Back from the Brink

As an emergency medicine and family care physician, I've dedicated my professional life to helping my patients and my volunteer life to protecting humankind from the existential threat of nuclear war.

I serve on the steering group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, and am co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the founding partner organization of ICAN and itself the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize  I co-founded Physicians for Social Responsibility, IPPNW's US affiliate.

I authored the report “Nuclear Famine: Two Billion at Risk?,” a study of the global consequences of limited nuclear war that was central to ICAN’s campaign for the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

In the US, my focus is bringing US nuclear policy in line with the TPNW through the “Back from the Brink” campaign.

The world is closer to nuclear war than it has ever been. Building on our success in securing the adoption of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in 2017, we need to secure ratification of the Treaty by at least 50 nations so that it enters into force, which we are very close to accomplishing. And we need to create a similar groundswell of public pressure in the US for a fundamental change in US nuclear policy that leads to negotiations among all nine nuclear-armed states for a verifiable, enforceable timetable to eliminate their nuclear arsenals. Only by eliminating these weapons, will we free humanity from the impending threat of a nuclear apocalypse.

Experts such as former Defense Secretary William Perry and the advisory board at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists are warning that we are closer to nuclear war than we have ever been.  Recent studies in which I participated have shown that even a limited nuclear war, as might occur between India and Pakistan, and which would involve less than 1% of the world’s nuclear weapons, could kill 75 to 125 million people in the first week and cause enough climate disruption to trigger a global famine that would put two billion people at risk. A large scale war between the US and Russia could kill hundreds of millions in an afternoon and trigger a nuclear winter that would kill most of humanity.  Massive new spending on nuclear arms is exacerbating the existing threat of thousands of nuclear weapons on 24-hour hair trigger alert.  This is quite simply the greatest problem facing the world today.

Back from the Brink is a campaign to mobilize public support for the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to bring about a fundamental change in US nuclear policy away from a reliance on nuclear deterrence to a new understanding that security requires the elimination of nuclear weapons.  Modeled in part on the enormously successful Nuclear Freeze Campaign of the 1980’s, it is organized around a 5 plank platform: 

1) Adopt a “no first use” policy

2) Take US nuclear weapons off high alert

3) End the unchecked authority of any President to launch nuclear war

4) Abandon plans to spend over $1 trillion over the next 30 years to enhance our nuclear arsenal.

5) Begin now negotiations for a verifiable agreement among nuclear-armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals

The campaign seeks to build support for this policy change by getting faith communities, scientific organizations, medical and other professional associations, civic groups, labor unions, town meetings, city councils, and state legislatures to endorse these policies and join this campaign.

I believe that BfTB serves all of humanity; the nuclear war we seek to prevent would be catastrophic for the entire planet.

It's sometimes difficult to appreciate the imminence of the nuclear threat—nuclear weapons have not been used against a city in nearly 75 years.  And our power of denial is very strong.  We simply cannot believe that this beautiful world could be destroyed—today or tomorrow.  But as the pandemic has shown us, when the experts warn us about an impending disaster, we must take them seriously.  The experts are telling us that if we don’t take action it is only a question of “when” not “if” we have a nuclear war. The prevention of nuclear war through the elimination of all nuclear weapons is necessary to protect us all, regardless of geography or ideology, and to preserve this world for future generations. And we will succeed in eliminating these weapons only by mobilizing large sections of civil society, as ICAN has successfully done and BftB has begun to do here in the US.  

BftB can empower ordinary people to mobilize their communities to address the greatest threat to humanity, which our political leaders have thus far failed to confront.

All of humanity will suffer in the event of nuclear, especially the most marginalized.

The campaign is primarily designed to educate the public and generate grassroots activity to create the political will necessary to prevent nuclear war, in the same way that our organizations successfully mobilized civil society to halt the Cold War nuclear arms race.

If we are successful, we can bring the nuclear-armed states together, as we brought the US and the Soviet Union together a generation ago, and create the trust and cooperation needed to address the climate crisis and the other urgent problems facing humanity.

When the historic Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was adopted by vote a vote of 122 States in favor (with one vote against and one abstention) at the United Nations in the summer of 2017, I began to think about the next step—how would we move the nuclear armed states, who were not involved in the negotiations for the Treaty, to actually eliminate their weapons.  That September at a conference on the relationship between climate change and nuclear war in western Massachusetts, I floated the idea of a campaign, inspired by ICAN and modeled in part on the 1980’s Freeze Campaign.  The idea was greeted with great enthusiasm. We launched the campaign locally and it quickly spread into a national movement.  We now have some 300 organizations, 40 municipalities, and six state legislative bodies on board—all without any funding budget or paid staff. 

I grew up in a Jewish family right after the Holocaust, and I was taught from childhood that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is the silence of good people.  The looming threat of nuclear war is the greatest evil humanity has ever faced, and I believe that if we do not eliminate these weapons, this ultimate calamity will befall us.  I also believe, with equal passion, that this is not the future that must be.  Nuclear weapons are not a force of nature.  They are little machines that we have built with our own hands and which we know how to dismantle. We can prevent nuclear war.  The question is, will we?  Should we fail, our children, if any of them survive, will not judge us kindly.

I have been a principle spokesperson about the medical effects of nuclear war for several decades, representing ICAN at the International Conferences on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons in Oslo and Najarit, Mexico in 2013 and 2014, and chairing the session on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons at the UN Open Ended Working Group meetings in Geneva in 2016.  I also addressed a special session of the UN General Assembly that year.  These historic gatherings were the first time that governments had ever met to consider the health impacts of nuclear weapons.  It was this humanitarian focus, setting aside the usual narrow national political debates that have stymied progress for decades, that lead to the negotiation and adoption of the TPNW. I have carried our message to medical, government, student, religious and general audiences in 29 countries on five continents rallying support for IPPNW, ICAN and PSR’s previous campaigns to end the Cold War arms race and to bring about the TPNW. 

With the end of the Cold War, people began to ignore the issue of nuclear war. Membership in PSR, here in the US, fell from nearly 50,000 to about one tenth that number.  For nearly twenty years, those of us who still understood the enormous threat posed by these weapons had to find ways to keep this issue alive. During this time, I continued to lecture frequently and write about emerging concerns related to nuclear weapons. In 1998, I co-authored a study in the New England Journal of Medicine on accidental nuclear war and in 2002 a British Medical Journal article on nuclear terrorism. Later that year I co-authored a study on the medical effects of a possible nuclear war between the US and Russia in the post-Cold War context. The efforts enabled us to maintain a movement that was able to blossom into the International Campaign to Abolition Nuclear Weapons about 12 years ago. ICAN is now comprised of 570 partner organizations in 103 countries.  

Doing this work has been an incredibly humbling experience. I have listened to the stories of the atomic bomb survivors and of mothers who lost children to leukemia from the radioactive fallout from atmospheric testing.  And I have tried to give voice to potential future victims by describing what the medical community knows will happen if these weapons are used again.

At the 2014 World Summit of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, the Dalai Lama approached me after my talk about nuclear war.  “You scared me!,” he said.  Absent was his usual whimsical grin.  “Um, that is my job, Your Holiness,” I managed to reply. Later that day, when the Laureates were debating a final summit statement, the Dalai Lama rose again and, pointing to me, said loudly, “that man (he didn’t know my name)…he scared me…we must have a much stronger statement on nuclear weapons!”  And the Summit issued a ringing endorsement of the process then underway to negotiate the TPNW.

I believe that I have become an effective voice sounding the alarm about what awaits us if we do not eliminate nuclear weapons and would greatly appreciate any support getting that message to as large an audience as possible. 

Back from the Brink is a national coalition-building campaign to bring the US into negotiations with the other nuclear-armed states and to join the global Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).  The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) serves as the umbrella organization that brings together IPPNW’s US affiliate, Physicians for Social Responsibility, other grassroots organizations, and the ongoing work of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons to promote entry into force of the TPNW.  IPPNW, with 58 national affiliates worldwide, has a small staff headquartered in Malden, Massachusetts and is a 501(c)3 organization.

Our message about the medical consequences of nuclear war has shown a unique power to focus people’s attention on this existential threat and to shift the public conversation about nuclear weapons away from fallacious theories of the stability of a nuclear armed world to a more accurate understanding of the urgent need to eliminate these weapons.  This medical message was at the heart of the three inter-governmental conferences on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, which we helped organize in 2013 and 2014.  The conferences and the follow up meetings at the UN re-framed the international debate about nuclear policy and led to the successful negotiation and adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. 

Our work is based on the belief that if leaders understand the true danger posed by nuclear weapons they will understand the need to eliminate them, and that if the general public shares this understanding they will pressure their leaders to act.

In the 1980’s this approach worked well and its success was recognized by the Nobel Committee which awarded us the 1985 Peace Prize, stating, “It is the committee's opinion that this organization has performed a considerable service to mankind by spreading authoritative information and by creating an awareness of the catastrophic consequences of atomic warfare.”  The value of this approach was also recognized by Mikhail Gorbachev who said, “Their work commands great respect.  For what they say and what they do is prompted by accurate knowledge and a passionate desire to warm humanity about the danger looming over it. In light of their arguments and the strictly scientific data they possess, there seems to be no room left for politicking. And no serious politician has the right to disregard their conclusions.”

Today, there is a terrible ignorance about the nuclear danger.  Those who have come of age since the end of the Cold War never really learned about this issue and those who did live through that era have largely put this issue out of mind.

Back from the Brink, and the related work to assure that the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons enters into force, will conduct an educational campaign inspired by the successful work of the 1980’s but using the communication tools available to us today, to recreate an understanding of the danger of nuclear war and the need to eliminate nuclear weapons. 

Remembering that the Cold War nuclear arms race was stopped and reversed in a matter of 5 years, we believe that the TPNW can enter into force in the next year and that rapid progress can be made to achieve adoption of the 5 planks in the BftB platform by the United States, leading to the initiation of negotiations for the final elimination of nuclear weapons.

Not really applicable—this is not a service project.  Preventing nuclear war and eliminating nuclear weapons in a global humanitarian imperative.  

We hope to see the TPNW enter into force within a year and the adoption of the entire BftB platform, and the commencement of negotiations among all 9 nuclear armed states for a verifiable, enforceable, time-bound agreement to dismantle their remaining nuclear weapons, within 5 years.

We have the message, but it is competing with a range of other critically important concerns which all demand the attention of government leaders and the public. We need to train more messengers and create venues for getting our message out to a much broader audience and to get the attention of government officials who are not attending to this existential danger.

Traditional news media have been slow to understand the current nuclear danger—we need to educate them so that they can help disseminate this information to their readers/listeners/viewers.  Popular culture—especially TV and the movies—once played a critical role in disseminating our message (“The Day After”, “War Games”, etc).  We have to reach the creative talents in the entertainment industry to engage them again on this issue.  We have to devise a strategy to tap the enormous potential of social media to spread this information.

We are working with an extensive civil society network in ICAN that is educating national governments about need to sign and ratify the TPNW, and a diverse network in the Back from the Brink campaign that is educating local governments, state legislatures, and additional elements of civil society in the US to secure endorsements for the BftB platform, and with members of Congress and potential members of a new administration to secure their support for this policy prescription. We need to expand this outreach to government leaders

Further, we have not had, and hope to acquire, the ability to hire staff to work with our physician volunteers to coordinate outreach to the news and entertainment media and to create a social media campaign. 

There are currently some 550 partner organizations in ICAN and over 350 groups have joined the Back from the Brink campaign. The full list can be accessed at our respective web sites, www.icanw.org and www.PreventNuclearWar.org.  We also have worked closely on a number of initiatives with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the World Medical Association, the World Federation of Public Health Associations, the International Council of Nurses, and the International Federation of Medical Students Association.

Not really applicable to our project.

Our work is funded by individual donations from long time supporters.  We also receive some very modest foundation support.  To expand this campaign we hope to attract increased foundation support and are also partnering with a number of leaders in the business and finance community to identify potential major donors. 

As noted above, the Back from the Brink campaign has achieved its current level of success with no full time staff or budget.  We received a $30,000 grant in 2019 and 2020 from the Olum Foundation and $30,000 in each of these years from an individual donor (me) to help enable staff at some of our key partner organizations to work on the campaign.

We are seeking to identify other potential donors and Foundations and are working with the ICV Group to identify possible corporate supporters for this campaign.  

We have developed an aspirational budget showing how we would expand the campaign if we are able to raise additional funds.  If we are able to raise $500,000 we would be able to hire three full time organizers and establish a national clearing house for the BFTB campaign, and to hire two additional staff in the IPPNW office to work on securing entry into force of the TPNW.  If we are able to raise an additional $2 million we could place 2 full time organizers with 10 or our key partner organizations to mobilize their established networks around the campaign. Additional funds beyond that would enable us to hire media and social media consultants to design an effective outreach campaign.

I am applying for the Elevate Prize out of a moral and professional duty to do everything within my power to prevent nuclear war, the greatest immediate threat to human health and survival.  Despite our lack of funding and limited expertise in digital media and marketing, our focus on the medical and humanitarian consequences of these weapons has proven to be effective at breaking through the political and diplomatic logjams that obstruct progress in reducing the dangers. The infusion of funding, media and marketing support, professional services and networking connections offered by the Elevate Prize would be a true game changer, allowing us to scale up our efforts to create the kind of awareness and action that is needed to change US nuclear policy and bring about a new agreement among the nuclear-armed nations for a verifiable, enforceable time bound agreement to dismantle all nuclear weapons.

The success of our work depends upon expanding our partnerships at every level.  Our core expertise is the medical and public health consequences of nuclear weapons, which must be coupled with staff, volunteers and partners that have expertise in all other aspects of effective campaigning:  fundraising, management, media and marketing (especially digital and social media), and networking.  

We have been developing a relationships with Rotarians around the world, seeking to formally involve Rotary International in the campaign.  With some 1.2 million members world, RI is enormously influential.  We have been working most closely with the leadership of the Rotarian Action Group for Peace.  Mostly recently we secured the participation of the current RI President in an upcoming webinar we are organizing on the nuclear threat. 

We also need to build stronger common cause with the larger social justice communities in the US and abroad.  The disarmament community has taken strides in recent years in advocating for equal participation regardless of gender identities or sexual orientations, and in recognizing gendered impacts of weapons.  More needs to be done in this area, as well as in ensuring greater representation of BIPOC and addressing the health, social and economic impacts of the nuclear arms race on these communities.