Hello, my name is Dominik Symank, I am studying medicine in my 5th year at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, at the moment and I have been a member of IPPNW since the beginning of my studies, I have already participated in an IPPNW cycling tour through Southern England and I am looking forward very much to this one!

Ever since I participated in peace activities before the Iraq war in my hometown Fürth, I have been increasingly interested in the international peace movement; I have taken part in IPPNW conferences about social conscience that take place every few years in Nuremberg, close to my hometown.

I was especially impressed by the commitment of one of the founders of IPPNW, Bernard Lown, an American cardiologist and inventor of the defibrillator device, whom I met at a lecture he gave in Nuremberg last year. This man, fighting all his life against death, cardiac and nuclear death, evaluated the effects of a nuclear bomb in his hometown and saw that doctors would be helpless. And an illness that cannot be cured has to be prevented. Nuclear weapons are an illness that would affect all of the world’s population.

The nuclear weapons have unfortunately not disappeared along with some dictatorships in the East. There is a nuclear warhead pointed at every major city in the NATO-countries and at every major city in the former Soviet Union. In Europe there are the nuclear arsenals of France, the UK and the US, the latter for example stationed in US airbases in Germany. Their possible use would have unthinkable effects. Their spreading to more countries e.g. Pakistan and North Korea does not make them easier to control. Their maintenance and renewal costs billions of dollars every year; money, that is badly needed elsewhere. To focus public attention to all those facts we are planning this cycling tour. We are a group of young physicians and medical students from all over the world, dedicated to a world where we can center our attention again at other illnesses which afflict the world without the threat of nuclear war.