Group calls on world to prevent nuclear war

The dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima 70 years ago this week was a awful, seminal moment in human history.

In 1969, President Richard Nixon surprised many when he ordered an end to the US biological weapons program.

The answers are simple enough: To be certain that nuclear bombs never are used again, we must abolish nuclear weapons, and until we do, we must limit the potential for their use. But the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remind us that we should, and that we can. From a high of 50,000 nuclear warheads at the height of the Cold War, 16,000 warheads remain, 90 per cent of which are American and Russian.

“They had the insight from the get-go that these weapons and their destructive power were a violation of our Church teaching and heritage”. With such power unleashed, it vaporised people and animals, melted buildings and vehicles, pulverising a 400-year-old city virtually to dust without any landmarks left standing.

The Nuclear Threat Peter Ferenbach says that 70 years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons are still a 21st Century threat.

He dismissed the notion that Britain and the US holding nuclear arsenals was laying a path to peace: “If you follow that argument every single country in the world would have nuclear weapons to protect itself and its own security”. In 1985, IPPNW received the Nobel Peace Prize. But the dictates of common humanity, democracy, common interest and common sense, based on all people everywhere being vulnerable to the catastrophic impacts of nuclear weapons, can lead to disarmament. In such a scenario, the sun would be blocked out by smoke, causing a devastating cooling of the Earth.

And he warned of the “serious dangers” of nuclear weapons expansion in the Middle East and warned “one war begats another begats another”. Still, India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan have not signed the NNPT and there are constant fears of nonstate groups obtaining the technology or the weapons for terrorist uses.

Fast-forward to 2011 when a tsunami, triggered by a magnitude quake measuring 9.0 rocked the northern part of Japan, resulting in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. China sent observers.

More than 100 countries are in discussion to seize the historic opportunity that exists to outlaw and eliminate nuclear weapons. Article VI of the treaty requires that “each of the parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations toward the goal of nuclear disarmament”.

The world marks Hiroshima Day and the global Day of Nuclear Disarmament on August 6. It also fits Robert Lifton and Richard Falk’s 30 years old definition of nuclearism, which they define as ‘a psychological, political and military dependence on nuclear weapons, the embrace of the weapons as a solution to a wide variety of human dilemmas, most ironically that of “security”‘. In 1996, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty called for an end to nuclear armament. It would also close loopholes in the legal regime that enable some states to engage in nuclear weapon activities while clearly codifying the illegitimacy of possession. According to the final text of the nuclear agreement, Iran will under no circumstances seek to develop or acquire a nuclear weapon and, in exchange, will receive sanctions relief.

States without nuclear weapons can not eliminate them.

“There’s no winning in nuclear war”, Maryann Cusimano Love, an worldwide relations professor at the Catholic University of America, told CNA.

It was the former Stoltenberg-government in Norway who in 2013 took the initiative to roll out to an global campaign against nuclear weapons.

The process should be flexible about the nature of the forum, taking into consideration which forum best serves the objectives of developing and adopting an effective ban treaty.