Although a widespread movement has developed to fight climate change, no counterpart has emerged to take on the rising danger of nuclear disaster — yet.
Trump says that he is abandoning the INF treaty, basically confirms a renewed arms race, and absolves himself from any responsibility to lead efforts to reduce nuclear tensions around the globe.
David McReynolds, lifelong pacifist and socialist, died last Friday. Twice a presidential candidate, lifetime member of the War Resisters League, well-known photographer, was the first out gay man to run for President.
World peace, “the most important topic on earth….not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women – not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” That was 1963, the president was was John F. Kennedy. Contrast to today and the desire for ever greater stockpiles of nuclear bombs.
This great doctor taught us there can be no public health without world peace. Despite the specter of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War, Dr. Sidel was an optimist and innovator who preached that community outreach was a critical factor in treating vulnerable populations.
Not since 1953, when the U.S. and the Soviets exploded thermonuclear bombs, has the world been such a powder keg!
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Against all odds, 122 countries agreed in July to ban nuclear weapons. At the heart of the United Nations treaty is an explicit ethical goal: to protect peoples of the world from the humanitarian catastrophe that would ensue if nuclear weapons were employed. Once 50 states ratify the treaty, it will enter into international law. The United States, the only country to use nuclear weapons, dropped the first atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945 at Hiroshima, and Aug. 9 on Nagasaki.
Recently the Chair of an exciting UN initiative formally named the “United Nations Conference to Negotiate a Legally Binding Instrument to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, Leading Towards their Total Elimination” released a draft treaty to ban and prohibit nuclear weapons just as the world has done for biological and chemical weapons. The Ban Treaty is to be negotiated at the UN from June 15 to July 7.
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