'It's Terrifying': Students Build Grassroots Momentum for Nuclear Disarmament
Activists say nuclear weapon elimination should be a top priority.
May 3, 2010— -- Scott Ibaraki has been on the road for the last three weeks. Ibaraki, 22, has driven from Florida to Washington, D.C., in a dusty green van, accompanied by two colleagues for what he describes as an important mission: warning people about the dangers of a nuclear world.
It is so important to him that Ibaraki, at one college campus, used a Pikachu outfit and ran across the campus with a megaphone screaming at people to get excited about it. The threat of nuclear conflict did not go away with the end of the Cold War, Ibaraki said, and it's people like him who need to raise awareness about it.
"It's our generation's responsibility to uptake this movement and make it actually happen," said Ibaraki, a recent graduate of University of California, Davis. "No one denies its importance."
As world leaders convene today in New York City for the start of the 2010 review conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Ibaraki and other "roadies" are hoping to build a grassroots movement on the threats of nuclear weapons, and convince their generation to take up this issue.
Three-people teams like Ibaraki's have been traveling the country this month to raise awareness at college campuses, encouraging students to sign a petition to eliminate nuclear weapons globally and start support clubs on their campuses. The teams are sponsored by Global Zero, an organization that advocates for a nuclear-free world.
The students are fully aware of the challenges facing them.
For one, it's not an issue that currently ranks high on Americans' priority lists. Barely half of Americans see nuclear terrorism as a top-level threat. Just 12 percent of Americans in an April ABC News/Washington Post poll called the chance that terrorists could obtain nuclear weapons "the single biggest threat the world faces." About 45 percent called it a major world threat but not one of the biggest.
President Obama last month signed a nuclear weapons reduction treaty with Russia, and the administration changed its nuclear policy to one that limits the use of nuclear arms, but both moves faced criticism from Republicans for being too soft on U.S. enemies.
Second, and perhaps most importantly for these students, most of their generation was born after the Cold War and many don't even consider nuclear weapons to be a threat.
"I don't think it's something that college students talk about right now unless you're in the political science community," said Mandi Adair, 22, a Texas State University student who is part of the three-people "South Shore" team with Ibaraki. "I personally never thought twice about it. It's something you learned in history."
But once she did learn more about it, Adair said the thought of loose nuclear weapons scared her.
"It concerns everybody. It's something that could very easily happen within the next week, scarily enough," she said. "It's very real, and it affects the entire world. ... It could kill hundreds of thousands in a second, it's terrifying."
