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Viewpoint by Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka
The writer is UN Women Executive Director. She issued this statement for International Youth Day, 2019.
NEW YORK (IDN) – Sixteen-year old Gambian Jakomba Jabbie wants to be an aerospace engineer. A vocal advocate for girls’ education, she created a robotics team at school to show that girls can also participate in the area of technology, and “to make it a space for all of us”. She knows how important education is, especially to a girl.
Viewpoint by Somar Wijayadasa*
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." – U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower in 'The Chance for Peace' address in April 1953.
NEW YORK (IDN) – The arms race has reached a new dimension as the United States President Donald Trump withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
Viewpoint by Ibrahim Thiaw
Following is the text of the response of Ibrahim Thiaw, UN Under Secretary General and Executive Secretary to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), to Special Report on Climate Change and Land by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released in Geneva on August 8.
BONN IDN) – We have known for over 25 years that poor land use and management are major drivers of climate change, but have never mustered the political will to act. With the release of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) – special report on climate change and land, which makes the consequences of inaction crystal clear, we have no excuse for further delay.
Viewpoint by James M. Dorsey
James M. Dorsey – a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, an adjunct senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture – offered this viewpoint to IDN.
SINGAPORE (IDN) – Russia, backed by China, hoping to exploit mounting doubts in the Gulf about the reliability of the United States as the region’s sole security guarantor, is proposing a radical overhaul of the security architecture in an area that is home to massive oil and gas reserves and some of the world’s most strategic waterways.
Viewpoint by Jonathan Power
LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – If MAD was Mad then the decision of President Donald Trump to renounce the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) is MADDER.
MAD is Mutually Assured Destruction, a concept which underlay the nuclear deterrence of the Cold War. Presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan began the hard work of dismantling MAD with the INF, a treaty affecting the land-based missiles of Europe. It abolished missiles with a range of 500 to 2000 kilometres.
Viewpoint by Alice Slater
Author and nuclear disarmament advocate, Alice Slater is a member of the Board of World Beyond War, UN NGO Representative of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and a longtime member of CODEPINK.
NEW YORK (IDN) – August 6 and 9 mark 74 years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where only one nuclear bomb dropped on each city caused the deaths of up to 146,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 people in Nagasaki. Today, with the U.S. decision to walk away from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force (INF) negotiated with the Soviet Union, we are once again staring into the abyss of one of the most perilous nuclear challenges since the height of the Cold War.
Viewpoint by Tariq Rauf
The writer is a Vienna-based nuclear arms control specialist, who was Head of Verification and Security Policy Coordination, Office reporting to the Director General at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 2002—2011/2012, in which capacity he was the Alternate Head of the IAEA NPT Delegation. The views expressed in this paper are purely personal.
VIENNA (IDN) – With August 6 and 9 respectively marking the 74th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no sentient human being who has met or seen the hibakusha (survivors), or visited the hypocentres in the two cities, or seen the photographic evidence of the destruction of these two Japanese cities, can avoid being shocked and horrified by the devastation that was inflicted by nuclear weapons.
Viewpoint by A.L.A. Azeez
The writer, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the UN in Geneva, is concerned about the security landscape in most regions as well as globally. He pleads for all feasible measures to resume discussions on substantive matters. Nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation are the foremost among them, he adds. The following are extensive extracts from his remarks made in his personal capacity as a member of the panel on nuclear disarmament at plenary meeting of the Conference on Disarmament on 30 July 2019 in Geneva.
Viewpoint by Gregory Kulacki
The writer researches the cross-cultural aspects of nuclear arms control negotiations between the United States, China and Japan. He is China project manager and senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The following was first published at UCS's blog on July 24, 2019.
CLAREMONT, CA, USA (IDN | UCS) – Ever since I took this job 17 years ago U.S. colleagues of all political and intellectual persuasions have been telling me that sooner or later China would alter, adjust, amend or qualify the policy that China will never, under any circumstances, use nuclear weapons first.
Viewpoint by Daryl G. Kimball
The writer is Executive Director of the Arms Control Association. The following is the text of his statement issued on August 2.
WASHINGTON, DC (IDN | Arms Control Association) – The loss of the landmark INF Treaty, which helped end the Cold War nuclear arms race, is a blow to international peace and security. Russian noncompliance with the INF Treaty is unacceptable and merits a strong response. But President Trump’s decision to terminate the treaty will not eliminate Russia’s noncompliant 9M729 missiles — and is a mistake.
