2023-08-02 22:51:05
Medical journals
Common call once morest a “growing” nuclear threat
About 100 medical journals around the world, including the most prestigious, issued a rare call on Thursday for urgent action to eliminate nuclear weapons.
Updated3 August 2023, 00:51
A simulated North Korean nuclear attack on March 19, 2023.
The call comes following 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,” the editors of 11 leading medical journals, including the BMJ, Lancet, JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine, co-wrote in an editorial. “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.
New review of the NPT
This text is published the same week as a meeting, in Vienna, of the preparatory committee for a new review 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, had failed to produce a joint declaration and the United States blamed the failure on “cynical obstructionism” by Russia.
Sunday will also mark the 68th anniversary of the first use of nuclear weapons once morest 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 might kill 120 million people and cause global climate disruption leading to nuclear starvation and the endangerment of two billion people,” according to its authors.
(AFP)Show comments
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