17 September 2019
Mikhail Gorbachev’s letter to Nobel Peace Prize LaureatesDear friends,
I am very glad that you have met again in this Forum. I was one of the founders of this project and it is very dear to me. It enables you and representatives of laureate organizations to continue efforts to affirm the principles and values of peace in politics and in the minds of people.
It is now difficult for me to cover long distances in order to join you but I would like to convey to you my support, wishes of success and some thoughts that I believe are important in the current alarming situation.
I am sure that you share the concern over the grave problems the world is facing today. As relations between the major powers have been worsening over the past years it has become more and more difficult to unite efforts to address the global challenges of security, poverty and backwardness, and saving the environment. The global civil society must urge leaders to return to sanity and resume dialogue. This is of vital importance now, and the voice of Nobel Laureates must sound loud and clear.
I believe that priority attention should now be given to the problem of nuclear weapons. What is happening now is extremely dangerous. Treaties are collapsing, new kinds of weapons are being created, and plans for using them are being drawn up. Politicians seem to have forgotten that nuclear war is unacceptable. The obligations that nuclear powers assumed under the Non-proliferation Treaty – to reduce and ultimately eliminate nuclear weapons – have been relegated to oblivion. We must not put up with that.
I suggest that the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates adopt a statement calling upon all leaders of nuclear-weapon powers to reaffirm without delay the proposition that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. This principle, contained in the Joint Statement that U.S. President Ronald Reagan and I issued in Geneva in 1985, set in motion a process that has resulted in the destruction of thousands of nuclear weapons. Yet, what still remains today is enough to destroy human civilization. Therefore the world leaders’ responsibility to mankind and to every human being requires that they reaffirm the inadmissibility of nuclear war and return to the negotiating table to agree on reducing and eliminating the nuclear arsenals.
Let us state it and let us work for it!
Sincerely, Mikhail Gorbachev Moscow, September 2019
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The XXI century will be a сentury either of total all-embracing crisis or of moral and spiritual healing that will reinvigorate humankind. It is my conviction that all of us - all reasonable political leaders, all spiritual and ideological movements, all faiths - must help in this transition to a triumph of humanism and justice, in making the XXI century a century of a new human renaissance.
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