There is a rational, multilateral alternative to the madness of war
April 2, 2026By Melissa Parke
Many years ago, I worked in Gaza for the United Nations – with UNRWA, the UN agency for the Palestinian refugees.
One evening in August 2002, I vividly recall a ceremony commemorating the catastrophe of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For the event, hundreds of Palestinian children had made little paper boats with candles in them. They carefully lit the candles and set them afloat in the harbour. It was extremely beautiful but also very moving to think that here were children – themselves being bombed on a regular basis – remembering children in another time and place who had been bombed.
More than 20 years later, as the new Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), I visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the first time. When I met the survivors of the atomic bombings – the hibakusha, elderly people all in their 80s and 90s – I realized that these were in fact the survivors being remembered by the children of Gaza many years earlier.
Some of these hibakusha were participating in nightly rallies in support of the children of Gaza. They did this because they could see how these issues are linked – it is the same ways of thinking that justify nuclear weapons as justify the committing and facilitating of genocide.
It is the same ways of thinking that consider Indigenous and colonized peoples expendable in their quest to test bigger bombs to destroy more lives – the same disregard for international law when not convenient.
The children of Gaza and the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, now elderly survivors, understood that ultimately we are all connected across space and time – that what we do to each other and to the planet, we ultimately do to ourselves.
Last year we commemorated the 80th anniversaries of the invention and first uses of nuclear weapons. These were not some isolated historical events of 80 years ago with little relevance to today, but the start of 80 years of catastrophic, indiscriminate, widespread, ongoing harm to people and the environment.
The message from the survivors of nuclear use and testing is that nuclear justice and true human security can only come by eliminating these inhumane weapons.
What happened more than 80 years ago also marked the beginning of an existential threat to humanity. The story perpetuated by nuclear armed states and their allies that nuclear weapons keep the world safe through deterrence is a grotesque and dangerous lie, as every person harmed by nuclear weapons can attest and as the current major wars – started by nuclear armed states – demonstrate so chillingly.
In these troubled times, with more conflicts in the world today than at any other time since World War II, it can seem as if things are dark and hopeless.
But it is often during times of great uncertainty that there is also great opportunity. Today there is an opportunity for people of conscience to come together – to show that brute force is not strength, that there is light among the shadows.
The ICAN global movement to eliminate nuclear weapons – made up of more than 700 organizations in more than 110 countries – is powerful because it is based on lived human experience.
Because of courageous voices of people at the frontlines across the globe, we now have a Treaty in the UN that bans nuclear weapons and provides a pathway under international law for nuclear armed states to disarm in a timebound verifiable manner.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) is democratising the debate around nuclear weapons – taking it out of the hands of the UN Security Council P-5 and into the UN General Assembly where every country has an equal vote.
The TPNW is the first international treaty that acknowledges the disproportionate harm caused by nuclear weapons to women and girls, and to indigenous peoples, and it is the first international framework to support communities and environments harmed by nuclear weapons.
So far, more than half the world’s governments have joined the Treaty and more are joining in the near future. This November in New York will see the first Review Conference of the TPNW, with South Africa as the President.
We must all now urgently spread the word to the public and to political leaders that there is a rational, multilateral alternative to the madness of war. Our appeal is as simple as it is urgent: we must urge them to support the TPNW and get other countries to join. There is more information on how you can help on ICAN’s website at: icanw.org
To continue to devote our finest minds and greatest resources to the art of mass killing is to inflict a profound moral injury and to betray the spiritual inheritance of humankind. Thus, disarmament is not just a political and technical process. It is an act of collective spiritual awakening.
The writer is the Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). In 2017, ICAN was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.”