian and African activists who struggle against uranium mining on our continent and beyond. Such recognition of our struggle will motivate the communities we are working with to continue to defend the environment against uranium mining and consequently stopping the proliferation of nuclear power in the world, and enable the goal of a nuclear-free future.
Read more…Ocean discharge is the worst plan for Fukushima waste water
As soon as within a month or two, Japan could begin dumping into the Pacific Ocean 1.3 million tons of treated but still radioactively contaminated wastewater from the stricken Fukushima Daichi nuclear plant. Construction of the kilometer long undersea discharge tunnel and a complex of pipes feeding it commenced last August.
This cheap and dirty approach of “out of sight out of mind” and “dilution is the solution to pollution” belongs in a past century. It ignores the significant transboundary, transgenerational and human rights issues involved in this planned radioactive dumping, projected to continue over the next 40 years.
Read more…
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