Peace Quest Welcomes Walk for Peace

The Road Less Traveled: Welcoming all those who Walked for Peace from Pugwash to Halifax
September 8-21, 2024 

Statement by Sean Howard, Campaign Coordinator, Peace Quest Cape Breton

UN International Day of Peace, September 21, 2024 

On behalf of Peace Quest Cape Breton it is my honour to send greetings in gratitude – and anti-nuclear and anti-war solidarity – to all those who participated in, and worked to make possible, the walk for peace begun in Pugwash two weeks ago and completed in Halifax on this UN International Day of Peace: the annual call by the World Organization for a day’s global ceasefire in our conflict-riven, intolerably-imperilled world. We applaud your commitment, body and soul, to the great cause of the United Nations – to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war – and we are inspired by your shining and stoic example of ‘walking the walk’ as well as ‘talking the talk’ of peace. 

Walking can indeed speak more eloquently than words. Eighty years ago, when it became clear Germany had no atomic weapons, Joseph Rotblat became the only Manhattan Project scientist to walk away from Los Alamos. The peace-loving path he then followed led, 50 years after the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. In that speech, Rotblat stated: 

“I have argued that we must eliminate nuclear weapons. While this would remove the immediate threat, it will not provide permanent security. A nuclear-weapon-free world would be safer than the present one. But the danger of the ultimate catastrophe would still be there. The only way to prevent it is to abolish war altogether. War must cease to be an admissible social institution. We must learn to resolve our disputes by means other than military confrontation.” 

I had the privilege of working with and campaigning alongside Dr. Rotblat in the 1990s, and this was the point he stressed more than any other: not that we need to wait for the abolition of armed conflict before we abolish nuclear weapons, but that we need to conceive of nuclear abolition as a central and crucial contribution to an even-greater emancipation – the abolition of human slavery to war.    

Words, of course, can also lead us away from the Abyss, as the famous Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955 proved, inspiring the inauguration of the Pugwash Conferences with its clarion call to “remember your humanity, and forget the rest.” Today, Peace Quest Cape Breton is issuing a statement on the need to urgently walk the path From a Pre-War to a Post-War World. In the last year, numerous statements from western military and political leaders have bluntly asserted – as a fact – that we are now a “pre-war generation” living in a “pre-war world,” the prelude to an unpreventable, inevitably massively destructive conflict we must all be prepared, sacrificing whatever it takes, to support. As our statement argues, “given that we already live in a war-torn world, with over 100 armed conflicts and 100 million refugees,” the “chilling phrase can only logically refer to a pre-world-war world”: in the nuclear age, a world doomed to destruction. 

Like you, Peace Quest refuses to accept that that is the ignominious ‘fate of the Earth’; we refuse to play the demeaning part – “ours not to question why” – of dutifully flag-waving bystanders to Doomsday. Refusing to accept that we live in a ‘pre-war world,’ we demand instead the right to help build a world without war. Shortly after the mechanized slaughter of World War I, the American poet Robert Frost famously wrote: 

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

 Today, non-violence is the ‘road less travelled,’ and militarism an overcrowded road to hell. There are not many of us, and there is not much time left: but that is a reason to go on, not back, to show – in word and in walk – there is another way, that if we give peace a chance it can make ‘all the difference’ between nothing less than life and death.