Back from the Brink: How to address the growing danger of nuclear war efforts to change international and US policy.

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Event Description

Six years ago, former Defense Secretary William Perry warned us that we were closer to nuclear war than we have ever been before—and that was before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Nuclear war seems once again a possibility. However, despite policy shifts after the Cold War, nuclear weapons have remained an existential threat to life on this planet. Today, there are nine nuclear armed countries, and it is not a question of if, but when, nuclear weapons might be used. We must consider the actual catastrophic impacts of even a limited engagement with nuclear weapons will have on the health of people and the planet. Nobel Peace Prize winter, Dr. Ira Helfand, has worked for decades as a member of organizations that seek to shift international policy around nuclear weapons to warn us of the dangers of even limited nuclear arsenals. In this talk, he will reflect on the impacts of nuclear engagement, the international policy victories that have led to limited disarmament, and what we can do to avert an issue that remains an existential threat. 

More about Dr. Ira Helfand

Ira Helfand, MD is a member of the International Steering Group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. He is past President of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), (the founding partner of ICAN) and itself the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. He is also co-Founder and Past President of Physicians for Social Responsibility, IPPNW’s US affiliate, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Back from the Brink campaign. In 2023 he received the Gandhi King Ikeda Award from the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College. 

He has published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, the British Medical Journal and the World Medical Journal on the medial consequences of nuclear war and has lectured about nuclear war in Russia, China, Japan, Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel, Turkey, Brazil, Mexico, Columbia, and across Europe and North America.  He spoke at the 2013 and 2014 International Conferences on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons. He chaired the session on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons at the UN Open Ended Working Group in 2016 that lead to the negotiation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons the following year.  Dr. Helfand was educated at Harvard College and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and recently retired as staff physician at Family Care Medical Center.  He lives with his wife, Deborah Smith, a medical oncologist, in Leeds, MA, USA, and has two grown sons and two grandchildren.