Protest letter against the Russia subcritical nuclear test (August 11, 2004)

August 11, 2004

His Excellency Vladimir V. Putin
President
Russian Federation

Letter of Protest

We have learned that the Russian Atomic Energy Minister Rumyantsev announced that your country has conducted multiple sub-critical nuclear tests at the Novaya Zemlya Island test site in the Arctic Ocean since the start of the year.

If the reports are factual, as the mayor of Hiroshima, I vehemently protest these acts as a betrayal of the hopes of the A-bomb survivors and people around the world for nuclear abolition.

The nuclear policies of the United States, North Korea, and other countries have thrown the world into a crisis of new nuclear proliferation and increased the danger that nuclear weapons will be used. For Russia, which claims to abide by the NPT to, like the U.S., test and take every other pain to maintain its nuclear arsenal, only hastens the destruction of the NPT regime. These deeply alarming developments are increasing nuclear proliferation and leading the world towards a day when such weapons will be used and extinguish human life.

I demand that Russia sincerely abide the "unequivocal undertaking" by the nuclear weapon states to "accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals," adopted by the 2000 NPT Review Conference, to immediately cease sub-critical nuclear testing, and to do all in your power to make the 21st century peaceful and free of nuclear weapons.

Tadatoshi Akiba
Mayor
The City of Hiroshima