Pre-conference

At 1:30 this afternoon, thousands of people gathered in Times Square to rally and march for a world without nuclear weapons. Despite an attempted car bomb attack the night before in Times Square (and the 90 degree heat during the day), people still showed up in huge numbers, and carried on with nothing to fear.

Day two of the NPT Pre-conference started at 10am back at Riverside Church on the upper west side of Manhattan. Unlike day one, day two would be an all day affair, including workshops, afternoon performances, and the closing event — an address from U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

The NPT Pre-Conference kicked off this evening with speeches, testimonies, and performances at Riverside Church on the upper west side of Manhattan (Interestingly enough, Riverside Church was also the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous get-out of Vietnam speech). Prior to the doors finally opening at 7pm, the real “activism” was occurring outside in front of the Church during the afternoon.

“If the bomb gets out of hand, if we do not learn to live together so that science will be our help and not our hurt, there is only one sure future. The cities of men on earth will perish.”

Dr. Philip Morrison, Manhattan Project scientist and one of the founders of FAS, wrote this line in his work “If the bomb gets out of hand.” While he wrote this in 1946 following his survey of the effects of the Hiroshima bomb, these words still ring very true today.