Statement: “Nuclear Disarmament in Times of Unprecedented Risk”
Five Recommendations Arising From the Roundtable
Canadians for a Nuclear Weapons Convention / Rassemblement canadien pour une convention sur les armes nucléaires
Five Recommendations Arising From the Roundtable
September 9, 2024
Ernie Regehr, who has devoted a lifetime of work to the nuclear disarmament movement in Canada, will receive the Canadians for a Nuclear Weapons Convention (CNWC) 2024 Distinguished Achievement Award.
CNWC is a civil society initiative sponsored by the Canadian Pugwash Group and endorsed by more than 1,000 recipients of the Order of Canada, who have called for Canada to work for comprehensive negotiations for the elimination of nuclear weapons. “We are proud to give this year’s Award to Ernie Regehr for his expert leadership for half a century to rid the world of nuclear weapons,” said Alex Neve O.C., CNWC Chairperson.
Regehr was the founding Executive Director of Project Ploughshares in 1976. In that post, he led a civil society movement in 1999 successfully urging the Government of Canada to use its influence to have NATO review its nuclear weapons policies. He later partnered with Dr. Jennifer Allen Simons, president of The Simons Foundation Canada, on Arctic security and Canadian defence policy issues.
His book, Disarming Conflict: Why Peace Cannot Be Won on the Battlefield, published in 2015, is an authentic study shattering the illusion that war is necessary for peace. His citation as an Officer of the Order of Canada stated: “He is one of Canada’s most prominent and respected voices on international disarmament and peace.” Additionally, he has been awarded the University of Waterloo’s 50th Anniversary Alumni Award (2007), the Arthur Kroeger College Award for Ethics in Public Affairs (2011), and the Pearson Peace Medal (2011).
Throughout his career, Regehr has modelled for his colleagues in the peace movement the importance of a respectful, open approach among themselves and in their relations with parliamentarians and officials.
The Award will be presented Oct. 24, 2024 at Regehr’s lecture, “The Arctic and the East-West Nuclear Confrontation,” sponsored by CNWC and the Centre for International Policy Studies (CIPS) at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Social Sciences Building, 120 University Private, Ottawa. The public lecture, beginning at 4 pm, will be followed by a reception.
Previous recipients of the CNWC Achievement Award are:
2011 Murray Thomson
2012 Bev Tollefson Delong
2013 Fergus Watt
2014 Adele Buckley
2015 Paul Dewar
2016 Peggy Mason
2017 Metta Spencer
2018 Debbie Grisdale
2019 Dr. Mary-Wynne Ashford and Dr. Jonathan Down
2021 Dr. Jennifer Allen Simons
2022 Paul Meyer
2023 Tariq Rauf
Contact: Elaine Hynes
CNWC Secretariat
cnwc@pugwashgroup.ca
Re Canada’s Role in Nuclear Disarmament
Letter to Bev Delong (co-ordinator), Canadian Pugwash Group, Canadians for a Nuclear Weapons Convention, Canadian Network to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and Project Ploughshares. This is a response to a letter sent to Global Afairs Canada on October 30, 2023.
Linked below is the paper entitled, “How Canada Can Regain Leadership in Nuclear Disarmament,” authored by former Senator Douglas Roche, O.C. and Tariq Rauf, former head of Verification and Security at the International Atomic Energy Agency, and published by the four leading nuclear disarmament organizations in Canada:
Canadian Pugwash Group
Canadian Network to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Canadians for a Nuclear Weapons Convention
Project Ploughshares
This paper is intended to further Canadian government action in response to the grave crisis in global nuclear arms control and disarmament.
Roche/Rauf: How Canada Can Regain Leadership in Nuclear Disarmament
Report to the Government of Canada on Special Roundtable October 23, 2023
For the first time, the four leading organizations in Canada devoted to nuclear disarmament issues — Canadian Pugwash Group, Canadian Network to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Canadians for a Nuclear Weapons Convention and Project Ploughshares — co-sponsored a single event on October 19, 2023. This extraordinary Roundtable, “Revitalizing Nuclear Disarmament After the Ukraine War,” was convened at a moment of extreme danger to the world. This is the Roundtable report to the Government of Canada.
November 6, 2023
Globe and Mail, OPINION
John Polanyi is Professor emeritus at the University of Toronto who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in chemistry. This text is adapted from remarks he gave last month at Revitalizing Nuclear Disarmament After the Ukraine War, a round-table discussion in Ottawa.
When I was a young chemist at the University of Toronto in 1961, I found myself drawn into the central debate of the age. The Globe and Mail’s pages were discussing nuclear war, asking “if war comes, would we survive?” The question is as valid today as 62 years ago, but we have learned a little in the interim.
In March, 1961, John Gellner, The Globe’s military commentator, wrote these surprising words on the defeatism that marked the mood of the time: “That humanity can survive a nuclear war, and carry on after it, has been established not by the sort of freewheeling speculation that the proponents of surrender generally indulge, but by a thorough scientific enquiry conducted by the U.S. RAND Corporation.” Basing his remarks on his reading of the 1961 RAND report, On Thermonuclear War, by Herman Kahn, Mr. Gellner went on to say, “If certain basic preparations have been made, economic recovery would be 60 per cent complete within one year of a nuclear attack launched against the U.S. in the early 1960s.” The population, he conceded, would have had to “rough it for a time, but could definitely pick themselves up.”
I responded to Mr. Gellner in the Globe of April 5, 1961, arguing that he had taken from Mr. Kahn’s book the absurdly optimistic and hazardous assumption that the victims of a nuclear attack would respond by evacuating all our sizable cities, thus (in my view) precipitating the greatest panic in history. This alarming debate in a respected newspaper did not pass unnoticed. I found myself invited to the office of the minister of foreign affairs at the time, Paul Martin Sr., in Ottawa. He seized his phone and asked to be connected to the House of Commons library. I heard the librarian explaining, apologetically, that Mr. Kahn’s book was presently unavailable since it had been borrowed by Lester Pearson, the prime minister.
My modest excursion into scientific activism had already led to an invitation to participate in a Pugwash Conference, a global disarmament meeting held in Moscow in 1960. On arrival in Moscow, I was handed a message from my host, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. He was confident, he said, that his demand for “universal and complete disarmament” would be accorded the meeting’s unanimous approval.
This was a worthy goal. I regarded it then as pie in the sky. But today I consider it the very best hope for mankind. This desired outcome, as Mr. Khrushchev stated it, was not to be achieved without incident. Two years later, the world was faced with unmistakable evidence of the secret emplacement of nuclear weapons in Cuba by the USSR. The contending nations had been plunged into what we know today as the Cuban Missile Crisis – 13 days in which the world teetered on the brink of all-out nuclear war.
What had happened to the unanimous desire for peace that Mr. Khrushchev anticipated? Had it become a casualty to the foolish complacency of the RAND report? Surely not. It derived from something more real than that. Despite the heartening embrace today by world leaders of the dictum that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” we continue to plan for nuclear war. This is the source of our peril.
It remains evident today in the sustained ambition of states to modernize every branch of nuclear weaponry, whether on land, sea or in the air. The reasoning behind this is simple; these weapons have the purpose of deterring an attack by an opponent who will then cease to be a threat. They exist, therefore, to do the thing that is avowed to be impossible, namely to win a nuclear war.
Last week, Vladimir Putin signed a law revoking Russia’s ratification of the global treaty banning nuclear testing. This is bad news, but fortunately, the 2011 New START Treaty is still in effect. Under that deal, the U.S. and Russia agreed to limit the number of nuclear warheads to 1,550. Each weapon is, however, a city-destroyer. Moreover, the accord is in the process of being weakened by pressure to increase the number of missiles to counter a rising China and to offset an increased pace of warfare anticipated in a world of AI.
For U.S. president John F. Kennedy, the possibility of the destruction of mankind was constantly on his mind. “If we err we do so not only for ourselves … but also for young people all over the world, who would have no say.”
Are we ready to assume that responsibility?