An Interview With Ira Helfand, 1985 Nobel Peace Prize Winner: The Risks of Nuclear War in Today’s Fraught Geopolitical Climate

Ira Helfand, M.D. Image courtesy of Campaign Nonviolence.

With Russia recently conducting tactical nuclear weapons drills, global spending on nuclear weapons up 13%, and the end of the Russo-Ukrainian War nowhere in sight, Dr. Ira Helfand’s work advocating for nuclear disarmament is more relevant than ever. Because of this, I wished to understand the risks of nuclear war in today’s conflicts from his perspective. We met for an interview via video call on Monday, 3 June.

Helfand is a member of the International Steering Group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, as well as the past president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), which is the founding partner of ICAN and the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. He is additionally the co-founder and past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

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1. How can we reconcile what we know about Putin’s leadership style with remaining optimistic that there’s still a chance Russia concedes to denuclearisation?

I think first of all, I need to make clear, I’m not optimistic, and there’s certainly no guarantee that Russia will do the right thing in this situation. But there’s also no reason to assume that they won’t agree. There’s nothing to lose by reaching out to them and trying, so we should do that, because there’s everything to lose by continuing on the course that we’re on currently. 

I think that the path to an agreement with Moscow lies through Beijing. I think our primary focus at this point needs to be reaching out to the Chinese. Russia has become enormously dependent on China at this point. I think the Chinese have enormous ability to influence Russian decision making. The U.S. and China are also on something of a collision course that could result in nuclear war, so it’s imperative that that dynamic be addressed. 

2. Have there been any recent discussions with China or any other political leaders about denuclearisation? And do they seem amenable? I imagine you’re doing this work through the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). 

Actually ICAN does not have a presence in China, unfortunately. The civil society is extremely curtailed in Xi’s China today. There is a tiny International Physicians Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) affiliate in China, but it’s basically a division of the Chinese medical society. It’s completely controlled by the Chinese government, and it’s not an independent civil society organization. 

The Chinese did propose earlier this year, I think it was in February, that the nine countries which have nuclear weapons sit down and negotiate a treaty under which they would all promise not to use nuclear weapons first. The United States unfortunately rejected this offer. 

China has historically tended to be less aggressive with regards to nuclear weapons. It’s maintained a nuclear force of about 300 or 400 warheads for quite some time now, and had not chosen to go above that number until recently. That was only about a tenth or less of what the U.S. had or what Russia had. Now, for reasons which aren’t completely clear, the Chinese have abandoned that policy. As U.S.-Chinese tensions increase, they now appear to be committed to increasing their nuclear arsenal to perhaps a thousand more heads. A very unfortunate development. They’re moving in the wrong direction. 

3. Have there been any developments with the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) recently? 

Yeah, there’s a slow process of additions in both the signatory and ratification category. We still have not really taken the next step, which is to get either a nuclear armed state to sign the treaty or a state that lives under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, either NATO or Australia, South Korea, Japan — countries which have an explicit nuclear reliance with the United States. That really would be the key next step. In a couple of European countries, the Parliament has instructed the government to pursue signing onto the treaty, but the government has not done what the Parliament asked them to. 

So we’ve still not progressed beyond that point yet with regards to the TPNW. And it’s part of the why here in the United States, the Back From the Brink campaign is not focusing on getting the U.S. to sign and ratify the treaty, which we think is a complete non-starter. The U.S. is not going to do that unilaterally. The campaign has instead focused on this call for the United States to provide leadership to a multilateral effort to work out the details that would enable all nine of the nuclear weapons states to dismantle their arsenals and jointly join the TPNW. Because none of them are likely to do it unless the others do. 

4. Are most of the difficulties that ICAN or the other related organisations run into mostly bureaucratic, or it is more hesitance on the part of the governments, or a combination? 

It’s a combination. It’s just a question of not prioritising this enough. They’re not opposed to the treaty, they have voted in favour of it, but they just haven’t bothered to go through the signing and ratifying process. Then there’s these other countries which didn’t vote for the treaty. And in them it’s much more of a substantive political question. The countries that have nuclear weapons all say that they’re not going to sign it because they’re not willing to disarm unless everybody else does. And the countries in NATO say that because they’re in NATO, they can’t sign, which isn’t true. They can, but it’s largely the same reason. They don’t want to break ranks with United States, the U.K. and France. So depending on the country, there are different mechanisms that are resulting in failure to ratify. 

5. When addressing the Italian Parliament recently, you briefly touched on “the harm that has already been done by the nuclear enterprise,” particularly “the victims of testing, the victims of uranium mining,” and the treaty talks about how nuclear-weapon activities disproportionately impact marginalised peoples. Could you elaborate on that? 

It is a very complicated enterprise that involves mining, uranium, refining uranium, making nuclear warheads, testing the warheads. And at each step along that process, there are many people who are exposed to harmful levels of radiation. An enormously high percentage of them have gone on to develop either lung cancer or other forms of lung disease as a result of their radiation exposures. It’s a subset of the nuclear danger. We need to take appropriate measures to try to rectify that by at least providing them with adequate healthcare. 

Here in the United States, there’s something called RECA, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which provides medical care to people who are exposed to radiation. The law clearly defines which people are eligible, and the definition is drawn too narrowly, so members of communities that were exposed are not included in the plan. So the Senate, in a significantly bipartisan effort, passed an extension and expansion of RECA, and it’s sitting in the House where the House Speaker is blocking it coming to a floor vote where it would almost certainly pass.

6. Since I’m assuming that governments are fully aware of the colossal dangers of nuclear war, why have so many continued to invest so much into building new nuclear weapons and modernising existing ones? Does it have something to do with nuclear deterrence? What are your thoughts? 

That is a central question. First of all, many government leaders do not understand what’s going to happen if there’s a nuclear war, which is shocking, but it’s true. It’s our experience whenever we talk to leadership that they are sometimes intellectually unaware of what’s going to happen. They’re almost always viscerally unaware of what’s going to happen. The distinction I’m trying to draw there is that people can know in a very abstract way that nuclear war will be terrible, but do they really know what it’s going to look like? No. 

Nuclear weapons don’t make us safe, but they do make us powerful, and all the countries that have them view these as major ways of projecting national political power. The clearest example is what the Russians are doing with their nuclear arsenal, using it as a shield to protect their invasion of Ukraine from a more vigorous NATO response. If it weren’t for the Russian arsenal, I’m sure the Russians feel that NATO would’ve intervened more decisively on Ukraine’s behalf and Russia would’ve been defeated. So they are very actively and very aggressively using the threat of nuclear war to try to keep NATO out as much as possible from supporting Ukraine.

7. What can the average person do to get involved in denuclearisation activism? 

Well, here in the United States, we designed the Back From the Brink campaign explicitly to make it a user friendly vehicle for people who became aware of the issue and want to do something about it. We understand that people do feel intimidated as individuals about their ability to do anything, so we’re encouraging them to think about the communities they already belong to, that they could engage with and take action. ◈