Dear Presidents Biden and Putin,
although you are the two people who control 90 percent of the world’s nuclear arsenals, I am not sure you know the real effects of these weapons. Because you’ve never seen the inhumanity that any one of these weapons does to people.
89-year-old Setsuko Thurlow, who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize with me in 2017 on behalf of the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons, has that. As a 13-year-old, she survived the bombing of Hiroshima and describes how she was one of the normal mornings at school saw blinding white flash. Then she got a feeling of floating in the air and then total darkness.
She describes how she crawled out of the rubble when her school was pulverized. The ruins were on fire and burned alive most of their classmates. How she saw corpses and unimaginable devastation as she walked through her ruined city and processions of ghostly figures running to the cooling river. They were people who no longer looked human.
That is the reality of nuclear weapons. This is what you have threatened to do to the rest of the world every day for 75 years.
The Swedish Beatrice Fihn (39) has been the director of the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (Ican), based in Geneva, since 2014. Fihn, who comes from Gothenburg, studied international relations in Stockholm and international law in London. Her path led through the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the Geneva Center for Security Policy, and a Geneva bank to the Ican, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.
As you spend your day in summery Geneva, gazing out at a beautiful blue lake and snow-capped mountains, it’s hard to imagine that what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki could ever happen again. But today in particular, the risk of using nuclear weapons is higher than it was during the entire Cold War. Scientists and nuclear weapons experts warn that the risk will only increase and that a child born today is more likely than not to experience nuclear war in their lifetime.
By today’s standards, the bombs that were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed over 215,000 civilians are considered “small” nuclear weapons. Even if a single bomb is deployed, there will be no capacity to provide effective relief to the suffering people. No help will come.
The only solution is the abolition of nuclear weapons. That must be your main task when you meet here in Geneva. Fortunately for you, the rest of the world has already done some of the heavy lifting. In January the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons came into force, making these weapons illegal under international law. More and more governments are joining this treaty. The city of Geneva that you are in this week is one of hundreds of cities around the world that have now endorsed the treaty.
Almost 40 years ago, in 1985, Presidents Gorbachev and Reagan met in Geneva and initiated nuclear disarmament. During the decade following that summit, the United States, along with the former Soviet Union, later Russia, drastically reduced their stocks of tens of thousands of warheads.
In Geneva, the international city known for promoting peace and disarmament, it is up to you to set a historic milestone yourself. Our future depends on it.
Yours sincerely,
Beatrice Fihn
Managing Director
International Campaign for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons
Nobel Peace Prize 2017