Closing Plenary/Hiroshima Day Rally
2024 World Conference against A and H Bombs
Melissa Parke, Executive Director
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Thank you to Gensuikyo and the Organizing Committee of the World Conference against A and H Bombs, for the invitation to speak on this significant occasion. It is an honor to deliver remarks on these historic anniversaries about our work with the hibakusha to bring about the end of the nuclear age.
ICAN’s work is inspired by the hibakusha’s call for “No More Hiroshimas, No More Nagasakis, No More Hibakusha” and your tireless efforts to make that call a reality. We are honored to have worked alongside the hibakusha to achieve the first treaty banning nuclear weapons in 2017, and to work with hibakusha to achieve its universalisation.
Nuclear weapons are the only devices ever created by human beings that have the capacity to destroy all complex life on earth. Their very existence endangers us all, especially when tensions are high.
The risk of nuclear war is now at its highest since the height of the Cold War. There are currently 2 major conflicts involving nuclear armed states, renewed nuclear threats in the context of both of those conflicts, an almost complete breakdown in arms control agreements, and a new nuclear arms race underway. Nuclear weapons now are many times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed more than a quarter of a million people, and which today would be considered ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons.
In July last year the UNSG issued his New Agenda for Peace in which the number one recommendation was the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Last August more than 150 medical journals from around the world including The Lancet issued a joint call for urgent action to eliminate nuclear weapons as a public health priority. They referenced the study published in 2022 in the Nature food journal which concluded that even a limited nuclear war, using only a small fraction of the global arsenal, would kill millions of people outright and cause global climate disruption through soot being ejected into the upper atmosphere blocking sunlight and causing mass crop failure, putting the lives of 2 billion people at risk from starvation within 2 years. A major nuclear war between the US and Russia would end human civilization as we know it, as well as most other life forms.
In a joint statement in 2022, the UN security council permanent members – all nuclear armed states – agreed that ‘a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought’, so they themselves know nuclear weapons are not just genocidal but also suicidal. The only way to ensure nuclear weapons will never be used again is through total disarmament.
Yet nuclear armed states hold contradictory positions. They all have policies supporting a nuclear-weapons free world, while at the same time maintaining that their possession of nuclear weapons is essential for global stability and keeps us safe.
We see in the context of the Ukraine war that, rather than providing peace and stability, nuclear weapons are being used to coerce, intimidate & threaten. We are seeing the rapid escalation of nuclear risk on the Korean peninsula and in the middle east, and a number of countries starting to speculate publicly about potentially acquiring nuclear weapons themselves, including South Korea, Saudi Arabia and even some European leaders.
The fact is, as former UNSG Ban Ki-moon said, “there are no right hands for wrong weapons”. The more that nuclear armed states and their allies insist that nuclear weapons are essential for their security, the more other countries will want them, thus encouraging proliferation. The narrow, self-serving, short-sighted conception of national security of nuclear armed states and their allies, which is based on the flawed theory of nuclear deterrence, endangers the collective security of all of humanity.
The states parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) have condemned nuclear deterrence as an obstacle to disarmament. The Treaty is a bright light in an otherwise dark international security environment, proof that the majority of the states in the world do not believe that nuclear weapons are acceptable or legitimate and are willing to take action. This treaty is the pathway towards a world free of nuclear weapons.
Every country that joins this treaty pushes us that much closer to the ultimate goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.
But we are also working in nuclear-armed states and their allies by rallying the public, local governments, financial institutions and parliamentarians. Over 700 cities, including Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Washington D.C., Paris, Rome, Geneva, Barcelona, Canberra, Berlin, Oslo, Toronto and Zurich have publicly supported the treaty and urged their governments to join. Over 2,000 parliamentarians around the world have committed to work to get their government to join the treaty and they are now putting forward motions, debating the treaty, asking questions to the executive branch and increasing the pressure in other ways. We have also worked to involve the private sector by getting financial institutions to divest from nuclear weapons producing companies. Since the treaty came into force, more than 4 trillion dollars have been divested from nuclear weapons companies. This is increasing the financial pressure on nuclear weapons-producing companies and showing them that the time is up for these weapons of mass destruction.
We must strengthen the public’s understanding of the horrors nuclear weapons cause. It is critically important in the current climate that we expand public support for nuclear disarmament. We must reach not just audiences already committed to our cause, but new people who can be persuaded by our message.
To do this, we believe it is important to break down the silos where nuclear weapons are only discussed in security and disarmament fora, and only so called defence or security experts get to talk about nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons are everyone’s business; nuclear weapons are not separate from other global concerns; they are deeply interconnected. Nuclear weapons destroy life and health, contaminate the environment, divert essential funds away from addressing pressing global challenges like climate change and social inequality, and undermine the principles of human rights and justice.
The abolition of nws is an essential part of respecting and protecting the planet, the climate, humanity and all living things. There can be no nuclear weapons on a sustainable planet.
ICAN has powerful allies in our mission to raise awareness about nuclear weapons. First and foremost, we have you, the Hibakusha, courageously telling your stories over and over again so the world knows the truth about nuclear weapons. There are also over 120 governments supporting the treaty, in addition to the United Nations, the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement, religious leaders such as Pope Francis, Religions for Peace and the World Council of Churches, medical associations, the trade union movement, the environmental movement, and of course hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people around the world that know we must eliminate nuclear weapons before they eliminate us.
The UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons constitutes the best chance we have to protect our world from nuclear war and achieve nuclear disarmament. With this legal tool, the moral leadership shown by the hibakusha and our committed campaigners and partners around the world, we are unstoppable. We will eliminate nuclear weapons once and for all.