The world's leading medical experts have united to issue an urgent call to eliminate nuclear weapons. They warn that the warheads would have "catastrophic" consequences for humanity including our species' potential extinction.
In an open letter published on Tuesday, more than 100 medical journals – including The Lancet and the British Medical Journal – urged the world's nuclear-armed states to affirm "publicly and unequivocally" that they will never deploy nuclear weapons and to commit to a "verifiable, timebound agreement to eliminate" their nuclear arsenals, as mandated by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
In addition, the authors called on all countries to ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW): a more stringent UN agreement which expressly prohibits signatories from developing, possessing, or threatening to use nuclear weapons.
The authors warned that even a "limited" nuclear conflict involving a small fraction of the world's 13,000 nuclear weapons "could kill 120 million people outright and cause global climate disruption leading to a nuclear famine". They estimated that a full-scale nuclear war between the US and Russia would kill 5-6 billion people and trigger a global nuclear winter "threatening the survival of humanity".
Of the nine countries which currently possess nuclear weapons (China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the UK, and the US), only five are parties to the NPT (China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US). No nuclear-armed state has yet ratified the TPNW.
"The danger is great and growing," the authors concluded. "The nuclear-armed states must eliminate their nuclear arsenals before they eliminate us."
Approaching 'global catastrophe'
The warning about the growing threat of nuclear war is not the first to have been issued by scientific experts over the last few months.
Earlier this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its infamous Doomsday Clock forward by ten seconds to 90 seconds to midnight and announced that humanity is now "the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been".
The Bulletin further explained that the Clock — which had remained at 100 seconds to midnight for the previous three years — was reset closer to midnight "largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine".
In a subsequent interview with The Brussels Times, the Bulletin's CEO and President Dr Rachel Bronson highlighted the "alarming" fact that many nuclear-armed states – including the US and Russia – are currently in the process of upgrading their nuclear arsenals.
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Bronson drew attention to the fact that both the US and Russia have pulled out of crucial nuclear arms control treaties over the past two decades. In 2002, the US unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; it later also pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019 and the Open Skies Treaty in 2020.
Moreover, in February this year Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the "suspension" of his country's participation in the New Start Treaty: the last remaining bilateral nuclear weapons agreement between Russia and the US.
"When we see what's happening in Ukraine and the threats of nuclear weapons, it seems like we're back to a place where we were during the Cold War," Bronson said. "When you see how countries are investing in upgrading their nuclear arsenals, and at the same time how arms control architecture is being torn up, it is truly alarming."
