More than 700 organizations and some 1,400 individuals have endorsed the Joint Appeal for Nuclear Abolition Day. The appeal calls on governments to “affirm that the threat or use of nuclear weapons is inadmissible,” to stand down nuclear forces and adopt “policies never to initiate a nuclear war,” to pledge the elimination of nuclear weapons “no later than the UN’s centennial anniversary in 2045,” and to redirect nuclear weapons budgets to the UN, peacekeeping and human needs. It is to be presented on Sept. 26 to the General Assembly’s annual high-level meeting on nuclear disarmament, held on the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, which the Assembly established in 2013. The date commemorates Sept. 26, 1983, when Soviet duty officer Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov declined to report an early-warning alarm—later shown to be false—as an incoming U.S. missile attack. At the General Debate on Sept. 25, Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine urged the UN to apologize for the 67 nuclear tests conducted on the islands between 1946 and 1958, most of them while they were a UN Strategic Trust Territory: “The lack of acknowledgment remains a moral failure.”

Endorsers include more than a dozen Nobel laureates, among them Peace laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire and physicists Giorgio Parisi and Sheldon Glashow, as well as Oleksandra Matviichuk, whose Center for Civil Liberties shared the 2022 Peace Prize. Others include former Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba; former UN Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Nobuyasu Abe; former foreign ministers Gareth Evans of Australia and Erkki Tuomioja of Finland; British MP Jeremy Corbyn; and national affiliates of IPPNW, Pugwash and ICAN. The coalition, whose website is run by the Basel Peace Office, is holding an online event in four sessions across time zones on Sept. 25–26. Speakers include UN disarmament chief Izumi Nakamitsu, former Costa Rican President Óscar Arias, Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui and ICAN Executive Director Melissa Parke.

The Schiller Institute is pursuing the same goal by a different route. Its founder, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, historian Peter Kuznick and Jack Gilroy of Pax Christi and Veterans for Peace are the authors of an Appeal to Pope Leo XIV, issued Aug. 19 and since signed by more than 1,000 people. It asks the Pope to “convene such a meeting of the world’s leaders, including the heads of state of the three principal nuclear powers,” recalling that Pope John XXIII helped give Kennedy and Khrushchev “face-saving means” to resolve the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.