Editor’s note: Talia Wilcox is a staff writer at the Daily. Wilcox was not involved in the writing or editing of this article.
Tufts University Nuclear Activists held a Nov. 14 speaker event with Dr. Ira Helfand, a renowned nuclear disarmament activist who discussed his position on nuclear weapons and why students should join the movement against them. This was the first solo event hosted by TUNA, a new club that is currently in the process of obtaining official recognition from the university.
“Nuclear war is not primarily a military question or a political question or a diplomatic question. It’s primarily a public health question,” Helfand told the Daily. “This is the greatest threat to public health that’s ever existed, and health professionals have a particular responsibility, therefore, to point out the dimensions of this threat, what’s going to happen [and] what the medical consequences of nuclear war would be.”
Helfand is a member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. He is also the co-founder and past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and the former president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.
Helfand opened the discussion by listing the three main points he wanted to deliver to students.
“The first is that nuclear war really can happen. The second is that if [nuclear war] does happen, it’s going to be worse than you could possibly imagine. And the third is [nuclear war] doesn’t have to [happen],” he said.
Helfand stressed that not only is nuclear war possible, but it is more of a threat now than it has ever been before.
“Starting about six years ago, in 2018, experts like William Perry, who was secretary of defense in the 1990s, started warning us that we are closer to nuclear war today than we have ever been, closer than at the worst moments of the Cold War — and this was before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has increased that danger dramatically,” he explained.
In order to mitigate the ongoing threat of nuclear war, Helfand works as a part of ICAN to persuade governments to ratify the U.N. Treaty of Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Adopted in 2017, the treaty prohibits signatory countries from engaging in any activities involving nuclear weapons, including development, testing and possession. So far, the treaty has been ratified by 73 countries and signed by 94.
However, none of the nine countries that possess nuclear weapons — Russia, the U.S., China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea — have signed the treaty.
“The weakness of the treaty to date is that none of the nine countries which have these weapons has bought into this process. That’s really what our focus has to be: changing the behavior of those countries, and in particular, for those of us who live in the United States, it’s changing the behavior of the U.S. government,” Helfand said.
In 2019, ICAN backed the first U.S. congressional resolution to request that the U.S. government adopt the nuclear weapons ban.
“[The resolution has] 45 cosponsors. … We will have to introduce a new resolution to [the] new Congress. The groundwork has already been laid for that,” Helfand said, referencing the incoming majority Republican Congress.
Helfand said that the main challenge of the universal disarmament movement is not whether countries can give up their nuclear power, but rather whether they will want to.
“We have dismantled, at this point in time, already over 50,000 of these weapons. We know exactly how to do it. We know exactly how to take apart the 12,000 that remain,” Helfand said. “What has been missing is the political will to do that, and that’s where we come in, because we have to create that political will.”
TUNA Co-President Talia Wilcox, a senior, first became involved in the disarmament cause about a year ago after learning more about nuclear weapons while pursuing an international security concentration as an international relations major. Now, she is on the national board of Students for Nuclear Disarmament, an international, non-partisan coalition of students that spreads awareness about the dangers of nuclear weapons.
“Through school work, I’ve really seen the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons and how unethical [and] immoral [they are], and how the world is not safer with them. I come from an advocacy background, and I really was determined to make a difference,” Wilcox told the Daily.
Wilcox believes that students can have an impact on disarmament, as students were one of the driving forces behind the Nuclear Freeze Movement during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
“Ronald Reagan wanted to fight a nuclear war … and the Nuclear Freeze Movement actually changed his mind, and that’s when he said, ‘A nuclear war can never be never be won and must never be fought.’ So when I first got into the topic, I was really moved by how much students truly had an impact,” Wilcox shared.
Helfand’s speech was impactful for Wilcox. Her key takeaway was that, while many tend to shy away from discussing nuclear weapons out of fear, people cannot afford to not make the effort to fight for disarmament.
“There is a chance that North Korea would say no [to disarmament], but there is a chance they would say yes, and you could never know that unless you give your effort in this,” she said. “There’s nothing to lose, there’s only gain, and I think that can really motivate people in this issue.”
