General and complete disarmament makes sense because we don't have enough resources to support the world's militaries and also the eradication of poverty and the protection of our global environment. In the years ahead we will have to make choices about where to allocate our resources. If we continue to give generously to the militaries of the world and ignore the devastating poverty that faces some 1.2 billion people on the planet, we will be demonstrating values that do not speak well for the human species. We can do far better than we are doing. We can live with greater decency, and demand that all people be treated with dignity.
Nuclear weapons are just the tip of the iceberg.
They are the most dangerous threat to humanity, but they are far from our only threat. In a sense, we must move rapidly to end the nuclear weapons dangers on Earth so that we can move on to the even more demanding problems of poverty, environmental devastation, and human rights abuses. All of these add up to a concern for peace. You cannot have peace in the Nuclear Age without dealing with these problems. They are interconnected, just as each of us is interconnected with all humanity, with those alive as well as those who have preceded us and those who will follow us.