Peace petition tops one million; goes to UN

On April 12, the IPPNW petition to reject war and nuclear weapons was delivered at United Nations Headquarters in New York.  Launched by 16 Nobel Peace Prize Laureates and so far joined by 1,061,000 citizens worldwide, the open letter calls for “an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of all Russian military forces from Ukraine, and for all possible efforts at dialogue to prevent this ultimate disaster,” and further calls “on Russia and NATO to explicitly renounce any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict, and … call[s] on all countries to support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) to ensure that we never again face a similar moment of nuclear danger.”

Ms. Izumi Nakamitsu, Undersecretary General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs and Mr. Ioan Tudro, Chief of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Branch for Disarmament Affairs, welcomed the initiative at a meeting with representatives of WILPF, IPPNW and Avaaz.

The petition is a contribution to our collective efforts to expose how the the threatened use of nuclear weapons has been used to enable the Russian invasion of Ukraine; to prevent the escalation of this conflict to nuclear war, whether by accident or design;; and to contribute to public and diplomatic support for the TPNW.

We encourage those of you who are from NATO states to deliver the open letter to your foreign ministry, calling on them to support a no-use declaration by NATO to prevent what is already an unmitigated humanitarian disaster from going nuclear.  We must make the unthinkable undoable.