Gorbachev: Don’t Give up Hope for World without Nuclear Weapons

• Main Authors: Hideki Soejima, Takashi Kida
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis Group 2020-01-01
• Series: Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament
• Subjects: nuclear weapon; cold war; soviet union; intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty (inf); arms race; chernobyl
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/25751654.2020.1769529

In this interview carried out by two staff writers of the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev recalls how he engaged in dialogues with the United States in the final years of the Cold War. But the “peace dividend” brought by the initiatives of Gorbachev and his US counterpart has been largely eclipsed by renewed arms race between the United States and Russia. Gorbachev, in his sober understanding of the horror of nuclear war and the Chernobyl disaster, makes a strong case for a world without nuclear weapons, and calls for a moral world.