A hundred medical journals around the world, including the most prestigious, launched this Thursday, August 3, a rare joint call to act urgently to eliminate nuclear weapons, judging the threat of a nuclear catastrophe “significant and growing”.
The call comes after thinly veiled threats from Russian President Vladimir Putin over the possible use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, repeated tests of North Korean missiles and the blocking of non-proliferation initiatives.
“The danger is significant and growing,” co-write in an editorial the editors of eleven leading medical journals, including THE BMJ, THE LancetTHE JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine.
“The extreme urgency of the current nuclear crisis”
“Nuclear-weapon states must eliminate their nuclear arsenals before they eliminate us,” the editorial stresses.
“The fact that all of these leading journals have agreed to publish the same editorial highlights the extreme urgency of the current nuclear crisis,” said Chris Zielinski of the World Association of Medical Journal Editors.
This text is published the same week as a meeting, in Vienna, of the preparatory committee for a new examination of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) of the United Nations, which entered into force in 1970.
A new review – the 10th – of this key treaty, in 2022, did not result in a joint declaration and the United States blamed this failure on “cynical obstructionism” from Russia.
“Even a ‘limited’ nuclear war could kill 120 million people”
Sunday will also mark the 68th anniversary of the first use of nuclear weapons against civilians, when the United States dropped an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
Any use of nuclear weapons “would be catastrophic for humanity”, underlines the editorial. “Even a ‘limited’ nuclear war involving just 250 of the world’s 13,000 nuclear weapons could kill 120 million people and cause global climate disruption leading to nuclear starvation and the endangerment of two billion people,” according to its authors.