Gerald O�fBrien
Peace Council of Aotearoa-New Zealand

Minasan Konnichiwa!

Greeting from strong Nuclear-Free New Zealand.
Thank you all for the great conference and particular thanks to our distinguished guests for having imbued it with a great spirit of real hope and enthusiasm.

The world is stirring and we from other lands owe an inestimable debt to this World Conference for never ever having lost sight of the objective of total abolition of what Indian writer Arundhati Roy has called the most anti-human, outright evil thing man has ever made - a weapon that has turned civilization on its head.

The world now calls for total abolition of nuclear weapons, not in our lifetime nor in some few years but now - this very moment - this very day.

We no longer intend states to license the United States to continue to threaten life itself. The forces of morality are at long last coalescing around the demand for total abolition which your peace movement with others has long recognised since the unanimous very First Resolution of the UN made the demand on all states.

We affirm that we will no longer live with these illegal malign instruments of death condemned by the ICJ, and that we will take political action at all levels of democracy to bring to account those who temporize with wars without semblance of legality and the new imperialism which robs half the world of hope and the right to the fruits of life and the spirit.

Forgive me for repeating our charge that every injury, every illness, every crippling disease, every hell created on earth, and every single death attributable to nuclear weapons has been caused only by the nuclear weapons states themselves and by no other. They must be finally wrenched from their addiction to this demented power.

And forgive me for repeating the essential truth in historian AJP Taylor�fs dictum that every citizen of a free country has a duty to help rid the world of nuclear weapons, and that no country, no state, and no political system is entitled in any circumstance whatever, to employ mass murder in order to maintain itself. So all of us here are for Abolition Now today, because we all hold the conviction that, come what may, the new society in peace is simply bound to come to pass.

Justice for Hibakusha.
Never More Nuclear Weapons.

Domo arigato gozaimashita.
Gambarimasho !!!

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