John Mecklin
After two-and-a-half days of meetings in a mostly sunny midsummer Chicago, concerned Nobel Prize laureates and many of the world’s top experts on nuclear weapons spoke out on a dark subject: the high and seemingly rising prospect of nuclear war.
The Nobel Laureate Assembly for the Prevention of Nuclear War issued a declaration Wednesday—keyed to the 80th anniversary of the first nuclear weapons explosion in New Mexico, known as the Trinity Test—that presented a series of practical recommendations to world leaders for reducing the nuclear threat.
The impetus for the assembly came from Nobel laureates who, after issuing their own declaration on nuclear danger in 2024, felt public attention was not commensurate to the threat. Brian Schmidt, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011,
said the idea of the assembly initially arose last year at a meeting in Lindau, Germany, when Nobel laureates from more than 10 countries signed the “Mainau Declaration 2024 on Nuclear Weapons,” an echo of a Nobel laureates declaration on the same subject in 1955.
“We were discussing at this meeting of laureates, how this seemed to have gone off the radar of the world. And yet we were saying it’s, to our mind, the existential risk,” Schmidt said.
Daniel Holz, a University of Chicago astrophysicist and chair of the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board, was a co-organizer of the three-day assembly, held at the university’s David Rubenstein Forum this week. “Needless to say,
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