Who We Are

Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)

Conference on Disarmament

General Assembly First Committee

UN Disarmament Commission

Special Session on Disarmament

About Reaching Critical Will

Mission

The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) created the Reaching Critical Will project in 1999, in order to increase the quality and quantity of civil society at international disarmament fora, such as those that take place at the United Nations. We believe that nuclear disarmament will require coordinated and sustained effort on the part of governments, non-governmental organizations and the United Nations. Reaching Critical Will is WILPF's initiative to encourage people to act and contribute to a variety of international fora. For non-governmental organizations and concerned individuals to act, they need information, primary documents, and analysis. Reaching Critical Will collects, packages, and often translates disarmament related information into terms ordinary people can understand.

Reaching Critical Will has five aims:

Centralize and disseminate information about intergovernmental meetings that discuss nuclear weapons and their elimination;
Maintain a centralized electronic repository of information, and information services through our website www.reachingcriticalwill.org;
Increase the quality and quantity of NGO preparation and participation in these processes;
Increase the quality and quantity of NGO interaction with governments and the United Nations and it's family of specialized agencies;
Provide logistical support in facilitating activities before and during these fora tailored for policy-makers and the public.

Vision

Nuclear disarmament is inevitable. The majority of governments and people want disarmament and will eventually succeed in eliminating these suicidal, genocidal and ecocidal weapons. The movement for a world free of nuclear weapons has been expressed from the moment the government of the United States of America invented the atomic bomb, and it will continue until it succeeds in ending the nuclear age. This brutal era of belief in war and violence will be remembered by future generations as an embarrassing lapse in human evolution.

Nuclear disarmament is democracy. The peoples of the world have shown through polls and various demonstrations of the public conscience, that they oppose nuclear weapons and support their quick abolition. The vast majority of governments also express support for nuclear abolition, but those expressions have not been strong, loud, or coordinated enough to force those governments with nuclear weapons to get rid of them.

Nuclear disarmament will require coordinated and sustained effort on the part of governments, non-governmental organizations and the United Nations. Reaching Critical Will is WILPF's initiative to encourage people to act and contribute to a variety of international fora. For non-governmental organizations, and concerned individual to act, they need information, primary documents and analysis. Reaching Critical Will collects, packages and often translates disarmament related information into terms ordinary people can understand.

History

Reaching Critical Will began as an NGO project around the NPT Review Conference in 2000. 187 governments have signed a treaty called the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which contains a promise on the part of the five nuclear weapons states (USA, UK, Russia, France, China) to eliminate their arsenals of nuclear weapons. Every five years the treaty is reviewed. This four week meeting is one of the most important multinational forum whose task is nuclear disarmament. If real steps forward are to take place toward nuclear abolition, the NPT Review Conference is a crucial crossroad. WILPF believed that with proper, firm, and educated pressure placed on the world's governments by civil society and non-governmental organizations around the world leading up to this extended meeting of the world's governments, nuclear weapons can be abolished.

The 2000 NPT Review Conference was a surprising success. A 13 point action plan for disarmament was agreed at the 2000 meeting. The 2005 Review Conference, unfortunately, was a failure. Reaching Critical Will is now actively engaged in the Preparatory Committees leading up to the 2010 Review Conference.

Staff

Ray Acheson is the project associate of Reaching Critical Will. Prior to this position, she was a research assistant for the project for two years. Ray is also the associate editor of the Arms Control Reporter, a reference journal that provides information and analysis on international arms control and disarmament issues. She has worked extensively with the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, an organization founded during the Nuclear Freeze movement of the 1980s, tracking the manufacture and trade of conventional weapon systems. Ray graduated from the University of Toronto with an Honours BA in Peace and Conflict Studies.

Interns, Winter/Spring 2008

Julia Donald is a Scottish citizen interested in nuclear disarmament and human rights. She is an active volunteer and contributes all of her free time and energy to community building and charitable endeavours. She holds an MA Honours degree from Dundee University and has been accepted to Royal Holloway University of London to do a postgraduate degree in International Relations commencing in September 2008.

Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)

WILPF is the oldest women's peace organisation in the world. It was founded in April 1915, in the Hague, the Netherlands, by some 1300 women from Europe and North America, from countries at war against each other and neutral ones, who came together in a Congress of Women to protest the killing and destruction of the war then raging in Europe.

Its aims and principles are:

to bring together women of different political beliefs and philosophies who are united in their determination to study, make known and help abolish the causes and the legitimization of war;
to work toward world peace; total and universal disarmament; the abolition of violence and coercion in the settlement of conflict and its replacement in every case by negotiation and conciliation;
to support the civil society to democratise the United Nations system;
to support the continuous development and implementation of international and humanitarian law;
to promote political and social equality and economic equity;
to contribute towards co-operation among all people;
to enhance environmentally sustainable development.

Believing that under systems of exploitation these aims cannot be attained and a real and lasting peace and true freedom cannot exist, WILPF makes it one of its missions to further by non- violent means the social and economic transformation of the international community. This would enable the establishment of economic and social systems in which political equality and social justice for all can be attained, without discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion, or any other grounds whatsoever.

Visit http://www.wilpf.int.ch/ for more information.