By Dr Arun Mitra
The incident of shouting highly communalized slogans and chanting genocide of Muslims and also that they be thrown out of India by a mob of Hindutva goons with police watching as mute spectator is not a new thing. The difference however is that this incident has happened at Jantar Mantar in proximity to the Parliament. Till date neither the Prime Minister nor the Home Minister have uttered a single word to condemn it. Even in his Independence day speech the Prime Minister took no notice of this. Their silence is intriguing. Encouraged with government’s covert support, an incident of similar type occurred in Kanpur just after three days. In this case the accused got bail in the Police station itself
Earlier too we have seen crowds forcing people to chant Jai Shri Ram. Many innocents have faced mob lynching something hitherto unknown in our country. All this is not spontaneous but apparently a part of the pre-planned strategy of the Hindutva brigade to vitiate the atmosphere and generate communal riots so that the situation is then utilized to further their agenda at a time when elections in some parts of the country are a few months away. As a result of such incidents social cohesion becomes weak and health is a major casualty.
Read more…Baby teeth collected six decades ago will reveal the damage to Americans’ health caused by US nuclear weapons tests
by Lawrence Wittner and Joseph Mangano
In 2020, Harvard University’s T. C. Chan School of Public Health began a five-year study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, that will examine the connection between early life exposure to toxic metals and later-life risk of neurological disease. A collaborator with Harvard, the Radiation and Public Health Project, will analyze the relationship of strontium-90 (a radioactive element in nuclear weapons explosions) and disease risk in later life.
The centerpiece of the study is a collection of nearly 100,000 baby teeth, gathered in the late 1950s and early 1960s by the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information.
Read more…Setsuko Thurlow Rose honors the legacy of a Hiroshima survivor and abolition campaigner
In the year that the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons enters in force, a new variety of rose will be planted in Spain. The Setsuko Thurlow Rose, a rose of hope, will be planted on the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, September 26, 2021, in a prominent rose garden in Madrid, with a nameplate “Setsuko Thurlow”. The rose was cultivated by Matilde Ferrer, a world-renowned rose breeder and former president of the European society of rose breeders. Matilde describes the Setsuko Thurlow Rose as a “beautiful, multicolored rose, delicate in appearance, yet resilient. It does not lose its leaves throughout the year.”
Read more…UN PoA at 20 – How to #Breakthechain of Armed Violence
Today the 7th Biennial Meeting of States of the United Nations Programme of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons (UN PoA) convenes. According to the UN, with this international agreement adopted in 2001, “governments agreed to improve national small arms laws, import/export controls, and stockpile management – and to engage in cooperation and assistance,” with a goal “to prevent illegal manufacture of and illicit trafficking in small arms and light weapons, or their diversion to unauthorized recipients.”
Read more…Paying tribute to Maohi Nui heroes
[Message of support and solidarity to the Maohi Lives Matter event, 17 July 2021, Papeete,
Maohi Nui/French Polynesia]
From our international medical federation, representing national affiliate organisations of physicians and health professional colleagues around the world, we send our warm greetings and solidarity to people participating in the Maohi Lives Matter event in Papeete on 17 July 2021.
We note that this day marks the anniversary of the infamous Centaur nuclear test explosion at Moruroa in 1974, one of many which indiscriminately contaminated inhabited areas of Maohi Nui and other areas of the Pacific region with radioactive fallout. These invisible radioactive toxins will continue for many generations hence to damage the genetic inheritance of human beings and other organisms, increasing the risk of cancer, adverse pregnancy outcomes, and cardiovascular and other chronic diseases. We also know that the effects of nuclear test explosions go well beyond physical radiation harms; in addition causing physical damage and chemical and toxic contamination of islands and reefs; distress, displacement, disruption of livelihoods, communities, cultures and connections to ancestral lands.
Conflict or cooperation in US-China relations?
The United States and China, the world’s mightiest military and economic powers, are currently heading toward a Cold War or even a hot one, with disastrous consequences. But an alternative path is available and could be taken.
Read more…Nationalism on the decline
Although, beginning in about 2015, nationalist political parties made enormous advances in countries around the world, more recently they have been on the wane.
The nationalist surge was led by a new generation of rightwing populist demagogues who, feeding on public discontent with widespread immigration and economic stagnation, achieved startling political breakthroughs. Matteo Salvini of Italy, Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, and Marine Le Pen of France catapulted their fringe political movements into major party status. In Britain, Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) startled mainstream parties by winning a referendum calling for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. Donald Trump, championing an “America First” policy, shocked political pundits by emerging victorious in the 2016 U.S. presidential race. Two years later, in Brazil, the flamboyant Jair Bolsonaro, campaigning under the slogan “Brazil Above Everything,” was easily elected president of his country. In May 2019, Narendra Modi’s BJP, a Hindu nationalist party, won a landslide election victory in India.
As the acknowledged leader of the rightwing, nationalist uprising in these and other nations, Trump forged close contacts with his overseas counterparts and pulled the U.S. government out of international treaties, as well as out of global institutions. “Wise leaders always put the good of their own people and their own country first,” he admonished the UN General Assembly in September 2019. “The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots.”
But, even as he spoke, the nationalist momentum was beginning to falter.
Read more…
In 1946, John Hersey wrote a magazine article that changed the world. On the 75th anniversary of the events he described so vividly in Hiroshima, journalist Lesley M. M. Blume has given us Fallout, a timely reminder that Hersey’s courageous and influential reporting is as important today as it was when the facts about nuclear weapons were still shrouded in secrecy.
Blume depicts a diligent and resourceful wartime reporter struggling to uncover suppressed facts and disclose essential truths. She takes us into the musty offices of The New Yorker, at the time an upstart humor and society magazine, as Hersey and his editors plot to outmaneuver the post-war military censors who, under Gen. Douglas MacArthur, had closed off media access to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to all but the most cooperative journalists. Through a combination of careful preparation, his reputation for integrity, fortunate timing, and a certain amount of luck, Hersey himself had little trouble getting permission to enter Hiroshima, moved about freely, and was able to leave without interference, unlike colleagues who had their notes and film confiscated. (Hersey, Blume tells us, actually took no notes during his interviews as a means of evading the censors, and did not begin writing until he got home. Remarkably, he retained everything his subjects told him, and quoted them at length, with uncanny accuracy and respect for their stories.) Getting the story past the censors and into print once he had written it was a more daunting challenge, which Blume recounts with enthusiasm.
Read more…IPPNW statement on the US-Russia Presidential Joint Statement on Strategic Stability; Geneva, 16 June 2021
IPPNW, which along with Pugwash initiated the 7 June 2021 Russian-American High-Level Appeal to Presidents Biden and Putin on the issues of preventing nuclear war and nuclear disarmament, strongly welcomes the “US-Russia Presidential Joint Statement on Strategic Stability,” adopted by the two leaders at their meeting in Geneva on 16 June 2021.
By proclaiming the “shared goals of ensuring predictability in the strategic sphere, reducing the risk of armed conflicts and the threat of nuclear war,” the Presidential Statement offers hope for a much-needed shift from the climate of suspicion, misunderstanding and hostility that has characterised Russia-US relations in recent years. We look forward to early constructive outcomes from the integrated Strategic Stability Dialogue initiated by the presidents of Russia and the US.
In reaffirming the principle that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” the Statement again establishes this essential truth as the foundation of negotiations between their two countries.
We hope that other nuclear weapons states, especially the Permanent Members of the UN Security Council, will also soon embrace this principle.
We call on President Putin and President Biden to make rapid progress on reducing and eliminating nuclear dangers based on this Statement. We urge them to recognize that nuclear weapons do not make either country more secure and are, in fact, the principal threat to their national security and to the security of the entire planet. We call on them to begin now negotiations for further deep reductions in their nuclear forces, which will pave the way for a verifiable, enforceable, time-bound agreement among all nine nuclear-armed nations to eliminate their nuclear weapons and accede to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that entered into force in January of this year.
The Risk of Nuclear War With China
[The following letter was published in the New York Times on June 3. Dr. Gould is North American regional co-vice president of IPPNW and is president of the San Francisco Bay chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility.]
To the Editor:
Re “The U.S. Nuclear War That Almost Happened” (news article, May 23):
The courageous disclosure by Daniel Ellsberg of the dangerous 1958 U.S.-China flash point over Taiwan provides a vivid warning of how easily we can precipitate a nuclear Armageddon by pursuing our strategy of heightened confrontation with China throughout the Pacific region.
Congress needs to oppose plans to greatly expand our military budget, including modernizing our deadly and overflowing stockpile of conventional and nuclear weapons. These expenditures, a down payment for a new Cold War, move us further from the global collaboration needed to solve our climate and other planetary emergencies evinced by the Covid pandemic.
Hopefully, learning from this grim historical revelation, our representatives should mobilize immediately to support the No First Use Act (H.R. 2603), introduced by Representative Adam Smith, to help avoid future predictable close calls involving nuclear weapons.
This would provide an opening for the United States and other nuclear-weapons states to move speedily to ratify the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which would do much to end the daily, too-invisible threat to our very existence.
Robert M. Gould
San Francisco
Bimal Khadka
Bjorn Hilt
Charles K. Johnson
Gunnar Westberg
IPPNW
John Loretz
Lawrence Wittner
Maria Valenti
mollymcgint
Sue Wareham
Tilman Ruff
Tim Wright
Xanthe Hall
IPPNW peace and health blog 