Sept. 26 is International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, a day designated by the United Nations to draw attention to one of its oldest goals: Achieving global nuclear disarmament.
It is also the founding mission of my organization, Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Nuclear weapons make us less, not more, safe. Since their existence, they’ve posed one of the gravest threats to public health and human survival. According to U.N. estimates, 14,500 nuclear weapons remain. That’s enough to completely destroy the Earth.
Very few people want a nuclear war to occur. We all have a vested interest in preventing one. No nation on Earth would be adequately prepared to address the mass health emergency and humanitarian crisis that would result.
While it’s difficult to predict for certain what a nuclear war would mean for each nation, scientific and medical studies paint a grim picture. National Geographic recently analyzed the impact of a long-lasting wildfire cloud in 2017 to get a sense of what the smoke and soot from a nuclear war might look like. The results confirmed the physics involved in a global nuclear winter. According to analysts, nuclear winter could mean noontime darkness, plummeting global temperatures and the end of life on the planet.
Right now, the risk of nuclear war is the greatest it has been since the height of the Cold War. Decades later, we’re still playing a high-cost game of chicken with Russia and other nuclear-armed states. And once again, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock is set at just two minutes to midnight, the closest it’s ever been to a nuclear apocalypse.
On Aug. 2, the United States officially withdrew from the landmark 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between Russia and the United States, which prohibited an entire class of nuclear missiles while providing procedures to ensure compliance and verify arms reduction. It led to the elimination of more than 2,600 intermediate-range missiles.
The New START Treaty, a strategic nuclear arms reduction treaty between the United States and Russia that provides crucially important verification protocols, is also under threat of U.S. withdrawal.
But there has also been progress to address the nuclear weapons threat. The U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, known as the nuclear ban treaty, was approved by 122 nations in 2017.
Let’s make this the year when we finally resolve to abolish nuclear weapons for good.
Olivia Alperstein is the media relations manager for Physicians for Social Responsibility, www.psr.org.
