I would like first of all to congratulate the organizers for having the keynote speeches at the end of your conference. If there is one thing this world needs its new ideas.

Having said that; let me congratulate all of you for hanging on to the idea of social responsibility. When I told my dermatologist on Thursday that I was going to be speaking to Student PSR tonight, he said, “Is that still around?” Personally, I am delighted that PSR is still around and I trust socially responsible medical people will continue to be around as long as there is a society, both local and global, to be responsible to. I trust, in other words, that, in you careers, you will be providing care professionally as well as morally.

This will not be an easy task, for care, I fear, has fallen on hard times in these days of zero sum values. Have you noticed how every time one of our great leaders utters a positive word or phrase it’s immediately canceled out by something negative? “Compassionate”. That’s a nice word, right? But “compassionate conservatism”? That’s like hitting the delete key. On Sunday, I think it was, I turned on the TV and there was our brave new President saying the US must walk humbly in the world so as not to provoke other nations to resent us. Good for him, I thought. Ten seconds later he was boasting that we had the mightiest military establishment and saying we had to keep it that way, and make it even mightier, so we could, at a moment’s notice, project our power into any part of the world where “our interests are threatened.” You can’t win.

So it is also with nuclear weapons, which I am supposed to talk to you about. On the one hand, Dubya maintains, quite correctly, that keeping an arsenal of 12000 nukes long after the end of the cold war is foolish and wasteful and that most of them should be unilaterally taken off alert status and even dismantled, a position which neither William Jefferson Clinton nor Albert Gore Jr. had the guts to espouse while they were in charge. On the other hand, once the current nuclear status review, about which ordinary citizens will have zilch to say, is completed, we are likely to be blessed with a global ballistic missile defense plan which will restart the nuclear arms race, fly in the face of international law and keep our defense contractors in the money for at least the first quarter of this century.

What should we do about that? One thing I am sure we should not do is follow the example of Germany and most other NATO countries – with the exception, so far, of France – and say “Well, we thought it was a terrible idea when it was launched, but now that it’s clear the US is going ahead with it, we might as well get in on it and try to do a little damage control.” Some things, Mr. Schroeder – that’s the German Chancellor – are just not damage controllable. They are simply bad, wrong, inhuman and abhorrent and should not be fiddled with.

At this point, let me do a fast backwards. One of the most gratifying experiences of my pro bono career – that’s Latin for unpaid work for the common good – has been the collaboration between lawyers and doctors in bringing the question of the illegality of nuclear weapons to the International Court of Justice, also known as the World Court, in The Hague. It was through the work of people like Vic Sidel and Herman Spanjaard, whom some of you heard in breakout sessions or at lunch today, that the World Health Assembly, which is the governing body of WHO, passed a resolution in 1993 requesting an Advisory Opinion from the World Court on the legality of nuclear weapons. This was followed by a similar request a year later by the General Assembly of the United Nations, for which most of the credit must go to IALANA, the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms. All throughout this period, and continuing to this day, there has been the closest cooperation between the anti-nuclear doctors and the anti-nuclear lawyers. The doctors supplied the scientific underpinnings of the horrors of nuclear war, which earned them their Nobel Prize. The lawyers provided the international law context within which to situate these findings so as to make the case ultimately adopted by the World Court that nuclear weapons are inherently illegal under international law. In the course of this collaboration, many enduring friendships were formed and many victories were racked up. Thus, unbeknownst to the public at large and even most of the policy wonks  of the nuclear powers,, the quinquennial review of the Nonproliferation Treaty ended on May 20 of last year at the United Nations with a solemn declaration agreed by all the nuclear weapons powers expressing , and I quote, their “unequivocal undertaking to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.”

The challenge for those of us truly committed to nuclear abolition is to make them eat their words. One way to do this is to publicize the audit of the 13 steps toward nuclear abolition, which the 187 governments parties to the NPT, including the five declared nuclear weapons powers, adopted last May at the UN. Chances are that , far from getting a passing grade, they will earn the title of François Truffaut’s classic movie, “Zero de Conduite”, Zero for Behavior. Once revealed, this should become a major scandal, and with your help it will.

The Middle Powers Initiative, an important civil society organization dedicated to the abolition of nuclear weapons, on which both IPPNW and IALANA are represented, will be issuing a compliance report card at a consultation to be held at the United Nations on April 30, but don’t expect to read or hear about it in the mainstream media. Nukes are no longer news, unless they leak, or go off by mistake, or are thought to be under construction by Iraq or North Korea. Some of you may have seen last year George Clooney’s live television production based on the sixties movie “Failsafe”, with Brian Dennehy and Martin Sheen. It’s about a misread signal which sends a US bomber off on an uncancelable mission to drop a nuclear bomb on Moscow, which leads the American President to allow the Soviets to drop one on New York to convince them that it’s all a mistake and not a deliberate act of aggression. And guess what all the reviews, or at least all the ones I read, had to say about it. A daring venture by George Clooney they called it – is live television coming back? And Jay Leno, with his exquisite tact, was heard to comment that Clinton must have enjoyed watching it because Hillary was campaigning in New York at the time. Big laugh from the audience.

And yet, and yet, if there are not millions who see the threat of nuclear weapons for what it is, “the ultimate evil”, as the President of the World Court called it in 1996, there are thousands, even tens of thousands, here and abroad, who will not rest until what the court called the “ obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects” has been fulfilled. Some write, some litigate, some lobby, some demonstrate and some put their bodies on the line. And sometimes the heroes sit on the judicial bench as well as stand in front of it. In June 1999, three women, Angie Zelter, Ellen Moxley and Budil Ruder, undertook to cause some minor damage to an installation of the Royal Navy used to track the movements of nuclear-armed Trident submarines. This took place near a Scottish town called Greenock and so last year they came before a sheriff, which is what they call trial judges in Scotland. The sheriff happened also to be a woman. Sheriff Gimblett approached her task with the utmost seriousness, and what was expected to be a one or two day trial on charges of damaging government property turned into a three week examination of the World Court Opinion, the Nuremberg principles and the question whether one could be guilty of an intentional crime while believing that one was acting to promote the law rather than violate it. In the event, Sheriff Gimblett instructed the jury to acquit the defendants. Her decision has been much admired in activist and legal circles around the world, but will do little to advance her judicial career.

Nuclear weapons, needless to say, are not the only horror show currently running.  The AIDS epidemic in Africa, and particularly in South Africa, is another instance of a moral  imperative, which fails to touch the conscience of the world, as is the international traffic in small arms  and the traffic in women for purposes of prostitution and domestic slavery. Closer to home, we have the dismantling of the welfare system, including the disintegration of the health care system for a growing sector of the population, and the unchecked spread of gun violence. Based on the latest incident, I give you two more examples of sublimated moral trauma. The media’s reaction to Santee: We have to do something about kids bullying other kids. George Bush’s reaction: We have to teach our kids family values. Not a word about guns either from the media or from the President.

And yet, and yet, things are moving. “I pur si muove,” as Galileo said, when they led him to the stake. Today’s New York Times reports that, in the struggle to provide affordable AIDS drugs, “if” has become “when.” Prompted by the offer of the Indian pharmaceutical firm Cipla to supply such drugs at a fraction of the cost of the big multinationals, Merck has broken loose from the pack and is preparing to match that offer. (I know a little bit about the pharmaceutical industry because when I started practicing trademark law nearly half a century ago, my first big client was Pfizer. I mention this simply to underscore what I understand Herman Spanyaard told you yesterday: that you do not have to take a vow of poverty to care, that you can take in a reasonable income for yourselves and your families and still be active players in the search for social justice. It’s all a matter of how you divide your time. True, there are only 24 hours in a day, but that’s still a lot of hours. I mean, how much sleep do you really need? And, more to the point, how much money do you really need?)

The traffic in small arms, which fuels wars and civil conflicts in so many places, is also under assault from many quarters. The NRA, you’ll be pleased to know, is so concerned about it that it is now a major lobbyist at the United Nations. But there will, before long, be a treaty taming this monster, following in the wake of the land mines treaty. My wife, to whom I owe the honor and pleasure of appearing before you, because the original invitation was extended to her, had lunch today in Capetown with South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Defense, a Quaker woman one of whose jobs is to get her country’s embassies and consulates out of the business of pushing arms sales.

My wife has also been telling me about “The Court of Women”, a weeklong conference she has been attending in South Africa, at which thousands of women from all over the continent have been testifying about the abuse and exploitation to which they are exposed. And two weeks ago, the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia handed down a landmark decision recognizing systematic rape in civil conflict as a crime against humanity.

As for social and economic rights, which were meant to have equal status with civil and political rights when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948, they are slowly beginning to come into their own after four decades of almost total neglect. I am one of the lawyers in a case currently pending in the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights in which a number of poor people’s organizations are accusing the United States of violating their right to an adequate standard of living. And William Greider reports in the current issue of The Nation that “America’s major multinational corporations are love-bombing labor and environmentalists”. It seems to be dawning on the captains of industry and cyberspace that environmentally polluted societies living on a dollar a day are not going to make good customers for their products and services. All of a sudden the “Luddite whackos”, as the Wall Street Journal called them at the time of Seattle – and wasn’t that a time! – are being wooed as essential negotiating partners in the game of globalization. (I note, by the way, that “globalization” is in the thesaurus of my new laptop; how’s that for progress?).

But don’t get me wrong. With the oil industry firmly entrenched at the levers of power in our national capital after a stolen election, we are hardly in for an easy ride.  All I am trying to say, and it’s not particularly original, is that just as eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, eternal struggle is the price of progress. And caring alone is not enough: It has to be organized, disciplined, informed and action-oriented.

The fact that you are here tonight shows that you already know all that. So my advice to you is: Get, or stay, involved in whatever speaks to your moral sense most loudly, but never forget that the thighbone is connected to the hipbone and the hipbone etc. Focus is good, but overdoing single issue politics opens you up to the divide and conquer tactics of your opponents. In May of 1999, on the centennial of the first International Peace Conference, 10,000 activists from around the world came together in The Hague under the banner of The Hague Appeal for Peace. They produced a remarkable document, the Hague Agenda for Peace and Justice for the 21^st Century, which sets out in 50 short points what it would take to, in the words of one of the Greek dramatists, “tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world.” I have brought a hundred copies with me. Please help yourselves to them, and look at them from time to time as you embark on your careers of providing care in every sense of those words.

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