Nuclear Weapons

Photo: U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, in Manila, Philippines on August 6, 2017. (Photo credit: U.S. Department of State/Public Domain)

U.S. Shifts Arms Control Strategy with Russia

By Kingston Reif and Shannon Bugos

While Kingston Reif is the director for disarmament and threat reduction policy, Shannon Bugos is research assistant at the Arms Control Association.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (IDN) – The Trump administration has softened its demand that China immediately participate in trilateral nuclear arms control talks with the United States and Russia and says it is now seeking an interim step of a politically binding framework with Moscow.

But the administration continues to reject Russia’s offer of a clean five-year extension of the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) and has said that President Trump will not consider an extension until several conditions are met.

Collage of photos of the author in his IAEA capacity at the Semipalatinsk “polygon” on 29 August 2011, with ‘Stronger than Death’ monument in Semey in the centre. It was erected in 2001 in memory of the victims of nuclear testing at Semipalatinsk. Photos by Tariq Rauf.

Extinguishing Prometheus’ Nuclear Flame: International Day Against Nuclear Tests

By Tariq Rauf*

VIENNA (IDN) – The first nuclear explosive device was detonated at the Alamogordo Test Range in the New Mexico desert in the United States of America on July 16, 1945, and then on August 6 and 9 the US carried out the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the next seven decades, nine additional countries carried out some 2060 nuclear explosions, spreading radioactive contamination in the air, lands and space, and in the world's oceans, leading to long-lasting catastrophic consequences for the health and well-being of millions of innocent people.

Photo: UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Photo courtesy the UN.

Nuclear Testing Should Have No Place in the 21st Century

By Santo D. Banerjee

NEW YORK (IDN) – UN Secretary-General António Guterres has in a message for the International Day against Nuclear Tests warned of resurgent nuclear menace and called for a complete ban on testing. Following is the full text of his message.

Commemorated annually since 2010 on the anniversary of the closure of the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan, the International Day against Nuclear Tests takes on special meaning in 2020 in also marking 75 years since the first-ever nuclear test, code named “Trinity”, was undertaken in July 1945 in the United States.

Map: Soviet Invasion of Manchuria (1945), based on Glantz's maps in Levenworth Paper No 7 - Feb 1983. CC BY-SA 3.0

Soviet Advance Not U.S. Atomic Bombings Forced Japan To Surrender

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power*

LUND, Sweden (IDN) – Seventy-five years ago the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima on August 6 and on Nagasaki on August 9 was premeditated mass murder.

President Harry Truman had a workable alternative to using the atom bomb – to cooperate with Stalin, as Roosevelt and Churchill had done on the Western front, in the Soviet advance on Japan, rather than making it a race for control.

Indeed, it was the Soviet advance that convinced Japan to surrender.** Although unaware of each other’s thinking both Truman and the Japanese leadership shared a common cause – they both wanted to pre-empt the possibility of the Soviet Union occupying parts of Japan before the U.S. had got its boots on Japanese ground. Truman did not want to be compelled to concede Soviet participation in the government of post-surrender, occupied, Japan.

Three More Countries Ratify the UN Treaty to Ban the Bomb

By Tony Robinson

The writer is Humanist Movement activist, coordinating committee member of Abolition 2000 - Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons, author of the book "Coffee with Silo and the quest for meaning in life" and producer of the film "The Beginning of the End of Nuclear Weapons". The article originally appeared on Pressenza, one of our partners.

LONDON (IDN) – In a ceremony hosted by ICAN and chaired by Elayne Whyte Gomez, the Costa Rican diplomat who steered the negotiations of the ground-breaking Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, three more countries announced their ratification: Ireland, Nigeria and the pacific island state of Niue.

Photo: Side view of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.5

Looking Back at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Nuclear Attacks on 75th Anniversary

Viewpoint by Tariq Rauf

The writer is former Head of Nuclear Verification and Security Policy at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, former Alternate Head of the IAEA Delegation to the nuclear non-proliferation Treaty (NPT); Senior Advisor on nuclear disarmament to the Chairs at the 2015 NPT Review Conference and 2014 NPT PrepCom; long time Expert with Canada's NPT delegation until 2000. Personal views are expressed here. The following is an expanded version of comments made at the event, 'The 75th Anniversary of Atomic Bombing and the United Nations In the Time of COVID-19: Where Do We Stand and What Can Be Done for a Nuclear-Free World?', organized by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) Hiroshima.

Photo: Hiroshima Ruins, October 5, 1945. Photo by Shigeo Hayashi.

75th Anniversary of the Bombings of Hiroshima & Nagasaki

Viewpoint by Sergio Duarte

The author is Ambassador, President of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, Former UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs.

NEW YORK (IDN) –Seventy-five years ago, on August 6, 1945, a nuclear attack razed the city of Hiroshima. Three days later, Nakgasaki suffered identical fate. More than 200,000 men, women and children suddenly lost their lives, and many others perished from the effects of radiation during the next decades. Some survivors, known as hibakusha in Japan, whose average age is 82, still struggle to make their bitter experience known to the remainder of humanity, under the motto "no one should suffer what we have suffered".

Image: Peace cranes. Credit: ICAN | Ari-Beser

The Elders Urge World Leaders to Take Action or Risk Nuclear Catastrophe

By Jutta Wolf

BERLIN | LONDON (IDN) – A group of eminent world leaders, comprising The Elders, has called on the heads of states of five permanent members (P5) of the UN Security Council to use the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki "as a moment to reflect on the lives lost and begin substantive steps towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons".

The atomic bombing of the two cities on August 6 and 9, 1945 led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, laying bare the true horror of nuclear weapons. Today, over 13,000 nuclear warheads are in existence.

Photo: ICAN has campaigned for a ban treaty on nuclear weapons, inside and outside the United Nations headquarters, for over a decade, Credit: ICAN

Unlike the Pandemic, Nuclear War Can Be Blocked before It Begins

Viewpoint by Marina Martinez*

This article was originally published on WagingNonviolence and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

NEW YORK (IDN) – Nuclear weapons have been posing a threat to humanity for 75 years – ever since the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

These days, our focus is understandably on the COVID-19 virus and the threat it poses to human life. But as we commemorate the anniversary of these bombings, it is important to acknowledge that unlike the coronavirus, nuclear weapons can only be remediated with prevention. Millions of people could be killed if a single nuclear bomb were detonated over a large city, and the added threats of radiation and retaliation could endanger all life on Earth.

Photo: Atomic Bombing in Nagasaki and the Urakami Cathedral. Credit: Google Arts&Culture

Japanese and American Catholics Take on the Bomb

By Drew Christiansen

Writer Drew Christiansen, S. J., is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Human Development at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs. He is the co-editor with Carole Sargent of A World Free from Nuclear Weapons: The Vatican Conference on Disarmament (Georgetown University Press, 2020). facebook.com/disarmnowgeorgetown

WASHINGTON, DC. (IDN) -- Nagasaki is the historic centre of Japanese Catholicism. In the 16th century, beginning with the missionary visits of one of the first Jesuits, Francis Xavier, Nagasaki was the focal point of their efforts to bring Christianity to Japan.