peace action

Sixty years ago this month, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was in my mother's womb. My young, sweet mom was terrified she'd never get to see me be born, as the world teetered on the brink of unimaginable calamity. It's bewildering to me that nuclear crises bookend my life at this point, especially with my having worked for nuclear disarmament since 1983. But here we are, perhaps closer to nuclear catastrophe, with Russian President Vladimir Putin's thinly veiled nuclear threats in his disastrous war against Ukraine, than at any time since John Kennedy and Nikita Khruschev found a path back from the brink six decades ago.

Decades of progress in reducing the overall number of nuclear weapons in the world has recently been undercut by backsliding on nuclear weapons treaties, lack of progress on disarmament (in fact, the opposite, a new arms race with all nuclear states upgrading their arsenals), and hypocrisy on non-proliferation by the nuclear powers. There are now nine nuclear-armed states--the US, Russia, China, France, Britain, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea--and many more that could go nuclear if they so choose. Clearly, humanity has so far failed to deal with the existential threat of the weaponized atom.