Nuclear weapons threaten everything you know and love.
IPPNW is the only international medical organization dedicated to the abolition of these indiscriminate and illegal weapons. Together, we have a common-sense plan for their complete, irreversible elimination.
Global Nobel Laureate Summit on AI and Nuclear War
IPPNW was part of the coalition initiating the Global Nobel Laureate Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear War at the Vatican in July of 2026 in Castel Gandolfo.
IPPNW attended the conference to advocate for the abolition of nuclear weapons through the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and a permanent firewall on AI and related technologies and Nuclear Weapons systems.
The Rome Declaration adopted by participants of the conference called for “urgent, sustained and good-faith negotiations
leading, within an agreed and time-bound framework, to the verifiable and irreversible elimination of nuclear weapons.”
9 nuclear armed states – US, UK, Russia, China, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea- possess approximately 12,000 nuclear weapons. These arsenals, possessed by only a few countries, have the power to destroy the world as we know it many times over. Only 3% of their nuclear power could kill up to every 3rd person on earth.
Around the clock, IPPNW affiliates are working to rid the world of the nuclear threat. Our affiliates know that the only answer to this existential threat is total abolition. We are hard at work to achieve this reality through the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Peace and Health Blog
- The medical responsibility in IPPNW according to Hippocratic ethos
by IPPNW on October 9, 2026 at 12:00 pmby Maria Arvaniti Sotiropoulou “Prevention is better than cure,” taught Hippocrates, the father of medicine. And this motto holds true for every illness. But is war an illness? Many philosophers regard it as a natural state in human history. The figures bear them out. Since 3600 BC, more than 14,000 wars have taken place, 3,500
- Reykjavik Summit, 40 years on.
by Xanthe Hall on October 9, 2026 at 9:48 amMichail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan famously shook hands in front of the wooden Hofdi House in Reykjavik, Iceland on 12 October 1986. Twenty years later, it was revealed that they came within inches of achieving an agreement on total nuclear disarmament, only for Reagan’s “Star Wars” to block their vision. Forty years later, Russia and
- Goethe and the moral roots of peace and humanitarian disarmament
by Dr. Ghassan Shahrour on September 30, 2026 at 4:08 pmJohann Wolfgang von Goethe remains one of the most expansive minds in modern intellectual history. His legacy crosses poetry, literature, science, philosophy, and cultural thought, yet beneath this diversity lies a sustained concern with the development of the human being. He lived through revolution, political upheaval, nationalism, and war, but his intellectual response rarely confined
- 40 years later: The Abduction of Mordechai Vanunu
by Xanthe Hall on September 29, 2026 at 7:14 amFew whistleblowers have risked as much as Mordechai Vanunu did when he handed over covertly taken photographs of the Dimona nuclear facility in Israel to The Sunday Times in 1986. 40 years ago, on 30 September 1986, he was drugged and abducted by Mossad, taken back to Israel and sentenced to 18 years in prison,
- Jonathan Schell and the moral urgency of our time
by Dr. Ghassan Shahrour on September 28, 2026 at 12:00 pmIn revisiting my tribute to Jonathan Schell, written in March 2014, more than a decade after his passing, I find that his voice carries an even sharper moral resonance today. What once felt like a reflection on a towering figure in humanitarian thought has become a call to confront a world where civilian suffering is