| The following statement was released to the press on 6 August
1998. Drafted by Jonathan Schell and David Cortright as a response to the nuclear crisis
in South Asia, the Appeal is an urgent plea for greater progress toward the reduction and
elimination of nuclear weapons. The nuclear tests in South Asia have jarred the
world into new awareness of nuclear danger. They have demonstrated unmistakably the peril
of nuclear proliferation and the weakness of international measures of control. They have
also cast harsh new light on the persistence of the arsenals of the United States, Russia,
China, Great Britain, and France, who jointly possess some 35,000 nuclear weapons. These
two main components of nuclear danger--proliferation on the one hand, and the remaining
cold war arsenals on the other--can no longer be considered in isolation. They must be
addressed together.
To this end, we call for negotiations to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons in a
series of well defined stages accompanied by increasing verification and control. We
direct our appeal especially to the nuclear powers, to confirm and implement their
existing commitment to the elimination of nuclear weapons in Article VI of the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty. India has declared a moratorium on tests and its willingness
to give up nuclear weapons in the context of a global plan for their elimination. Today,
only a commitment to nuclear abolition can realistically halt nuclear proliferation.
The tests of South Asia pose great danger but, against the background of the end of the
cold war, they have also created an opportunity that must not be missed to take action
that can at last free the world of nuclear danger. The hour is late, and the time for
action is now.
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Signatories
Jimmy Carter
Former President of the United States
Mikhail Gorbachev
Former President of the USSR, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Oscar Arias Sanchez
Former President of Costa Rica, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Alan Cranston
Former California Senator, Now serving as Chair of the State of the World Forum
Morton Halperin
Former National Security Council Staff
Joseph Rotblat
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Douglas Roche, O.C.
Former Canadian Ambassador for Disarmament
Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll
Center for Defense Information
Jonathan Dean
Advisor on International Security Issues, Union of Concerned Scientists
Daniel Ellsberg
Director, Manhattan Project II
Mark O. Hatfield
Former U.S. Senator from Oregon
Marcus Raskin
Institute for Policy Studies
Most Revered Walter Sullivan
Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Richmond,
President of Pax Christi, USA
Admiral Noel Gayler
United States Navy (ret.)
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