Australia spills some water
When you carry someone else’s water, you have to expect that some of it might spill.
Tim Wright of ICAN Australia has obtained a revealing new set of documents from the Australian government as the result of a Freedom of Information request. Read more…
The nuclear weapons era ends: Not with a bang but with songs!
The happy year 2045.
Finally it happened: One month ago, on Aug 6 2045, the century of slavery under the nuclear threat ended.
For thirty years the nuclear arms race between China and the USA had been going on. The Chinese brandished new nuclear missiles at the First of May parades, year in and year out. Thousands and thousands of missiles. So the USA had to keep up. Read more…
No Rest for Weary Arms Control Campaigners
Campaigners have recently dragged their suitcases from Cancun to Croatia to raise their voices against weapons of war and the suffering they inflict on humans and the environment around the world.
The First Conference of States Parties to the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) #CSP2015 no sooner ended in late August in Cancun, Mexico when the First Review Conference to the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) began yesterday in Dubrovnik, Croatia. IPPNW leaders have been active in both efforts for many years. Read more…
Can nuclear war be avoided?
Robert McNamara, former US Secretary of Defense and member of the Canberra Commission
The members of the Canberra Commission included former leading politicians and military officers, among others a British field marshal, an American general, an American Secretary of Defense, and a French Prime Minister. The Commission unanimously agreed in their 1996 report that the proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used — accidentally or by decision — defies credibility. The only complete defence, they concurred, is the elimination of nuclear weapons and assurance that they will never be produced again.
This is no less true today. Nuclear weapons will be used if they are allowed to remain with us. And even a “small” nuclear war, using one per cent or less of the world’s nuclear weapons, might cause a world wide famine causing the death of as many as two billion humans. Read more…
In 1915, a mother’s protest against funneling children into war became the theme of a new American song, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” Although the ballad attained great popularity, not everyone liked it. Theodore Roosevelt, a leading militarist of the era, retorted that the proper place for such women was “in a harem―and not in the United States.”
Roosevelt would be happy to learn that, a century later, preparing children for war continues unabated. Read more…
Reaching Shared Meaning for Peace
Guest authors Donna J. Perry, Christian Guillermet Fernández, and David Fernández Puyana
Peace is a necessary condition for global realization of the right to health.
Our paper, The Right to Life in Peace: An Essential Condition for Realizing the Right to Health published in June 2015 by the Health and Human Rights Journal discusses an international movement toward elaborating the “right to peace” by the Human Rights Council (HRC) of the United Nations in Geneva. The initiative has had broad global support.
However, formulating the human longing for peace into specific words that define peace and its necessary conditions has not yet been successful in reaching consensus. Read more…
The blogosphere is atwitter that the great global gun grab has begun now that the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) First Conference of States Parties (CSP1) has commenced in Cancun, Mexico.
Adam Weinstein’s brilliant piece “It’s a U.N. ‘Gun Grab’ — Reach for Your Wallets!” in the new “The Trace” is a great retort and analysis.
But let’s get back to reality and the vital importance of a robustly implemented ATT, and the millions of lives and livelihoods that are at stake today.
Writing in the Reaching Critical Will ATT Monitor Ray Acheson of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom quotes Peter Maurer, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in his video statement at the opening session of the CSP1: Read more…
Photo: Sean Clee – Courtesy of Control Arms Coalition
Millions of lives continue to be devastated and every continent marred by armed violence. Now the world has a chance to change this.
In ten days States will come together for the first annual meeting of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), where they must make important decisions about how it will be implemented. Read more…
Ukraine conflict risks nuclear war
[IPPNW co-presidents Ira Helfand and Vladimir Garkavenko have sent the following letter to Presidents Barack Obama of the United States and Vladimir Putin of Russia, expressing the Federation’s concern over the continuing conflict in Ukraine between two heavily armed nuclear States. Dr. Helfand is a member of the board of IPPNW’s US affiliate, Physicians for Social Responsibility. Dr. Garkavenko is a member of the board of IPPNW’s Russian affiliate, Russian Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.]
Dear Presidents Obama and Putin:
We write this letter to you in our capacity as co-presidents of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) because we are deeply concerned about the conflict in Ukraine and the risk that nuclear weapons will be used in this conflict. Read more…
What can happen while you change trains
Earlier today I watched a short video about the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima—one of many that have found their way online to mark the 70th anniversary of the defining moment in human history: the moment when humankind acquired weaponry that could bring history itself to an end. Read more…
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