Dr. Ivana Hughes at ICAN Campaigner Forum

On Sunday, March 2, NAPF joined ICAN partners and allies gathered at Riverside Church in New York for a full-day campaigners meeting in preparation for the Third Meeting of States Parties (3MSP) to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The event brought together advocates, experts, and survivors to strategize and strengthen the movement for nuclear disarmament and justice for those impacted by nuclear testing.

Melissa Parke, Executive Director of ICAN, welcomed all of the participants to the meeting to Campaigners Meeting and 3MSP. Dr. Ivana Hughes also had the opportunity to welcome the participants to Morningside Heights. She reflected on the rich history of Riverside Church and the neighborhood and connected them to the important current moment. You can read and watch her speech below.

The meeting also featured a discussion with the 2024 Nobel Peace Laureates, Nihon Hidankyo, who shared their firsthand experiences as atomic bomb survivors and the necessity of centering the voices of those most affected by nuclear weapons. Panels and breakout sessions focused on nuclear justice, policy advocacy, and strategies to build momentum ahead of 3MSP.

Attendees had the opportunity to connect with fellow campaigners, exchange ideas, and collaborate on ways to amplify support for the TPNW. The meeting reinforced the strength of the ICAN network and set the stage for impactful advocacy in the lead-up to 3MSP.

Dr. Ivana Nikolić Hughes – Speech at ICAN Campaigner Forum (Delivered March 2025)

Good morning ICAN! It is truly an enormous honor and privilege to welcome you all to New York City and to the Morningside Heights neighborhood. I live just a couple of blocks south of here, my office at Columbia is in Pupin Hall just east of here, and I spend a lot of time in Riverside Park with my family, including my dog Nala, just across the street.

This is a very special neighborhood, filled with history and inspiration and I want to take just a few minutes to share some of that history with you so that we can all situate ourselves in this remarkable place and make the connections to so many who have blazed a path for us to follow.

The disarmament history of this neighborhood begins with the very start of the nuclear age and extends to the decades of anti-nuclear and peace activism that we continue with our work today.

In the basement of Pupin Hall at Columbia, a team of physicists, including the newly minted Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi, split the atom for the first time on US soil in January of 1939. Alongside I. I. Rabi, another Columbia physicist and Nobel Laureate who was showcased in the film Oppenheimer as the voice of conscience in the nuclear age, Fermi would later call hydrogen bombs “weapons of genocide.”

There are many more inspiring figures with deep ties to this neighborhood:

Like Sister Megan Rice, the legendary anti-nuclear activist and Catholic nun, who saw nuclear weapons as the gravest of dangers and who repeatedly put her life and body on the line to protest them in the strongest terms possible. She grew up in this neighborhood on Claremont Avenue, just south of 119th street.

Like Thomas Merton, arguably the most impactful American Catholic author of the 20th century, who wrote widely on peace and spirituality, and was a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons and the nuclear arms race. Thomas Merton graduated from Columbia in 1938 and was baptized that same year at Corpus Christi Church on 121st Street, just east of Broadway.

And then there were major events, including the mass at St. John’s Cathedral on June 11, 1982, the night before the Central Park Rally, the largest anti-nuclear demonstration in US history. St. John’s Cathedral is about a 10-minute walk from here on 112th Street and Amsterdam.

And if you walk south on Riverside Drive to 105th street, you will see a Budha statue that survived the Hiroshima bombing and was gifted to New York as a message of peace.

Of course, Martin Luther King delivered his brilliant and timeless speech Beyond Vietnam in April of 1967 in this very building. He spoke eloquently and forcefully against not just the Vietnam War, but against war in general. The speech is a poetic expression of a deep yearning for peace, for brotherhood, and for love. MLK also discussed just how difficult this calling is. In the speech, he says:

“Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.” This might sound familiar to all who have been making pleas for peace in Ukraine, in the Middle East, and with China, and everywhere else where peace is missing or fragile. Later on, MLK adds that, “Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.”

MLK also called “for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation – in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind.”

This is a message that I know we are bringing to this forum and to the Third Meeting of States Parties to the TPNW. We are here to say that destroying our world is not acceptable. That nuclear weapons have to go. And that the TPNW will eliminate them. We won’t rest until this goal has been achieved.

I don’t just hope – I know – that someday, perhaps decades into the future, a person will stand in this very building and also tell the story of the peace and disarmament history of this neighborhood. They might mention Martin Luther King, and Rabi, and Fermi, and Sister Megan Rice, and Thomas Merton, and the Central Park Rally. They might encourage people to see the Budha Statue on 105th Street and Riverside Drive, and to visit St. John’s Cathedral. But they will also tell their audience about this ICAN Forum and about the Third Meeting of States Parties to the TPNW.

And what they will say is that we fought for a world free of nuclear weapons and that we succeeded.

Thank you for being a part of history!