A visit to Brussels: NATO, Russia, and the EU
For many years, I’ve joined other IPPNW members on regular visits to NATO Headquarters in Brussels. This tradition continued a week or so ago when some of us returned to Brussels to meet not only with NATO staff, but also with diplomats at the Russian mission and with staff at the EU Commission group responsible for proliferation and disarmament.
At all three meetings we presented IPPNW’s findings on nuclear famine and the climate disaster that would follow a limited, regional nuclear war, whether in Europe or elsewhere in the world. We had the impression that this research was not very well known either at NATO or at the Russian mission. Read more…
P5 steps up…or was that down…or sideways…
The P5 gathered in London this month to reaffirm that they need to be seen reaffirming from time to time their affirmation that a world without nuclear weapons is a topic of discussion to which they take an affirmative approach.
Meeting on February 4 and 5, the US, Russia, the UK, France, and China “reaffirmed that a step-by-step approach to nuclear disarmament that promotes international stability, peace and undiminished and increased security for all remains the only realistic and practical route to achieving a world without nuclear weapons.” Read more…
How to get out of the Nuclear Swamp
This week I read an email exchange that made me think. Actually, it worried me deeply. In one of the messages an old friend described the Nuclear Weapons Convention – an idea many of us fought for since the early nineties – as a “fairy tale” and a “distraction”.
The authors of these mails are not government representatives from nuclear weapon states or their allies, although you might be forgiven for thinking so. Both those descriptions have been used by states that want to brush aside the idea of a convention summarily, as if only for the very stupid or naïve. No, these were colleagues. Read more…
A quarter century after the end of the Cold War and decades after the signing of landmark nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements, are the US and Russian governments once more engaged in a potentially disastrous nuclear arms race with one another? It certainly looks like it.
With approximately 15,000 nuclear weapons between them, the United States and Russia already possess about 93 percent of the world’s nuclear arsenal, thus making them the world’s nuclear hegemons. But, apparently, like great powers throughout history, they do not consider their vast military might sufficient, especially in the context of their growing international rivalry. Read more…
Thomas B. Graboys — a life that balanced skill with compassion
by John Pastore
Dr. Thomas Graboys succumbed on January 5th after a long struggle with Lewy body disease, an unrelenting and progressive neurologic illness.
Tom had been a stalwart leader in the Lown Cardiovascular Group, named for Bernard Lown, a founding co-president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1985. Especially in the years leading up to the Nobel, Tom was active in IPPNW and in our US affiliate, Physicians for Social Responsibility. Read more…
People of all faiths and races have a reason to rejoice today as a new treaty that will regulate the $85 billion global trade in arms and ammunition enters into force this Christmas eve. After more than a decade of campaigning by thousands worldwide, the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) will become international law at last. Read more…
Nobel Peace Laureates call for treaty banning nuclear weapons
IPPNW co-president Tilman Ruff (left) shares the stage with the Dalai Lama at the Nobel Peace Laureates Summit
The 14th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates was held in Rome this weekend. Co-presidents Ira Helfand and Tilman Ruff represented IPPNW. The Summit issued strong language condemning nuclear weapons and called for a treaty to ban them as part of a statement published at the conclusion of the meeting. Read more…
Helfand holds Nobel Peace Laureates summit “spellbound”
IPPNW co-president Ira Helfand spoke about the medical and environmental consequences of nuclear war at the Nobel Peace Laureates Summit, held in Rome this weekend.
“For the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) Ira Helfand held the hall spell-bound as he described the horrific consequences should a major nuclear exchange take place today. They include the vaporisation of everything in an immediate 3kms radius of the explosion in 1000th of a second, complete destruction within a 6kms radius, the burning of everything flammable within a 25kms radius and the consumption of all oxygen within a 50kms radius. In Rome 3 million would die instantly. In New York it would be 12 million. Temperatures would plunge for several days. The world ecosystem would be disrupted to the extent that food production would be severely curtailed.
Helfand said:
“The continued existence of these weapons alone is a threat, but human beings built them, so human beings can also take them apart. We can all work on this; let’s all help to do it.”
His presentation was met with a long ovation.”
Firearms used in half of global homicides says new WHO report
Reducing access to guns one of “best buys” for reducing violence
Firearms were used in about half of the 475,000 murders committed worldwide in 2012, according to the new Global status report on violence prevention 2014 released yesterday by the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations (U.N.) Development Programme (UNDP), and the U.N. Office of Crime and Drugs (UNODC). Sixty percent of those killed were males aged 15-44, “making homicide the third leading cause of death for males in this age group.” Rates of firearm use in homicides varied quite a bit between regions, ranging from a high of 75% of all homicides in the low-middle-income countries in the Americas, to 25% in the same income-level countries in Europe. Read more…
Austria pledges to work for a ban on nuclear weapons
Humanitarian initiative on nuclear weapons must initiate treaty process in 2015
(9 December 2014, Vienna) After 44 states called for a prohibition on nuclear weapons at a conference in Vienna on the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons, Austria delivered the “Austrian pledge” in which it committed to work to “fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons” and pledged “to cooperate with all stakeholders to achieve this goal.” 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 