Authors of the Open Letter, signed by over 1,200 distinguished and deeply committed persons, that went to Presidents Putin and Biden prior to their meeting yesterday have welcomed the reaffirmation of the Reagan-Gorbachev statement of 1985 that ‘A Nuclear war Cannot be Won and Must Never be Fought’, and the promise of ongoing talks on ‘strategic stability’.
The Reagan-Gorbachev statement along with the principle of No First Use of nuclear weapons, was central to that letter.
The letter’s authors noted that:
” We are pleased that the two presidents did address the dangers and risks of nuclear war at today’s summit, as we and several peace groups urged in an unprecedented number of voices before the summit. We are gratified that the two re-affirmed the words of 40 years ago that we cited in our Open Letter: “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”. *
The talks on ‘strategic stability’ will hopefully take the world ‘back from the brink’, where it has been hovering with the Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight (i.e., nuclear war) for far too long.
We look forward to the promised joint talks, hoping that they will begin soon and will have as their overriding goal to bring about a world without nuclear weapons. We urge that the first concrete step to reduce the risk of accidental war be the mutual adoption of No First Use policies, i.e., a “joint commitment that [the United States and Russia] will not use nuclear weapons first under any circumstances.”
In pursuing these promised talks, negotiators must bear in mind that the consequences of large-scale use of nuclear weapons are likely to include the abrupt termination of what we call ‘civilization‘, and may render the planet uninhabitable for humans (and most other species) for decades. Human survival itself might become problematic. This very perspective is what the Reagan-Gorbachev Joint Statement had in mind. This is often lost sight of in discussions and negotiations about ‘strategic stability’.
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