The Dangers of Nuclear Weapons Part 2

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has been campaigning since 2006 to prevent the proliferation and spread of nuclear weapons around the world. Following up from our previous episode where we sat down with Dr Johanna Garnett, today we are lucky enough to speak to Gem Romuld, the Director for ICAN Australia.

Gem has been an active campaigner across multiple disciplines for over a decade now, and in 2021 was awarded a Peace Woman award by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Australia.

Over the years there have been many pushbacks against nuclear weapons, and Gem notes that these have been successful in the past.

“We are we are able to actually dismantle them, and we have dismantled thousands of them at the peak of the Cold War. There were 70,000 nuclear weapons down to about 13,000 today.”

ICAN is calling for the Australian government to sign onto the nuclear weapon ban treat.

“We want to see a legally binding guarantee that this government will not have anything to do with nuclear weapons, and will bind future governments to that as well. And of course, the best way to do that is to sign and ratify the nuclear weapon ban treaty.”

Find part one of this two part episode here.

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash