Peace and Disarmament

Co-president Tilman Ruff addressed the Open-Ended Working Group on nuclear weapons on May 13 in Geneva, on behalf of IPPNW’s Australian affiliate, MAPW, and ICAN. His remarks follow: Given some views expressed here in recent days, I feel a medical…

President Obama has just passed a little-noticed milestone, according to The New York Times: Obama has now been at war longer than any president in U.S. history—longer than George W. Bush, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Obama has taken…

Understanding the code words of diplomacy. Those of you who attempted to follow the discussion in real-time over the last two weeks at the Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) at the United Nations in Geneva may have been non-plussed at the…

Londoners met yesterday May 14 to form a Peace Sign in Trafalgar Square and hear calls for Peace and Nonviolence from a number of organisations. Here is the speech I gave representing World without Wars and Violence as well as…

Our friends at wildfire>_, always a source of frank opinions and witty commentary, besides their brutal analysis of hypocritical statements, made this final statement to the Open Ended Working Group May session.  We reproduce it here for the benefit of…

The new UN working group on nuclear disarmament, the Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG), completed its second and most substantive session in Geneva today. 100 governments participated over the course of two weeks at the United Nations and many more contributed…

At the May session of the UN working group in Geneva, a small number of nations extolled the supposed “security value” of nuclear weapons and spoke out against a ban. ICAN protested at the diplomatic missions of some of these…

The White House announced this week that President Barack Obama will visit Hiroshima, the site of the world’s first atomic-bomb attack. He will be the first sitting president to go there, and only the second president ever, after former President…

Campaigners have revealed that the cost of replacing Trident, Britain’s nuclear weapons system, has risen to £205 billion (US$ 296 billion, €259 billion). In a briefing published by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, researchers have compiled a comprehensive account of…

Addressing the open-ended working group (OEWG) on nuclear disarmament, Dr. Nick Ritchie of the University of York thoughtfully and systematically dismantled any supposed justification for the retention of nuclear weapons. In so doing, he also providing a searing critique of…