A race against time
Tilman Ruff’s life mission is to help rid the world of nuclear weapons
By Robert Fedele
In 2007, Associate Professor Tilman Ruff and a small group of antinuclear activists founded the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) in Melbourne. In 2017, the global nongovernmental organisation captured the first Nobel Peace Prize born in Australia after years drawing attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons and driving a historic UN prohibition treaty. In June 2019, Ruff, and fellow ICAN co-founder, Dimity Hawkins, were awarded Order of Australia Honours for their advocacy on nuclear disarmament.
Tilman Ruff’s life’s mission to help end nuclear weapons traces back to growing up in Melbourne in the 1980s living with the genuine fear that nuclear war could strike at any moment.
His family background passed on a profound awareness of the impacts of war.
“My family were German Christians living in communities in…
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Executed for being an anti-nuclear activist
By Maria Arvaniti Sotiropoulou and Panos Trigazis
A surviving portrait of Nikos Nikiforidis (Photo: WikiCommons)
Under present conditions, it seems inconceivable that a 22-year-old fighter for the anti-nuclear movement was arrested, sentenced to death by court martial and executed in Thessaloniki, on a charge of collecting signatures under the Stockholm Appeal for the abolition and prohibition of all nuclear weapons. But Nikos Nikiforidis was the first person (and perhaps also the only one) in the world to suffer such a fate. Read more…
Thinking in terms of the lifetime of humanity
A new article in an American Heart Association journal draws a compelling analogy between preventing sudden cardiac death and preventing nuclear war. That the three authors are long-time members of IPPNW should come as no surprise. In “Cardiac Events and Nuclear War: Prevention by Cardiovascular Specialists,” in the June 4 issue of Circulation, James Muller, John Pastore, and Amir Lerman relate the risks of heart attack to the risks of nuclear catastrophe. Read more…
How about a peace race instead of an arms race?
In late April, the highly respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported that, in 2018, world military expenditures rose to a record $1.82 trillion. The biggest military spender by far was the United States, which increased its military budget by nearly 5 percent to $649 billion (36 percent of the global total). But most other nations also joined the race for bigger and better ways to destroy one another through war. Read more…
[Interview with Daniel Ellsberg, originally published by the Great Transition Initiative; republished with permission.]
The growth of the military-industrial complex poses an existential threat to humanity. Daniel Ellsberg, peace activist and Vietnam War whistleblower discusses with Tellus Senior Fellow Allen White the continuing existential threat posed by the military-industrial complex—and what needs to be done about it. Read more…
Doctors from IPPNW’s South Asian affiliates met with government leaders in Kathmandu on March 31. From left, Akmal Sultan, Talat Sultan, Surinder Singh Soodan, Tipu Sultan, Kamrul Hasan Khan, Arun Mitra, Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali, Sharad Onta, Bansidhar Mishra, Satyajit Kumar Singh, Mahesh Maskey, Ganesh Gurung, Arun Dixit.
IPPNW’s South Asia affiliates have urged government officials in Kathmandu, Nepal, to take additional steps towards nuclear disarmament, reduction of small arms, and resolution of issues through dialogue. The IPPNW delegation met on March 31 with Foreign Minister Shri Pradeep Gyawali, Speaker of Parliament Shri Krishna Bahadur Mahara, and Advisor to the Prime Minister Shri Rajan Bhattarai. Read more…
The Fukushima nuclear disaster: 8 years on
The ongoing nuclear reactor disaster at Fukushima began on March 11, 2011
Eight years after the world’s most complex nuclear disaster, the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants and spent fuel ponds are still leaking and dangerous, vast amounts of contaminated water continue to accumulate, 8000 odd clean-up workers labour daily and will need to for many decades, the needs of people exposed to radioactivity are still neglected, no one is in prison for a disaster fundamentally caused by the negligence of the operator and the government, and most of the lessons of Fukushima have yet to heeded. Read more…
“Denuclearization” is for every country
Guest opinion
By Vic Hummert
Gen. Russell Honoré, who led the response to Hurricane Katrina, said he could “live without” nuclear weapons.
The United Nations session of July 7, 2017 was a monumental gathering during which 123 out of 195 countries voted to abolish nuclear weapons.
Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. Nearly 2,000 people died in that tragic natural mishap. General Russell Honoré, a Louisiana native, was sent to organize relief efforts for the devastated city. When I asked General Honore’ what he thought of nuclear weapons, he promptly replied, “I could live without them!” Encouraged by his reply, I asked why the USA and its UN Ambassador, Nikki Haley, were so opposed to abolition. General Honoré said, “because of the money involved.” The building of nuclear weapons is a multi-trillion dollar enterprise employing tens of thousands at more than twenty locations around the United States. Read more…
Kashmir conflict risks nuclear war
© Apollo, Pakistan Today
IPPNW calls on India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan to take immediate steps to deescalate the tensions in the disputed Kashmir region and to reduce the grave danger of nuclear war.
Recent acts of terror and military incursions in the long-disputed territory have exacerbated a conflict that threatens to plunge these two countries into a fifth and, conceivably, final major war since partition. Both countries have traded threats of nuclear retaliation. This is how nuclear war begins. Read more…
Don’t expect rulers of nuclear-armed nations to accept nuclear disarmament―unless they’re pushed to do so
Massive antinuclear protests in Europe and the United States pushed the Cold War superpowers to negotiate the INF Treaty.
At the beginning of February 2019, the two leading nuclear powers took an official step toward resumption of the nuclear arms race. On February 1, the US government, charging Russian violations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, announced that it would pull out of the agreement and develop new intermediate-range missiles banned by it. The following day, Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended his government’s observance of the treaty, claiming that this was done as a “symmetrical” response to the US action and that Russia would develop nuclear weapons outlawed by the agreement.
In this fashion, the 1987 Soviet-American INF Treaty―which had eliminated thousands of destabilizing nuclear weapons, set the course for future nuclear disarmament agreements between the two nuclear superpowers, and paved the way for an end to the Cold War―was formally dispensed with. Read more…
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