“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.”
on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons,
recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize
“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:
“
Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate
the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man,
woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging
by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment
by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war
must be abolished before they abolish us.”
Address in New York City Before the General Assembly of the United Nations
“A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
Radio Address to the Nation on Nuclear Weapons
“Is there a spiritual reality, inconceivable to us today,
which corresponds in history to the physical reality which
Einstein discovered and which led to the atomic bomb? Einstein
discovered a law of physical change: the way to convert a single
particle of matter into enormous physical energy. Might there
not also be, as Gandhi suggested, an equally incredible and
undiscovered law of spiritual change, whereby a single person or
small community of persons could be converted into an enormous
spiritual energy capable of transforming a society and a world?
“I believe that there is, that there must be, a spiritual
reality corresponding to E=mc
2 because, from the
standpoint of creative harmony, the universe is incomplete
without it, and because, from the standpoint of moral freedom,
humankind is sentenced to extinction without it. I believe that
the human imperative of our end-time is that we discover the
spiritual equation corresponding to Einstein’s physical
equation, and that we then begin to experiment seriously in
its world-transforming reality while there is time.” (pp.3-4)
“The exact opposite of the H bomb’s destructive
purpose, but psychic equivalent of its energy, is the Kingdom of
Reality which would be the final victory of Truth in
history—a force of truth and love powerful enough to fuse
billions of individual psyches into a global realization of
essential oneness. The experience of such a spiritual force of
fusion is unimaginable, and the mere hypothesizing of it, as in
this book, as a psychic and historical possibility will go beyond
any but the most willing suspension of disbelief. But there is no
reason why the same psyche which, when turned outward, was able
to create the condition for a self-acting force of over 100
million degrees of heat, thus realizing an inconceivable
thermonuclear fusion, cannot someday turn sufficiently inward to
create the conditions for an equally inconceivable (but nature
balancing) fusion in its own psychic or spiritual reality. The
main deterrent to its doing so is that sharp sense in us all of
the conditions necessary for a self-sacrificing love
corresponding in any way to the energy of a nuclear fireball. But
an end-time can also be a beginning.” (p.39)
“A great many reputable scientists
are telling us that such a war could just end up in
no victory for anyone because we would wipe out the
earth as we know it. And if you think back to ...
natural calamities – back in the last century,
in the 1800s, ... volcanoes – we saw the
weather so changed that there was snow in July in
many temperate countries. And they called it the year
in which there was no summer. Now if one volcano can
do that, what are we talking about with the whole
nuclear exchange, the nuclear winter that scientists
have been talking about? It’s possible.”
Bernard Weinraub & Gerald Boyd Interview, New York Times