The second inconvenient truth of our time

We urge the Australian Government to show foresight and leadership on the nuclear weapons front. No task is more urgent than destroying the nuclear monster before it destroys us.

The only thing standing in the way of realising this goal is a lack of political will. And the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a new global grassroots movement, aims to overcome this barrier by helping to generate an irresistible groundswell of popular support.

Abolition needn’t take decades. We’ve already banned chemical weapons, biological weapons and anti-personnel landmines, and a cluster bomb ban is currently being negotiated. Let us now turn our attention to outlawing, and ultimately eliminating, the most destructive weapons of all.

Unless we do so, they will eventually be used again - intentionally or by accident - and the effects will be catastrophic.

As Californian governor Arnold Schwarzenegger warned late last year: “A nuclear disaster will not hit at the speed of a glacier melting; it will hit with a blast. It will not hit with the speed of the atmosphere warming but of a city burning.”

“Clearly,” he concluded, “the attention focused on nuclear weapons should be as prominent as that of global climate change.” Both truths are inconvenient, and each requires urgent global attention.