Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula?
Can Korea be reunited after almost 70 years of complete division between North and South? This is the dream of many in the older generation in both parts of the country. The younger people in South Korea do not seem to care so much about the North.
North Korea has a few nuclear weapons and may be producing a few each year. South Korea has a military alliance with the USA, including a “nuclear umbrella,” a pledge from the US to use nuclear weapons, if needed, to defend their ally.
During my two visits to DPRK, as North Korea is called, the officials we met called for a Korean Peninsula without nuclear weapons. Are they serious? Well, only serious negotiations can give us the answer. Read more…
The NPT and the nuclear ban treaty
As this is being written, the conference reviewing the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is going on at the UN in New York. I often lose the line in the formal presentations by the official delegates, and find myself wondering: Why has the NPT worked? Read more…
Will the NPT sink or swim?
“We were waist deep in the Big Muddy,
The big fool said to push on.”
—Pete Seeger
The NPT member states have to choose between two irreconcilable narratives, and the success of the 2015 Review Conference depends upon their making the right choice.
According to the nuclear-armed states and their closest allies, nuclear disarmament is moving along step by step at a realistic pace, and all that’s needed for the next five years is to keep slogging through the river.
The majority view, expressed during the first week of general debate, is a little different: the NPT has failed to grapple effectively with the humanitarian catastrophe nuclear weapons could bring about in the blink of an eye, and it’s long past time to head for dry land. Read more…
[ICAN delivered the following statement during a special civil society session at the 2015 NPT Review Conference on May 1.]
Daniela Varano told NPT Member States “we can and we must move forward with a ban.”
The humanitarian initiative began here five years ago, when the NPT Review Conference expressed its deep concern at the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons. Since then, a fundamental shift has been under way. Concerns about the impact of nuclear weapons on people and the environment have become central to disarmament discussions.
There is a new sense of empowerment among the peoples and the governments of countries that reject nuclear weapons. Read more…
A nuclear war using only 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs against modern cities would cause prolonged global climate change and create an ozone hole encircling the entire Earth, according to data presented by Rutgers professor Alan Robock at an NPT side event sponsored by IPPNW on April 28. “Nuclear famine and the ban treaty: how prohibiting and eliminating nuclear weapons can prevent a climate disaster” examined the scientific and medical evidence supporting the conclusion that the number of nuclear weapons in the world must be reduced to zero without delay. Read more…
Will the NPT face the facts?
When the 2015 Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) opens in New York next week, the 190 member states will have to come to terms with some hard facts.
The NPT is 45 years old, and while most observers agree that it has worked reasonably well over that time to curtail the spread of nuclear weapons to countries that did not have them in 1970, it has not achieved its most important goal—a world in which no countries have nuclear weapons. Read more…
Who are the nuclear scofflaws?
Given all the frothing by hawkish US Senators about Iran’s possible development of nuclear weapons, one might think that Iran was violating the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
But it’s not. The NPT, signed by 190 nations and in effect since 1970, is a treaty in which the non-nuclear nations agreed to forgo developing nuclear weapons and the nuclear nations agreed to divest themselves of their nuclear weapons. It also granted nations the right to develop peaceful nuclear power. The current negotiations in which Iran is engaged with other nations are merely designed to guarantee that Iran, which signed the NPT, does not cross the line from developing nuclear power to developing nuclear weapons.
Nine nations, however, have flouted the NPT by either developing nuclear weapons since the treaty went into effect or failing to honor the commitment to disarm. Read more…
NATO and Russia—a tragedy unfolding
In 1984 a group from IPPNW Sweden met with the Norwegian general Tönne Huitfeldt, at that time Chief of the Military Staff of NATO. He was a man with great confidence in himself and in the military system.
“General Huitfeldt,” we asked, “when you work with your war scenarios in the NATO Headquarters, with the destruction of the world through a nuclear war looming as a possible outcome, are you not scared?” “Oh no, never,” he responded. “The Russians are as rational as we are. They will never let it go too far. I am never scared.”
Well, we were. And are. Read more…
Why ban nuclear weapons? Ask the French president
President François Hollande of France has explained to the world why nuclear weapons must be banned and eliminated. Not intentionally, of course. Not because he made the fallacious argument that nuclear weapons make France more secure in a dangerous world (although he did); not because he lumped every conceivable and inconceivable threat to France into a confusing hash and came up with nuclear weapons as the final answer to every one (although he did that, too); and not because he shamelessly contradicted himself on the fundamental point that France is a champion of nuclear disarmament but finds its own “nuclear deterrent” indispensible (all the nuclear-armed States suffer from that particular mental health problem, as Sue Wareham has diagnosed it elsewhere on this blog).
In fact, his speech on February 19 to the French military and political elite at Istres Air Force Base was more frightening than that. Read more…
By Dr. Michael Schober, Dr. Robert Mtonga and Maria Valenti
How can we foster more South-North projects on violence prevention that don’t cost a fortune? Can a grassroots project with a lot of volunteer enthusiasm but a low budget succeed in helping victims of violence?
Medical expertise coupled with commitment and creative thinking have always been hallmarks of our members’ work, and we are pleased to report that a recent IPPNW project that capitalizes on those traits will be published in the peer-reviewed Injury Prevention, a BMJ publication. You can read the abstract here. Read more…
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 