NAPF’s latest Nuclear Dangers event, reflecting on the Ukraine War one year later, took place this past Thursday. The discussion with Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg was introduced by NAPF President Ivana N. Hughes, and moderated by NAPF Board Member Cynthia Lazaroff, with commentary by NAPF Senior Vice President Richard Falk.
Nuclear Dangers: The Ukraine War, One Year Later.
Thursday, March 2, 2023, 11:00 am PT, 2:00 pm ET, 8:00 pm CET.
Noam Chomsky is a philosopher, cognitive scientist, linguist, political commentator, and lifelong activist. He is considered to be the world’s greatest intellectual. He has written more than 100 books, his most recent, The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and Urgent Need for Radical Change was published in 2021. Chomsky has recently commented about this critical time in human history, stating, “We’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history and are now facing the prospect of the destruction of organized human life on Earth.”
Daniel Ellsberg is known to many as the original whistleblower, in 1971, Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study of US decision-making during the Vietnam War. For this, he was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 and faced a maximum sentence of 115 years. All charges against him were eventually dismissed on May 11, 1973. The author of four books, the latest entitled The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Ellsberg was awarded the 2006 Right Livelihood Award “…for putting peace and truth first, at considerable personal risk, and dedicating his life to inspiring others to follow his example.”
Richard Falk is a professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor’s Chairman of the Board of Trustees. In 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed him to a six-year term as a UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. His book, This Endangered Planet: Prospects and Proposals for Human Survival (1971), was selected as one of only three Books for the Century (Political and Legal) in the centennial issue of the magazine, Foreign Affairs. His book is also part of a set considered “essential for understanding the century ahead.” Falk’s memoir, Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim, was published in 2021.
Cynthia Lazaroff is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and founder of Women Transforming Our Nuclear Legacy. She is the author of Dawn of a New Armageddon, a personal account of the Hawaii missile scare, published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on August 6, 2018. An expert on US-Russia relations, including on the history, geopolitics, military, cyber and escalating nuclear risks between these two countries, over the past forty years, Cynthia has been engaged in Track II and 1.5 citizen diplomacy and mediation efforts with Russia and the former Soviet Union.
Dr. Ivana Hughes is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and also a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University, where she previously served as the Director of the K=1 Project, Center for Nuclear Studies. Dr. Hughes holds a BS with Honors from Caltech, and a PhD from Stanford where she was an American Heart Association Pre-doctoral Fellow. Her work on understanding radiological conditions in the Marshall Islands has been covered widely by national and international media, including by the LA Times. She has just been appointed to the Scientific Advisory Group (SAG) for the TPNW, which was formed recently to advise diplomats on all of the different aspects of the treaty.