The Washington Post has published an opinion from our international fedreration, IPPNW.
In his Jan. 14 Tuesday Opinion commentary, “The U.S. is unprepared for a major war. Can Pete Hegseth fix that?,” Max Boot asked whether Pete Hegseth can prepare us for a major war, which unfortunately could go nuclear. It’s worth remembering that President-elect Donald Trump, who will be ultimately responsible for war and peace, has been concerned about nuclear war for decades. In 1986, the year after we were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he asked our organization, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, for help in arranging a meeting with then-Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to discuss ways to reduce the nuclear threat. We assisted the president-elect then, and offer some thoughts now.
As president, a valuable first step for Trump would be to initiate a dialogue among all nine nuclear-armed nations to discuss reduction of the threat. Universal adoption of a no-first-use policy would be an important step. But, as advocated by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, the goal must be abolition. Within a year of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, President Harry S. Truman and his representative Bernard Baruch put forth a plan that would prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and establish an international authority to monitor the development of atomic weapons, in exchange for which the United States would dismantle its nuclear arsenal. Ronald Reagan, an iconoclastic president, also sought abolition. Trump has the chance to achieve the elusive goal advocated, but not achieved, by his predecessors.
Abolition of all nuclear weapons would be worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize — and everlasting thanks from all future generations.
James E. Muller and John O. Pastore, Boston
The writers were, respectively, co-founder and executive secretary of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.