On May 13 The British Medical Journal and 133 other health and medical periodicals published a joint editorial confronting the leaders of nuclear weapons states, warning them that detonating a mere fraction of their nuclear arsenals could cause global famine and a mass extinction. The appeal further decried the fact that the group’s similar joint editorial in 2023 had been ignored. Some excerpts from the more recent appeal follow (with British spelling intact).
Two relatively small (by today’s standards) nuclear weapons unleashed a cataclysm of radioactive incineration on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the end of 1945, about 213,000 people were dead. Tens of thousands more have died from late effects of the bombings. …
In the words of [Nobel Prize] Committee Chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes, “It is naive to believe our civilisation can survive a world order in which global security depends on nuclear weapons. The world is not meant to be a prison in which we await collective annihilation.”
[There is] compelling evidence of the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war, its severe global climatic and famine consequences, and the impossibility of any effective humanitarian response.
Even a fraction of the current arsenal could decimate the biosphere in a severe mass extinction event. The global climate disruption caused by the smoke pouring from cities ignited by just 2% of the current arsenal could result in over two billion people starving.
Our joint editorial in 2023 … urged three immediate steps by nuclear armed states and their allies: adopt a “no first use” policy, take their nuclear weapons off hair trigger alert, and pledge unequivocally that they will not use nuclear weapons in any current conflicts they are involved in. It is an alarming failure of leadership that no progress has been made on these needed measures….
— The complete text is here: BMJ, 389 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.r881
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