How to get rid of nuclear weapons.

The Vancouver Institute is famous in the world for bringing together both experts and the general public to discuss problems of great importance to all of us. The subject of my talk this evening, I think, is also of great importance to everybody. The actual theme of my lecture is HOW to get

Why should we get rid of nuclear weapons? For many people, including I guess the majority of this audience, the answer is obvious. But there are many others for whom the answer is not obvious and, among those, are the five nuclear weapons states who tenaciously cling to their nuclear arsenals. The bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the first, and so far the last, in which nuclear weapons were used in combat. But during the cold war both sides accumulated enormous arsenals of nuclear weapons. At one stage the stockpile of the United States alone was equivalent, in its destructive power, to more than one million Hiroshima bombs. I want you to ponder this for awhile. A million Hiroshimas. Enough to destroy not only our civilization but also to wipe out the human race completely. Indeed it is the characteristic of the nuclear age that for the first time in our civilization we have acquired the means to extinguish the human race in a single act.

Once again I ask you to ponder this fact. Many people have not believed it. Indeed, the scientists who worked on the bomb in the earliest days, 1939-1940, including myself, had a pretty good idea about the destructive power of the bomb. We knew about the blast effect, the heat wave, even about the radioactive fallout. But we did not for one moment imagine that however destructive it was, it could bring the human race to an end. We did not think about this because we knew that to achieve this one would need a very large number of these nuclear weapons, maybe a hundred thousand. Even in our worst scenarios we did not believe that human society would be so stupid - or so mad - as to acquire such a large number of weapons for which we could see no purpose. But as it turned out, human society was that stupid. Within a short time we had accumulated that number of nuclear weapons. On several occasions we came very close to their actual use. It is much more by good luck than by good management that we have so far been able to avoid this ultimate catastrophe.