IPPNW has produced a new Campaign Kit on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, presenting the essential facts about their medical, environmental, and humanitarian effects in clear, simple, and accurate language. 

“This important new tool will help ICAN campaigners and other abolition activists make a compelling and irrefutable humanitarian case for banning and eliminating nuclear weapons,” said Program Director John Loretz, who will lead a workshop on the kit and its campaigning uses during the upcoming ICAN Civil Society Forum in Vienna.

From the Introduction

The facts about nuclear weapons—their unprecedented destructive power, their massive and indiscriminate medical and environmental effects, their capacity to wipe out everything that sustains life on Earth—have been extensively documented in hundreds of books, journal articles, and scientific papers. Campaigners for nuclear abolition are faced with the challenge of presenting the facts correctly and persuasively, and they must often do so in the few moments they have the attention of a government minister, a parliamentarian, a politician, a journalist, or a person on the street.
Table of Contents

  1. Nuclear weapons: uniquely destructive; incompatible with humanity
  2. Physical trauma and burns
  3. Radiation
  4. Nuclear famine and nuclear winter
  5. Doctors can’t help
  6. Physicians speak with a common voice: what IPPNW, the Red Cross, the WHO, and the WMA say about nuclear weapons
  7. When you only have one minute to make the case
  • Each of the first five sections begins with clear, concise, and accurate list of facts about a particular aspect of nuclear weapons, reduced to the most essential talking points.
  • How these facts support the argument for a treaty banning nuclear weapons is articulated in a single paragraph.
  • Each section includes a longer, more detailed description of the evidence, with references and links to a number of important research studies and reports.
  • The sections on nuclear weapons effects are followed by excerpts from some of the most important and influential statements about nuclear weapons made by international medical and humanitarian relief organizations.
  • The campaign kit concludes with an “elevator speech”—a one-minute version of the facts about nuclear weapons and why a ban treaty is the best political, practical, moral, and humanitarian response to those facts.

IPPNW co-president Tilman Ruff encouraged campaigners to make full use of the campaign kit in framing the humanitarian case for banning and eliminating nuclear weapons. “You don’t need to be a physician or a scientist to communicate these facts, which have the accumulated knowledge and authority of medical and scientific experts behind them,” said Dr. Ruff.

Production, design, and distribution of this campaign kit were made possible through the generous support of The Simons Foundation and Soka Gakkai International (SGI)  In collaboration with the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), SGI launched the “Everything You Treasure―For a World Free From Nuclear Weapons” exhibition at IPPNW’s 20th World Congress in Hiroshima in 2012.