Starting the Nuclear Weapons Inheritance Project has proven to be harder than we initially thought. Preventing nuclear war by achieving nuclear disarmament is a very ambitious goal. It has become clear to us that we will face numerous challenges and tasks on the journey towards our goal or “destination”. Building an international network of students interested in working with nuclear disarmament is vital to our project. This is a short-term achievable goal, suitable for impatient students not willing to wait for action. We are well on our way shaping the base for a student disarmament network. Seeing the change from the small group of students that started out in Uppsala, Sweden, three years ago to the current international student group, representing 15 different countries; we really have achieved many things and have a lot of momentum.

The reasons for opposing nuclear weapons are numerous: ecological, economical, medical and military, and it is up to each and everyone to sum up all their pros and cons to come to a conclusion. Two of the many essential questions that need to be asked are:

1. How can it be that while walls have fallen and economic as well as cultural exchange and cooperation is on the increase trying to bring nations closer and wipe out past injustices, nuclear weapons are still the golden standard when it comes to building lasting national and international security? Can we settle with this solution to the problem, one that is a counter-productive and means working on the basis of threat and deterrence and thereby not bringing trust and security for all nations.

2. Proliferation is inevitable; we have learned this from the past. Are we strong and determined enough to use this acquired knowledge to take the necessary steps towards disarmament? If not we are faced with a situation that can easily fall out of our hands as more and more nations acquire nuclear weapons.

The NWIP has chosen the medical effects of nuclear weapons as its start-out point. We use them to convey a very strong and concrete message, and they are hard to ignore as they appeal to our humanity. These effects are also in line with our future work as physicians. In dealing with nuclear weapons, there is really nothing else to do. The dialogues held by the NWIP so far have mainly been with medical students. This is largely because they are our peers and we have easier access to them. A second reason is that it is important to find out exactly how our project should be run before it starts to expand. The project is now ready for this expansion and we feel that it should include students of political, social, economical and judicial sciences. This will allow us to engage a wider cross section of society, but also enable us to get more expertise in to the project. One way of doing this is to start to make use of the large disarmament network already in existence and try to incorporate them into working more specifically with nuclear disarmament on a student level.

There are still many things to do and correct. The outline for the project is set and its intermediate and long-term goals ambitious but achievable. It is important for us to be constructive in our critique of the current model of security building, but we do not have to contribute with the final solutions, even though some are already present. Voicing our concern and identifying the problem behind the current state of affairs will take us a long way; but will it eventually take us to our planned destination?