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International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons

August 19, 2019 By Bob Kinsey

In 2013, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) declared September 26 to be the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons (Nuclear Abolition Day).

The UNGA resolution establishing the day:
1. Calls for progress to achieve a nuclear weapons convention – a global treaty which includes both nuclear-armed and non-nuclear countries in the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons under strict and effective international control;

2. Encourages parliamentarians and civil society to organise events or take action on this day to promote the complete elimination of nuclear weapons;

3. Decided to hold a High-Level Meeting annually to promote the global elimination of nuclear weapons and for governments to report on progress.

The United Nations General Assembly will host a High Level Meeting on Nuclear Disarmament at the UN Headquarters on September 26. UN Member States will be represented by their Presidents, Prime Ministers, Foreign Ministers or UN Ambassadors. The event will aslo be live-streamed on http://webtv.un.org/.

A limited number of NGOs will be able to attend the event. In addition, the UN Office of Disarmament Affairs will select two representatives from civil society to speak. Registration and application to speak closes on August 23. Click here to register.

Suggested Actions:
• Encourage your Prime Minister/President to participate in the Sep 26 UN High-Level Meeting on Nuclear Disarmament, and to use this opportunity to call on all states to commit to never launch a nuclear war, and to negotiate an agreement for the the complete elimination of nuclear weapons (nuclear weapons convention).

• Encourage your parliamentarian to join Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament and take action with other parliamentarians for nuclear disarmament.

Marzhan Nurzhan, Deputy Director of the Basel Peace Office, speaking at the UN High Level Meeting on Nuclear Disarmament at the United Nations in New York on September 26, 2017.

List of Nuclear Abolition Day 2019 events and actions around the world

UNFOLD ZERO, a global platform advancing UN initiatives for nuclear abolition, is compiling a list of Nuclear Abolition Day 2019 events and actions around the world. Please click here to have your event or action included in the list..

The Man who Saved the World

September 26 is also the anniversary of the incident in 1983 when a nuclear war was almost launched due to malfunctions in the Soviet nuclear weapons early warning system, which erroneously detected a US ballistic missile attack against Moscow. The incident is graphically portrayed in the award winning docu-drama ‘The Man who Saved the World.’

Suggested action: Organise a screening of ‘The Man who saved the World’ or another local event for Nuclear Abolition Day. Contact UNFOLD ZERO for details on how to organise a screening.

Global week of action on Peace, Climate, SDGs and Nuclear Abolition

The International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons falls in the same week as the UN International Day for Peace (Sep 21), the UN Climate Summit (Sep 23) and the UN Summit on SDGs (Sep 24-25).

As such, peace, development and climate action networks are cooperating with nuclear abolitionists on a Global Week of Action on Peace, Climate, Sustainable Development and Nuclear Abolition, Sep 21-27.

One link between the issues is the $100 billion nuclear weapons budget, which could instead be used to fund climate protection, renewable energies and SDGs.

Suggested action: Join the Move the Nuclear Weapons Money campaign to cut nuclear weapons budgets, end investments in nuclear weapons (including investments by your bank, city, pension fund, university, sovereign wealth fund etc…), and shift these budgets and investments to promoting peace, protecting the climate, ending poverty and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

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Disarmament Quotes

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee Butler Former Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford "The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. We scientists recognise our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of atomic energy and its implication for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope - we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death. 

Albert Einstein, January 22, 1947

[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

5-Star Admiral William D. Leahy Chief of Staff to President's Roosevelt and Truman, leader of Combined US-UK Chiefs of Staff during WWII

We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal ... 

George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, January 4, 2007

Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not. 

Robert McNamara Former U.S. Secretary of Defense

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight Eisenhower US President 1953-1961

There are still thousands of warheads loaded on operational systems and standing on high states of alert on virtually hair-trigger posture. And you have to ask yourself: Why is that? Who is the enemy? What is the threat? 

U.S. General Lee Butler Former Commander in Chief, U.S. Strategic Air Command in 1991-92

We seek the elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. 

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason. 

Mikhail Gorbachev, 1995

So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained for ages. There used to be so-called laws of war, which made it tolerable. Now we know the truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atomic bomb brought an empty victory but it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see... 

Mahatma Gandhi from The Essential Gandhi, Louis Fisher, ed.

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlister Kings Bay Protestor 2019

Over the past 15 years, the goal of elimination of nuclear weapons has been so much on the back burner that it will take a true political breakthrough and a major intellectual effort to achieve success in this endeavor.

Mikhail Gorbachev, January 31, 2007

Now, understand, this matters to people everywhere. One nuclear weapon exploded in one city -– be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague –- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences might be -– for our global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate survival. 

Former President Barack Obama, April 5, 2009

It is my fervent goal and hope…that we will some day no longer have to rely on nuclear weapons to deter aggression and assure world peace. To that end the United States is now engaged in a serious and sustained effort to negotiate major reductions in levels of offensive nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal of eliminating these weapons from the face of the earth. 

Ronald Reagan, October 20, 1986

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