In a climate-stressed world with increasing disregard for hard-won international law, wars and their casualties are rising. So too are military spending and the sales and profits of weapons companies. War comprehensively destroys the conditions for health and health service functioning, damaging physical and mental health across generations. The escalating but entirely preventable danger of nuclear war poses the most acute existential threat to planetary survival and health. Yet there are powerful commercial and institutional interests that benefit from feeding these dangers.

Evidence-based advocacy and collaboration by health professionals helped to drive underground and almost end explosive nuclear testing, helped end the first Cold War and contribute to reduction in nuclear weapon stockpiles, and played a key role in the negotiation of the historic 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). This treaty is the first to comprehensively prohibit the worst weapons of mass destruction, provide a framework for their elimination, and enshrine an obligation for assistance for the survivors of nuclear weapon use and testing, and associated clean-up. The TPNW has now been joined by more than half the world's nations, including almost all our SEAsian and Pacific neighbours. Australia is not yet among them, and provides burgeoning assistance for possible use of nuclear weapons.

This talk will examine some lessons of health action against weapons and war, particularly nuclear weapons, and discuss the opportunities and urgent need for collaborative health action to challenge militarism, prevent war and eliminate our worst weapons.

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