By Livia Malcangio*
The danger of nuclear war is greater than it has ever been. Nine nations hold a total of some 12,000 nuclear warheads, 90% of them in the arsenals of the US and Russia. Escalating tensions between the US and Russia, the US and China, India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, North and South Korea all provide potential trigger points for nuclear war. Recent studies have shown that even a limited nuclear war as might take place between India and Pakistan would put enough soot into the upper atmosphere to cause global climate disruption and a nuclear famine” that could kill over 2 billion people worldwide including more than 30 million people in Italy. A larger scale war between the US and Russia would kill more than 5 billion people world wide and more than 55 million in Italy. Either scenario would mean the end of modern civilization.
“We are sleep walking towards a nuclear catastrophe that will destroy human civilization. But this is not the future that must be. Nuclear weapons are not a force of nature over which we have no control. These are little machines that we have built with our own hands. We know how to take them apart. All that is missing is the political will to walk us back from the brink. And it is up to us to create that political will.” – Dr Ira Helfand
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-I am here today with Dr Ira Helfand, he is the past President of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, IPPNW, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, and he is in the steering committee of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, ICAN, winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for their work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons. ICAN also played a ground-braking role in to reach an international Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons called TPNW.
– Good morning Dr Helfand, it is always a pleasure to meet you and support your tireless work. Please, tell us about the new “Back to the Brink Campaign” and where we are now in the US, your country, with the nuclear disarmament movement.
We have a long way to go still, in order to get our government do the right thing. But I think there’s been a substantial progress over the last year, and especially in the last few months. Our campaign, the Back from the Brink campaign, has grown really quite dramatically. We have a resolution in the US Congress which as of now, April 2024, has 44 members of the house of representatives that have signed this resolution. We have passed local resolutions in 70 cities and towns across the country, and more than 480 Non-Governmental Organizations that are part of this network, working to bring about this change in the nuclear policy. And it seems to be having some effects.
In the last few months there has been a significant change in the public discourse around this issue in the US.
Major media such as the New York Times, The Los Angeles Time, the Boston Globe have editorialized about the need to get rid of nuclear weapons. This is quite new. They never took this position before. It suggests that there is a real change of thinking at a very profound level on what nuclear weapons can do.
-How is it possible that countries like France, UK, the US, engaged in supporting human rights and international humanitarian rights, still focus their home security on the capacity to kill indiscriminately hundreds of thousands or millions of people, by possessing the nuclear bomb?
Most people do this by just denying the reality. They assume that the weapons will never be used. Even though we know they will be used. This has become part of the nuclear doctrine, that the weapons exist, to deter anyone for ever using them. It does not correspond with history; there have been many instances that have come close to nuclear war.
People have the strange ability to compartmentalize the things that they don’t want to think about. They just convince themselves that It’s gonna be okay. And that unfortunately is a very dangerous solution.
-You are a physician at the first aid hospital and you are fighting against nuclear bombs for decades. Why are you so committed to the cause of nuclear disarmament?
I am jewish, I grew up in the era right after the holocaust. I grew up with the teaching that the holocaust was only possible because good German people didn’t speak up, didn’t take action to stop it from happening. And that’s the key lesson we all need to learn. When there’s something bad going on, we have the responsibility to take action.
That message has been deeply enriched by having children, having grandchildren, and feeling the sense of enormous responsibility to preserve the world in which they can grow up.
We all have to look at it that way. We have a responsibility to future generations. We need to understand that it is in our power to create that future for them. But we have to act for that to happen.
-You have just visited the exhibition SenzaAtomica, of which IPPNW, ICAN, Pugwash Conferences, and Rete Pace e Disarmo are partners. You have also taken part in many editions of the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, doing workshops with students, why it is so important to speak to young people about the importance of getting rid of nuclear weapons?
One of the problems we face today is that young people have not been educated about this. Old people like me have tended to forget the real danger. But Young people never got taught. They cannot be expected to take action to prevent nuclear war if they do not know the danger that nuclear weapons pose. Young people have had a tremendous impact on climate change, because they know about that existential threat.
In my experience, when we talk to young people about nuclear war, we get exactly the same reaction, they are very upset, some are angry that they were never told this information before. And very determined to make sure they do something about it. We have the responsibility to provide this information to young people, they have the right to know the danger that they face and we need to present this information in order for them to act.
-They are also very angry because climate change is a problem that we have to solve by changing our way of living. Becoming more conscious, more sensitive when we want to buy something, or dispose of something. But nuclear weapons, it would be so easy to get rid of them.
That’s an incredibly important point Livia, as people tend to think that nuclear weapons are part of the world and that we can’t get rid of them. But it actually would be relatively easy.
We don’t have to change the whole global economy. We don’t have to change the way 8 billion people live. All we need to do is to take a political decision and eliminate these 12,000 weapons. We have dismantled some 50,000 of these weapons already. We know exactly how to do it. .And the process of getting rid of them can become a model, it can be the catalyst really for a whole new way for countries to relate to each other based on cooperation, rather than competition.
-Going back to the Back to the Brink Campaign in the US that you are coordinating, do you think it will be possible to create a commission of representatives of the nine nuclear countries to start negotiating on how to get rid of nuclear weapons before they get rid of us?
We can’t know if we will be successful. All we know is what will happen if we fail.
There is no downside to trying this path. Here in the US we are focused on our government, getting the US government to begin these negotiations or enter into these negotiations if someone else proposes them.
The worst that happens is that this does not go forward and that we remain where we are. We would be no worse off than we are today. There is no downside to trying. So we absolutely should do it.
In the 1980s, in particularly 1983 when we almost went to war twice, no-one expected that Gorbachev and Reagan would sit down two years later and say that nuclear war can’t be won and can never be fought. So there is a historical precedent
Nuclear weapons must be eliminated, before they eliminate us.
You know well the educational book Being Nobel that I wrote, which tells the stories of selected individual Nobel Peace Laureates. Who is your favorite Nobel Peace Prize winner described in the book?
This is a really tough question, because there is a lot of really wonderful people who won the Nobel prize. Can I have two? Nelson Mandela is just the most extraordinary human being. After being in prison for 27 years to emerge from that experience, not focused on the injury that he had suffered, but rather on the healing the he could bring about it’s just incredibly inspiring.
The other person is Mikhail Gorbachev, because I really think he saved the world. At a time of extraordinary tension, when we were really moving towards nuclear war, he had the vision and the courage to understand that things had to be done differently and to reached out to the United States, probably with no expectation that he would be successful, Let’s try something different. Because had he not done that, we would have had a nuclear war in the 1980s, we have been given the gift of time. We got 40 years to continue that work and hope that our leaders will show the same kind of vision that Gorbachev and Reagan did.
-Dr Helfand, please accept this new version of my book Being Nobel, it has Gorbachev portrayed in the cover, thank you very much for your time and for your hard work.
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Below are the key points that Dr Ira Helfand told during his hearing at the Defense and Foreign Commissions at the Chamber of Deputies in Rome on April 18th 2024.
1) Since the end of the Cold War we have all acted as though the danger of nuclear war had ended. It did not and now we can no longer ignore experts like former US Defense Secretary William Perry who are telling us that we are closer to nuclear war than we have ever been. There is danger of war between NATO and Russia, between the US and China, between the two Koreas, between India and Pakistan, and now there is the danger of a wider war in the Middle East. Anyone of these could trigger a nuclear war. In addition, advances in cyber technology have increased the danger that command and control systems can be hacked creating another possible path to nuclear war. Finally, the climate crisis is increasing stress on societies across the planet and increasing the danger of conflict. We have survived this long into the nuclear era, not because we knew what we were doing, but because, as former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, said, “We lucked out.” IF we do not eliminate nuclear weapons it is not a question of whether, only a question of when they will be used.
2) If we do have a nuclear war, it will be far worse than we can possibly imagine. A war between NATO and Russia will see the destruction of most of the great cities in both countries with perhaps 200 to 300 million people dead in an afternoon. The entire economic infrastructure that would be necessary to support those who survive the initial attacks would be destroyed—there would be no internet, no cell phones, no electricity, no food distribution system. Most survivors in the countries that fought the war would die over the following months from starvation, exposure, radiation sickness and epidemic disease. Globally the soot generated by the burning cities would block out the sun dropping temperatures across the planet in a matter of days, an average of 10 degrees C. which is as cold as the coldest moment of the last ice age. Food production would stop and 5-6 billion people would starve to death in the first 2 years. Even a limited war, as might take place between India and Pakistan would cause enough climate disruption to cause a famine that would kill 2 billion people worldwide including 25-30 million in Italy.
3) This doesn’t have to happen. Nuclear weapons are not a force of nature over which we have no control. They are little machines we have built with our own hands and we know how to take them apart. We have already dismantled more than 50,000 of them. We simply lack the political will to get rid of the 12,000 that remain.
4) Italy, and other NATO states, especially those that house nuclear weapons, can play a critically important role in ending this insanely dangerous situation, by confronting the nations which actually possess these weapons with the hard truth: Nuclear weapons do not make us safe. They are the greatest threat to our safety and indeed our survival. Our common security demands that the nine countries that have nuclear weapons sit down and negotiate a verifiable, enforceable agreement to eliminate their nuclear weapons according to an agreed timetable so they can all join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. And Italy and other NATO countries can show the way by signing and ratifying the TPNW now.
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*Italian journalist, philanthropist, and a human rights activist. Ms. Livia Malcangio has served the Permanent Secretariat as the Director of Institutional Relations and Protocol for more than ten years, and has worked for the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates since it was established in 1999. She maintains a master’s degree in International Relations and Protection of Human Rights from the Italian Society for the International Organization – United Nations’ Association (SIOI).