Lecture given by the Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee
Francis Sejersted
Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee
10 December 1995, Oslo, Norway
J OSEPH Rotblat, the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, Your Majesties, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, Our world has for fifty years now been living in the knowledge that weapons exist powerful enough to wipe out human life on earth. The atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki meant the end of the Second World War, but also changed man's relation to his surroundings. Man's creature, his liberating technology, turned against him. The huge threat was clear enough for anyone to see who could bear to look. Indeed the United Nations' first resolution, unanimously adopted by the General Assembly on the 24th of January 1946, concerned the establishment of a commission to propose the elimination of nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction. It may be worth reminding one another of the fact that nuclear weapons have been used in war, admittedly in an extreme situation, but not by an irrational despot or under the naive illusion of their relative innocence. Extreme situations may arise again. What guarantee is there that nuclear weapons will not be used again? In the short term, the risk can be lessened by reducing nuclear arsenals. But the longer-term aim must be to destroy all such weapons, as the United Nations argued in 1946. Since we have no way of banning knowledge concerning nuclear weapons, the only guarantee that they will never be used is, in the last analysis, probably a world without war. | |
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