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Nuclear Truth Telling
In Memory of Daniel Ellsberg
Join us for an online discussion with leading antinuclear activists about the ongoing threats posed by nuclear weapons and the need collective efforts to reduce those dangers and move toward nuclear abolition. Our guests include Ira Helfand, of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War; Cynthia Lazaroff, a Founder of both Women Transforming our Nuclear Legacy and NuclearWakeUpCall.Earth; and Susi Snyder, author, speaker, and Programme Coordinator at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
This webinar will be free and open to the public. Moderator Christian Appy, director of EIPAD, will invite questions from the audience.
September 26th, 2003
7:00 – 8:30 ET
Ira Helfand, MD is a member of the International Steering Group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, ICAN, the recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, and Past President of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the founding partner organization of ICAN and itself the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. He is also co-Founder and Past President of Physicians for Social Responsibility, IPPNW’s US affiliate, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Back from the Brink coalition.
He represented ICAN at the Oslo and Nayarit Conferences on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear War, and in September of 2015 he addressed a special session of the United Nations General Assembly. In May of 2016 he chaired the session on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear war at the United Nations Open Ended Working Group meeting in Geneva that led to the successful negotiation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in the summer of 2017, and on September 20 of 2017 he represented IPPNW at the signing ceremony for the Treaty.
He has published studies on the medical consequences of nuclear war in the world’s leading medical journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, the British Medical Journal, the Lancet and the World Medical Journal, and has lectured widely in the United States, and in India, China, Japan, Korea, Russia, South Africa, Israel, Pakistan, Mexico, Brazil, Columbia, and throughout Europe on the health effects of nuclear weapons. He represented PSR and IPPNW at the Nobel ceremonies in Oslo in December 2009, honoring President Obama, and presented their report, Nuclear Famine: One Billion People at Risk, at the Nobel Peace Laureates Summit in Chicago in April of 2012. A second edition was released in December of 2013.
Dr. Helfand was educated at Harvard College and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is a former chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine and President of the Medical Staff at Cooley Dickinson Hospital, and practiced as an internist and urgent care physician at Family Care Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts until his retirement in 2021.
He is the recipient of the 1997-1998 Will L. Judy Award, the 2003 O’Dwyer Award, the 2003 John Phillips Award, the 2016 Verdoorn Prize, the 2017 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award, the 2017 Edward Barsky Award of the American Public Health Association, and the 2023 Gandhi King Ikeda Community Builders Award from the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College
He lives with his wife, Deborah Smith, a medical oncologist, in Leeds, Massachusetts.
Cynthia Lazaroff is the Founder of Women Transforming Our Nuclear Legacy and NuclearWakeUpCall.Earth. She is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and author of Dawn of a New Armageddon, a personal account of the Hawaii missile scare amidst escalating nuclear dangers published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Hiroshima Day. Cynthia is a U.S.-Russia relations specialist and has founded groundbreaking U.S.-Russian exchange initiatives since the early 1980s. Cynthia is a recipient of the 2022 Women Waging Peace Award from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
Susi is the programme coordinator at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Her responsibilities include facilitating the development and execution of ICAN’s key programmes, including the management of ICAN’s divestment work and engagement with the financial sector.
For more than a decade, Susi coordinated the Don’t Bank on the Bomb project. She is an expert on nuclear weapons, with over two decades experience working at the intersect between nuclear weapons and human rights.
Susi has contributed to a number of recent books, including Forbidden (2023), A World Free from Nuclear Weapons (2020), Sleepwalking to Armageddon: The Threat of Nuclear Annihilation (2017) and War and Environment Reader (2018). She has been featured in Project Syndicate, CNBC, 360 Magazine, Quartz, the Intercept, Huffington Post, U.S. News and World Report, the Guardian, and on Deutche Welle, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now (among others).
Susi is a Foreign Policy Interrupted/ Bard College 2020 fellow and one of the 2016 Nuclear Free Future Award Laureates. Susi has worked in PAX’s humanitarian disarmament team, coordinating nuclear disarmament efforts. Susi previously served as the Secretary General of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom at their Geneva secretariat.
She was named Hero of Las Vegas in 2001 for her work with Indigenous populations against US nuclear weapons development and nuclear waste dumping. Susi currently lives in Utrecht, the Netherlands with her husband and son. For more about her personal anti-nuclear journey, check out Susi’s Storycorps interview.