Working on a world free of nuclear arms

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/03/working-on-a-world-free-of-nuclear-arms

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Readers Aaron Tovish, Diana Francis and Caroline Westgate respond to our editorial about arms control to prevent nuclear war

Thank you for addressing this existential threat to our world (The Guardian view on arms control: essential to prevent the total devastation of nuclear war, 27 December). It would seem a no-brainer that the logical corollary to “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” would be to unconditionally renounce all options to initiate nuclear warfare. To date, only two nuclear-armed states have taken this stance: China and India. It seems to have served them well – at least as well as those that retain the option of escalating a conventional war into a nuclear war.

In an armed conflict between nuclear powers, it is courting disaster to make your adversary worry about being “beaten to the nuclear punch”, but Nato continues to consider the threat of escalating to nuclear warfare essential to the cohesion of the alliance. This policy urgently needs to be jettisoned.

The same logic applies to each and every other nuclear-armed state. It is time to put an end to the blustering and bluffing. This will buy time to work on establishing a world free of nuclear weapons.Aaron TovishStockholm, Sweden

Now 80 years old, I have from my early teens lived with images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the fear of nuclear weapons, knowing that they could destroy much of the world. In all those decades, the nuclear threat has never gone away, but it has been studiously ignored. Now at last, a major newspaper has made a powerful case for taking it deeply seriously, making it clear that, in a world now faced with the existential threat of climate catastrophe, there is another, pre-existing threat that needs to be addressed with equal urgency(Editorial, 27 December).

I will therefore, after all, begin 2025 with at least a glimmer of hope.Diana FrancisBath

I read your editorial more in sorrow than in anger. Since I was a student in the 1950s, I have believed that the only way to survive a nuclear war is not to have one in the first place. I’ve campaigned against nuclear weapons for nearly 70 years, but perhaps I’ve wasted my time, since the Doomsday Clock is now closer to midnight than it has ever been.

Nuclear weapons are obscenely costly national vanity projects, marketed to populations as deterrence, and sustained by false reassurances that they will never be used. I respect and support those who campaign for such causes as Just Stop Oil, but my focus remains on the threat of nuclear war. While nuclear weapons exist, we are one senseless act away from destroying all life on earth.Caroline WestgateHexham, Northumberland

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