Since the end of the Cold War two main nuclear powers have begun to make big reductions in their nuclear arsenals. Each of them is dismantling about 2,000 nuclear warheads a year.
We urge President Bush to abstain from the National Missile Defense, just as we urge China, India and Pakistan to discontinue their nuclear arsenals.
I have been very encouraged by President Obama's call to action on climate change both at his Inauguration and in the State of the Union Address. This is a global imperative. I also welcome President Obama's intention to pursue reductions in nuclear arsenals.
Nuclear proliferation has never entirely been brought under control, and the arsenals of nuclear powers contain bombs far more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
We're fundamentally opposed to the expansion of nuclear-weapons arsenals. This is why we have proposed the formation of an unbiased organization and the disarmament of the nuclear powers. We don't need any weapons. We're a civilized, cultured people, and our history shows that we have never attacked another country.
(God) gives the weak a weapon for self-defense that the strong, despite his military and nuclear arsenals, can do nothing against. There are clerics who condemn this and even say that these are suicide operations that are not allowed in Islam.
We have a chance to wind down and expedite the removal of 96 percent of the world's nuclear weapons. What an achievement it would be, if at the end of the next administration, we could say that the nuclear arsenals of both Russia and the United States had been reduced to the barest minimums.
The reduction of nuclear arsenals and the removal of the threat of worldwide nuclear destruction is a measure, in my judgment, ofthe power and strength of a great nation.
The bombs held in current nuclear arsenals are seventy times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. If we don't begin opposing the drift towards more and more of them, we will live in the shadow of the mushroom cloud for the rest of our lives - and millions may die there.
The decision to use the atom bomb on Japanese cities, and the consequent buildup of enormous nuclear arsenals, was made by governments, on the basis of political and military perceptions.
All nuclear weapon states should now recognize that this is so, and declare - in Treaty form - that they will never be the first to use nuclear weapons. This would open the way to the gradual, mutual reduction of nuclear arsenals, down to zero.
We are safer if there are not nuclear arsenals around the planet that can be utilized, stolen, sold to terrorists and others who would do harm.
The world has been gradually reducing its nuclear arsenals. Testing must stop so that progress on the destruction of nuclear weapons may begin.
