An expert in global nuclear disarmament says we are making great progress in reducing the numbers of atomic weapons globally, but we still have a long way to go to get the number to zero.
There are still more than 15,000 of nuclear weapons remaining between the United States and Russia alone.
Almost 70 years ago, the age of nuclear warfare formally began with the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It didn’t take long, as the Cold War descended across the world, for the two super-powers, the US and the USSR, to amass huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. You may be old enough to remember fallout shelters and school drills in case of a Russian attack.
But almost as long as there have been weapons of this magnitude, there have been people protesting their existence, and people working to eradicate them.
The Ploughshares Fund is a publicly supported foundation that works to eradicate nuclear weapons around the world for the past thirty five years. The president of the foundation, Joseph Cirincione, was in Milwaukee earlier this week to speak at the Milwaukee Rotary Club, and took some time out of his schedule to speak with Lake Effect's Bonnie North.
"The arrow is moving towards fewer and fewer nuclear weapons, it's a question of pace," Cirincione says. "When you're running away from a forest fire, direction is important, but it's really speed that matters. Can you get to safety quicker than catastrophe can overcome you?"
