Back from the Brink: The Call to Prevent Nuclear War

Nuclear Weapons - The Ultimate Evil

Time’s Up to Kick The Habit


Castle Romeo 4 megaton nuclear detonation, Bikini Atoll sacrifice, 1954 Mother and child dead on platform at Urakami station ~1 km near Nagasaki epicenter, 10 August 1945; credit: Yosuke Yamahata Kick The Habit, Rob Wout aka Opland, 1981

“Nine nations still threaten to incinerate entire cities, to destroy life on earth, to make our beautiful world uninhabitable for future generations. The development of nuclear weapons signifies not a country’s elevation to greatness, but its descent to the darkest depths of depravity. These weapons are not a necessary evil; they are the ultimate evil.”

—Setsuko Thurlow, Hiroshima survivor, speaking 10 Dec 2017 on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize

The Ultimate Necessity
of an International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Eli Martin Schotz, M.D., February 2018

“Any talk today of preventing a nuclear war misses the point that we are actually in a nuclear war right now. The question is not how can we prevent a nuclear war, but how will the nuclear war end? Will it end with the weapons abolishing mankind, or will mankind end this war by abolishing nuclear weapons? Just as war is a process, so is peace. Peace is a process of educating people about nuclear war, helping them organize against this war.”

We call on the United States to lead a global effort to prevent nuclear war by:

  • renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first

  • ending the sole, unchecked authority of any President to launch a nuclear attack

  • taking US nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert

  • cancelling the plan to replace its entire arsenal with enhanced weapons

  • actively pursuing a verifiable agreement among nuclear armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals