Indian doctors describe dire consequences of violence against women
by Dr. Balkrishna Kurvey
“Women and children are easy prey to those with guns,” said the keynote speaker at the national conference of the Association of Medical Women in India (AWMI) on October 15-16, 2011 at Nagpur, India.
Dr. Nalini Kurvey addresses Indian conference on violence against women
My wife Nalini and I agree, which is why we have been working for more than 15 years on preventing armed violence in India, especially toward women and children, and why we helped to organize the session entitled “Tackling growing violence against women—issues & strategies: Aiming for Prevention” at the AWMI conference. We addressed more than 375 Indian women medical doctors on the health effects of small arms and light weapons. Read more…
Remembering Reykjavic
An American and a Russian president almost made good on a serious proposal to abolish nuclear weapons 25 years ago this month. The leaders were Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev (who was actually the president of the now-defunct Soviet Union) and the occasion was the 1986 Reykjavic Summit.
The story of how Reagan and Gorbachev sat across from each other in Hofdi House, talking themselves into the elimination of all their ballistic missiles in one grand bargain, with US Secretary of State George Shultz cheering them on, was told in heartbreaking detail by Richard Rhodes in his 2008 book Arsenals of Folly. The heartbreak, of course, was the collapse of the proposal over Reagan’s stubborn adherence to the wholly imaginary Strategic Defense Initiative and Gorbachev’s unwillingness to ignore SDI as scientific and technological nonsense. They got a lot of support in these positions from obstructionist advisers who saw the actual elimination of nuclear weapons as not in, shall we say, their best interests. Read more…
Is Mitt Romney ready for the world?
If current polls are correct, Mitt Romney seems likely to become the 2012 Republican presidential candidate and the next president of the United States. Therefore, we should carefully examine his first major foreign and military policy address—delivered on October 7 at the Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina—and ponder the question: Is Mitt Romney ready for the world? Read more…
Hiroshima doctors leave for North Korea to examine A-bomb victims
The following news item appeared on October 11, 2011 in the Mainichi Daily News.
A team of six doctors from the Hiroshima Prefectural Medical Association departed for North Korea on Monday to conduct medical checkups for North Koreans who were in Hiroshima at the time of 1945 atomic attack on the city and exposed to radiation.
The team, led by Shizuteru Usui, the 74-year-old president of the association, is scheduled to arrive in Pyongyang on Tuesday via Beijing for a five-day stay in North Korea.
The six surgeons and internists and two aides are to visit Pyongyang and Sariwon where they will interview and diagnose the victims with the aid of local doctors, while exchanging views with North Korean groups of atomic-bomb victims.
The Japanese doctors also plan to invite members of the North Korean branch of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War to take part in an IPPNW world conference slated for next August in Hiroshima.
The prefectural association interviewed such victims in 2008 during a team visit to North Korea. But at that time, doctors could not examine the victims as they were not allowed by local authorities to practice medicine.
Burundi bar attack: more evidence of small arms proliferation
by Théophile Bigirimana
IPPNW National Student Representative, Burundi
On Sunday, September 18, at about 20:00, at least 36 people were killed after unidentified gunmen opened fire at a crowded bar near the Burundi capital, Bujumbura.
“I heard someone some distance away shout: ‘Kill them all,’ and they opened fire,” one survivor said.
There are some reports that the attackers crossed into Gatumba from just across the border in Democratic Republic of Congo.
Some 300,000 people are said to have been killed in Burundi’s 12-year civil war between the minority Tutsi-dominated army and ethnic Hutu rebels. The conflict officially ended in 2005 with a peace deal between the Burundi Government and the last rebel movement at that time but until now some unidentified groups of armed people are still killing people in some areas of Burundi.
Each one of us should take a short time to think about what the proliferation of small arms causes within our populations. The Great Lakes Region of Africa has been an area of armed conflicts since 1990 and from that moment until now, millions of people have died in Burundi, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The armed groups operating in these countries continue to kill people and do violence to women including sexual abuse.
We would appreciate if you join us to SAY NO to violence by bringing messages to all political leaders to take effective decisions to abolish the small armed conflicts in our region in general and in Burundi in particular.
11 September and 11 March – what’s the connection?
by Tilman Ruff
An interesting twist that 11 September 2011 is both the 10th anniversary of the extraordinary multiple terrorist attacks in the US that spawned a worldwide “war on terror,” and also six months since the devastating combination of earthquake, tsunami and ongoing nuclear disaster in Japan. These apparently disparate events do share some important implications.
Where was the fourth airliner on 11 September 2001 headed? It crashed in a Pennsylvania field as passengers and crew fought the hijackers, but what was its target? The White House or Capitol Hill are generally thought the most likely targets, though some scholars have concluded that when it crashed, flight UA93 was heading for the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. Read more…
Caring for A-Bomb survivors living in North America
by Jiro Yanagida
Many immigrants from Hiroshima Prefecture have long lived in the US, mainly on the West Coast and in Hawaii. During World War II, many of their children, who were born in the US, visited their parents’ home towns to learn Japanese culture. These children were affected by the A-bomb, which was dropped on their country of origin by their country of birth. Some 1,000 survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki either returned to the US after the war or relocated with American-born spouses or other family members.
The American Society of A-Bomb Survivors (ASA) was established to assist those who suffered from social discrimination and who had health concerns. As their requests for aid were rejected by both the US and the Japanese governments, the ASA asked physicians in Hiroshima to conduct periodic medical exams for the survivors living in North America. The Hiroshima Prefectural Medical Association (HPMA) acted on this request. By establishing sister relationships with local medical associations in the US, the HPMA enabled physicians from Hiroshima to examine patients within the US, even without a US medical license. The first medical examination of A-bomb survivors living in North America took place in 1977 in California, and was followed by biennial medical exams in four cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Honolulu). Several A-bomb survivors living in Canada have received medical exams in Seattle. Read more…
What will it take to prevent global violence?
Dr. Etienne Krug of the WHO Department of Injury and Violence Prevention challenged participants to “go home and decide how you will help move violence prevention forward” at the conclusion of the two-day 5th Milestones of a Global Campaign for Violence Prevention meeting held September 6-7 in Cape Town, South Africa. He had opened the meeting noting that it was fitting we were in South Africa because it was this country that brought the resolution on violence as a leading worldwide public health problem to the 1996 World Health Assembly that helped create the groundwork for this campaign.
IPPNW Aiming for Prevention activists Robert Mtonga (Zambia), Daniel Bassey (Nigeria), Andrew Winnington (New Zealand) and I joined more than 250 others at the meeting that was designed to review progress on international violence prevention efforts, and help create a blueprint for progress over the next several years.
What will it take? That was the topic of discussions both formal and informal during this meeting, including at the business meeting of the WHO Violence Prevention Alliance of which IPPNW is an active member. Ideas have ranged from sharing and twinning best practices to linking violence to the social determinants of health in more concrete ways, but the overarching theme was that we need to actively promote the concept that ” violence is preventable.”
A multitude of ways to accomplish this were presented by researchers, educators, advocates and others, from improving child welfare to education on conflict resolution, but there seemed to be a consensus that until violence is seen as an impediment to health and development and prioritized by both states and NGOs we will not move forward fast enough. We need political traction and a deeper understanding that health, wellness and progress cannot be achieved in unsafe and violent environments.
IPPNW delegates left the meeting headed for research projects, organizing, and political action, our ongoing way of answering the call from Dr. Krug.
Kansas City Here It Comes: A New Nuclear Weapons Plant!
Should the U.S. government be building more nuclear weapons? Residents of Kansas City, Missouri don’t appear to think so, for they are engaged in a bitter fight against the construction of a new nuclear weapons plant in their community.
The massive plant, 1.5 million square feet in size, is designed to replace an earlier version, also located in the city and run by the same contractor: Honeywell. The cost of building the new plant—which, like its predecessor, will provide 85 percent of the components of America’s nuclear weapons—is estimated to run $673 million. Read more…
International Day Against Nuclear Tests: Translating Words Into Action
Prepared Statement of Nongovernmental Organization Representative
Coordinated and Delivered by Daryl G. Kimball, Executive Director, Arms Control Association
On behalf of the many nongovernmental organizations with an interest in ending nuclear testing and achieving a nuclear weapons free world, I would like to thank the organizers of this year’s meeting—including the office of the United Nations Secretary General and the Foreign Ministry of Kazakhstan—for granting NGOs a seat at this table.
It is important to recognize the pivotal role of nongovernmental organizations—and ordinary people the world over—in the long struggle to end nuclear testing.
For example, beginning in the 1950s, American pediatricians and civil society activists documented the presence of strontium-90 in the deciduous teeth of young children, prompting a large and effective public outcry against atmospheric nuclear testing. These protests had a direct impact on the negotiation and adoption of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
In fact, civil society organizations have played a vital role in ensuring that the evidence compiled by physicians and scientists about the health and environmental consequences of nuclear test explosions—regardless of whether they are conducted in the atmosphere or aboveground—has consistently been put forward as an essential reason to ban testing permanently.
Nongovernmental organizations played a catalyzing role in more recent efforts to halt nuclear testing. Some twenty years ago, a popular movement in Soviet-controlled Kazakhstan forced Moscow’s communist regime to halt nuclear weapons testing at proving grounds in their homeland where more than 456 explosions had contaminated the land and its people.
In February 1989, the renowned poet Olzhas Suleimenov called upon his fellow citizens to meet in Alma Ata to discuss how to respond to fresh reports of radioactive contamination at the Soviet’s Semipalatinsk Test Site. Five-thousand people responded and collectively issued a call for closing the test site, ending nuclear weapons production, and a universal ban on testing. The movement, which became known as Nevada-Semipalatinsk, grew and held demonstrations throughout Kazakhstan and later in Russia.
On August 6, 1989, 50,000 people attended one of its rallies, which was the largest independent event of its type in the former Soviet Union. Eventually over a million people signed its antinuclear weapons testing petition.
In August 1989, Suleimenov pushed the Supreme Soviet to adopt a resolution calling for a U.S.-Soviet test moratorium. The movement also worked to prevent Moscow from simply shifting all Soviet nuclear testing to the Novaya Zemlya site in northern Russia. To appease the growing protests, Moscow would later acknowledge it had cancelled 11 out of 18 planned nuclear tests.
In May 1990, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement teamed up for an International Citizens Congress that brought together 300 delegates, including downwinders and disarmament leaders, from 25 countries to Alma Ata. A crowd of 20,000 gathered in support. Before the conference convened, Dr. Bernard Lown of IPPNW and Suleimenov met with Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze to reinstitute an earlier Soviet test moratorium.
Under pressure from President Nazarbayev, the people of Kazakhstan, and the international disarmament community, then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev would authorize only one more test (in Russia) and then declare a moratorium on October 5, 1991, prompting U.S. legislators to introduce nuclear test moratorium legislation in Congress.
With strong grassroots support in the United States, the legislation, which mandated a 9-month U.S. testing halt and negotiations on a CTBT, gathered strong support and was approved in September 1992. The last U.S. nuclear test explosion was conducted on September 23, 1992. Read more…
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