President Nelson Mandela made a call for nuclear disarmament in his address at the opening of the 53rd United Nations General Assembly. As the leader of a country which had unilaterally got rid of all its nuclear weapons he urged other countries to make progress to rid the world of the danger of nuclear war. He said:
We must face the fact that after countless initiatives and resolutions we still do not have concrete and generally
accepted proposals supported by a clear commitment by the nuclear weapons states to the speedy, final
and total elimination of nuclear weapons
We must ask the question, which might sound naive to those who have elaborate sophisticated arguments to justify their
refusal to eliminate these terrible and terrifying weapons of mass destruction - why do they need them anyway ?
The reasons why we need to urgently get rid of nuclear weapons were presented very powerfully by General Lee Butler, former Commander of STRATCOM, in a speech on 2 Feb 98.