ON December 10, during the ceremony of awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Director of Ican, Beatrice Fihn, said “through the action of ordinary people, 122 nations negotiated and concluded a UN treaty to outlaw these weapons of mass destruction”. She was referring to the Treaty agreed at the UN on July 7.

These words contradict your report that the treaty was “signed by 56 countries but ratified by only three”. Perhaps you were confusing the signing of the treaty (July7) with the process of ratification, which began in September and is on going. When 50 states have ratified the treaty, it becomes statutory law. To date, 56 nations have ratified it.

Setsuko Thurlow, a hibakusha or survivor of Hiroshima, also spoke at the ceremony. Her words need to be heard by everybody.

“For more than seven decades, we have stood in solidarity with those harmed by the production and testing of these horrific weapons around the world. People from places with long forgotten names, like Moruroa, Ekker, Semipalatinsk, Maralinga, Bikini. People whose lands and seas were irradiated, whose bodies were experimented upon, whose cultures were forever disrupted.

“We were not content to be victims. We refused to wait for an immediate fiery end or the slow poisoning of our world. We refused to sit idly in terror as the so-called great powers took us past nuclear dusk and brought us recklessly close to nuclear midnight ... we said: humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.

“Today, I want you to feel in this hall the presence of all those who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I want you to feel, above and around us, a great cloud of a quarter million souls. Each person had a name. Each person was loved by someone. Let us ensure that their deaths were not in vain”.

You are right, however, to report that the nine rogue nuclear states have said they want nothing to do with this. In the immortal words of Mandy Rice Davies, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Brian Quail,

2 Hyndland Avenue,

Glasgow .