People participate in an anti-nuclear rally in Union Square in New York. (photo: Seth Wenig/AP)
Dear Prime Minister Trudeau,
As you prepare to leave office, allow me to appeal to you to address the defining crisis of human history: the nuclear threat to life on Earth. I last made this public appeal to you in 2020 to which you did not reply. But with the Doomsday Clock of the *Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists* now set at 89 seconds to midnight, closer than ever, I owe it to the great cause to which I have dedicated my life – nuclear disarmament – to try again.
I am a survivor of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima, a crime against humanity made possible in part by Canada’s crucial contributions to the Manhattan Project. What I saw, through a terrified and bereaved child’s eyes, was nothing less than the beginning of the end of the world. I have told the story of my miraculous escape from Hell countless times because I have never lost hope in the capacity of humanity to save itself from the worst of its inventions.
In recent years, I played my part in a diplomatic breakthrough potentially signaling the end of the nuclear nightmare: the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), adopted by 122 states, two-thirds of the United Nations, in 2017. Yet your Government chose to stand on the wrong side of history, following the directives of both the Obama and Trump Administrations for NATO states to refuse to participate in the TPNW talks in New York: the first time Canada has boycotted negotiations mandated by the UN General Assembly.
I was honored to jointly accept the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a network of activists and survivors inspired by the success of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines in the 1990s, a decade when Canada was admired as a champion of humanitarian disarmament, not least for its urging of major reforms to NATO’s nuclear policies.
The Foreign Minister from that inspiring time was Lloyd Axworthy, who has publicly appealed to you to sign the TPNW, as have former Liberal Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and the late John Turner, former Liberal Foreign Ministers Bill Graham and John Manley, and a Who’s Who list of former senior diplomats and ambassadors, as well as 74% of Canadians in a 2021 poll.
This is the Treaty that you described as “sort of useless” because it was not supported by the nuclear-weapon states and their junior military partners. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has already established a powerful new anti-nuclear norm and stigma, complementing and supplementing the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty Canada has always supported. But how much more ‘sort of useful’ would the TPNW be if it found friends like Canada, finally willing to break the shackles of nuclear dependency?
Because of its path breaking provisions on victim assistance and environmental remediation, the TPNW also offers Canada a way to belatedly make amends for its role in the atomic age: the mining of uranium on colonized Dene territory that paved the atomic highway to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Canada’s involvement and complicity in the agonizing epochs of nuclear testing, nuclear arms racing, and nuclear proliferation that followed.
In August 1998, members of the Dene community of Deline in the Northwest Territories travelled to Hiroshima to apologize for their unwitting part in the atomic atrocities. Is it not high time that the Canadian Government issued such an apology, both to the survivors of the bombings and to the affected Dene? Such an apology, however, must be matched by action: and signing the TPNW should be top of the list.
I have lived in Canada for 70 of the 80 years of the atomic age, as tides of concern over nuclear weapons have ebbed and flowed. When your father was Prime Minister, he sought to ‘suffocate’ the arms race and bring the reign of nuclear terror to an end. I believe he would be dismayed at Canada’s loss of leadership on disarmament, but encouraged by the path to Global Zero opened by the TPNW.
Prime Minister, I dearly wish I had the chance to discuss Canada’s participation in the world-wide nuclear weapons abolition movement with you five years ago, or before. I recently celebrated my 93rd birthday and am still recovering from a serious fall. But I am neither ready nor able to give up. And while you remain Prime Minister, every second still counts.
Sincerely,
Setsuko Thurlow
CM, MSW
Toronto
A founder of the Hiroshima Nagasaki Day Coalition in Toronto, Setsuko Thurlow jointly
accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in 2017. His letter to Prime Minister Trudeau was published in the Ottawa Hill Times on February 20, 2025.