HIROSHIMA DECLARATION
OF
THE PUGWASH COUNCIL

23 July 1995


Fifty years ago, two American atomic bombs destroyed the Japanese cities of
Hiroshima and Nagasake. Those two mushroom clouds and the horrific devastation
beneath them marked the end of the most destructive war in history and, at the
same time, the beginning of a new era dominated buy the danger that global nuclear
war would wreak more havoc in six hours than World War 2 had wrought in six
years.

Civilization is fortunate to have survived the half century since 1945 with no such
nuclear war and, indeed, no further explosion of a nuclear weapon in anger. This
may have been partly the result of sensible restraint and good management, but it has
also been partly the result of good luck.

In these 50 years, the number of nations declaring themselves possessors of nuclear
weaponry increased form one to five; the number possessing them without declaring
so increased from zero to three or more; and the total number of nuclear weapons on
the planet grew to a peak of 70,000 before beginning a gradual decline.

During this period, the use of nuclear weapons was explicitly threatened occasionally,
implicitly threatened continuously, seriously contemplated more often than will ever
be admitted, and narrowly averted, more than once, by the last©minute quenching of
crises that had careered to the brink of nuclear war. A close review of this history
offers little bases for complacency that a nuclear©armed world will succeed in
refraining indefinitely from using these weapons again.

On the contrary, there can be no real safety against nuclear destruction until the
weapons themselves have been destroyed, their possession forsworn, their production
prohibited, their ingredients made inaccessible to those who might seek to evade the
prohibition. Indeed, real safety will require still more. Because the knowledge of
how to construct nuclear weapons cannot be erased from human memory, and
because, in the extremity of war, nations that previously forswore them may race to
produce them anew, it will be necessary to eliminate war itself as a means of
resolving disputes among nations.

This view may appear utopian, but to reject it is to accept not only the possibility but
the inevitability that someday, somewhere, immense numbers of people will again
perish under nuclear mushroom clouds like those that obliterated Hiroshima and
Nagasaki 50 years ago. It could be hundreds or thousands of mushroom clouds in'+p-p-p-'the mindless spasm of a large nuclear war; it could be one mushroom could here, a
few there, in scattered acts of nuclear violence committed by warring nations, or by
the factions in civil wars, or by terrorists.

Wherever, whenever, however many mushroom clouds it may be, we say such an
outcome is unacceptable and must be prevented. It can only be prevented if nuclear
weapons and, ultimately, war itself are banned from this planet.

The end of the Cold War, and the beginning of deep reductions in the huge nuclear
arsenals that the Cold War spawned, have provided an unprecedented opportunity
for the world to take further decisive steps toward achievement of these ends. The
opportunity must be seized, or it will be lost... and civilization may be lost.

In this fiftieth year after the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, therefore,
we, the Council of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, rededicate
ourselves to the goals of the Russell©Einstein Manifesto of 1955 that initiated the
Pugwash movement, that is, to the abolition of nuclear weapons and the abolition of
war. We invite all of humankind to join us in this effort.

  • Council Declaration: Dagomys (3 September 1988)
  • Council Statement (30 July 1995)
  • Council Members
  • Go to the International Pugwash Home Page

    • Related Matters:

  • Letter to J. Chirac against Nuclear Tests (20 June 1995)
  • Hans Bethe Letter (23 July 1995)

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