Over several decades, scientific research published in peer-reviewed journals has informed activists working for nuclear disarmament by describing and providing the evidence for the health and environmental damage nuclear weapons have inflicted, even when they are not used in war. During the Cold War of the 1970s and 1980s, books, research articles, and independent studies about the effects of nuclear weapons were published around the world. Nuclear disarmament campaigning based upon this scientific evidence and humanitarian concerns reached a peak during this period. In the mid-2000s, a renewed focus on the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons emerged. All of the existing scientific evidence about the health and environmental impacts of nuclear weapons was gathered together and brought into the service of what would ultimately become the HINW (Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons) process, leading to the negotiation and adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in 2017. A new generation of activists, which recognizes the threat of nuclear war as intrinsically connected to the climate crisis, has emerged. A growing number of health and peace organizations have made explicit connections between the climate crisis, nuclear disarmament, and public health.
Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsJohn LoretzJohn Loretz was Program Director of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War from 2000-2017. He was an IPPNW representative on the steering group of ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2017 and entered into force in January 2021, was the end product of a highly effective partnership ...
Somewhere in central Russia during the height of the Cold War lay an empty field that US intelligence agencies had determined could be used as a makeshift landing strip for Soviet bombers in the ev...
In 1946, John Hersey wrote a magazine article that changed the world. On the 75th anniversary of the events he described so vividly in Hiroshima, (Hersey 1946) journalist Lesley M. M. Blume has giv...
Somewhere in central Russia during the height of the Cold War lay an empty field that US intelligence agencies had determined could be used as a makeshift landing strip for Soviet bombers in the ev...
My professional career as an expert on the consequences of nuclear weapons and as an advocate for their elimination came to a bittersweet end on 10 December 2017 in Oslo, when ICAN received the Nob...
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War held its 22nd World Congress from 4–6 September 2017 at York University. The Congress, organised in conjunction with the Medact forum ‘Health Through Peace 2017: Tackling public health crises in a changing, unstable world,’ addressed the interrelationships among armed violence, health, and development, and the ways in which health professionals can mobilise in pursuit of a more peaceful world. A focal point of the programme was the recently adopted Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which provides a legal, moral, and political framework for the elimination of nuclear weapons as ‘the only way to guarantee that [they] are never used again under any circumstances.’ The statement that follows was issued by IPPNW at the opening of the Congress.
An IPPNW Congress is a periodic opportunity for physicians, medical students and the federation’s supporters from every corner of the world to gather in one place where they can assess progress tow...
‘Nuclear abolition: for a future’ was a thoughtful choice for the title of the 19 World Congress of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, held in Basel, Switzerland from 25–30 August 2010. While the Congress programme reflected IPPNW’s broad range of activities to confront the causes and humanitarian consequences of armed violence, the ‘red thread’ running throughout the sessions was the unprecedented – if, perhaps, fleeting – opportunity to rid the world of the only weapons capable of erasing our future. The Congress theme, therefore, was both an aspiration and a warning that perfectly summed up this moment in time. IPPNW Congresses have become multinational, multicultural, intergenerational events where networking, relationship building, and strategizing are at least as important as the speeches and workshops. More than 700 doctors, medical students and IPPNW supporters from 45 countries converged on Basel, a charming city at the foot of the Alps, whose historic buildings and monuments were untouched by the aerial bombing that devastated so much of Europe during the Second World War. Thirty-three participants arrived by bicycle at the conclusion of an 11-day, 750-kilometer, three-country, low-carbon Ban All Nukes (BAN) Tour, promoting a European nuclear weapons free zone all along the route from Düsseldorf to Basel (the whole story, photos and videos are at www.ippnw-students.org/ BAN). The programme itself was as complex as a fine Swiss watch, and – cliché or not – was engineered by the host affiliate, PSR/IPPNW-Switzerland, with characteristic precision and efficiency. This was not easy, given the need to coordinate a two-day student congress with its own full agenda of speakers and workshops; a one-day ‘pre-conference’ on uranium mining, health and indigenous peoples (www.ippnw2010.org/index.php?id1⁄479); a continuous
The only clear point of consensus among the participants at the outset of the five-year review of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which took place in New York in May 2...
