By a vote of 136 to 3, the United Nations General Assembly, in December 2024, called for a new study to update established facts regarding the catastrophic large-scale, long-term human, environmental, ecological, economic, and societal impacts of nuclear weapons attacks. Then on May 26, the UN’s World Health Assembly (WHA) meeting in Geneva adopted a resolution directing the World Health Organization (WHO) to establish an independent scientific panel on the effects of nuclear war to examine “the physical effects and societal consequences of a nuclear war on a local, regional and planetary scale.”
The WHA resolution passed 86-14, with 28 abstentions. Britain’s UN delegate, reportedly speaking on behalf of 16 European member states, urged rejection of the resolution, saying, “No update to existing WHO studies could materially alter [the] established understanding of the devastation of nuclear war.”
In March 2020, the International Committee of the Red Cross convened an expert meeting on the impacts and risks of exploding nuclear weapons.
(See: https://www.icrc.org/en/document/humanitarian-impacts-and-risks-use-nuclear-weapons.) And earlier, three major intergovernmental conferences, convened in Oslo in March 2013, in Nayarit, Mexico in February 2014, and in Vienna in December 2014, produced comprehensive documentation of the devastating consequences of nuclear weapons detonations. (Key documents are here: https://peaceandhealthblog.com/hinw/) These findings were also snubbed by the world’s nuclear powers.
— Health Policy Watch, “WHO Mandated to Update of 30-Year-Old Review on Health Impacts of Nuclear War,” May 26, 2025; Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, “UN Approves Global Study of Nuclear War,” Jan. 23, 2025
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