Social activists of all stripes thrive on the connective power of the Internet, and the No Nukes movement is no exception. Take, for instance, Physicians for Global Survival, the Canadian affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). With the help of 3 medical students, it recently launched www.bombsaway.ca, a funky site whose target audience is Web users aged 17 to 30. Sarah Kelly, a medical student at UBC, says many people in that age group are unaware of these issues because they are too young to remember the Cold War or the Cuban missile crisis.
Specifically, the site was set up to help youth protest the proposed US national missile defence program (see page 1477) by providing a fax protest link to Canada's foreign affairs minister, John Manley.
“It's a site that lets one ‘do something’ without taking up a lot of time,” says Kelly. The site had 278 000 page views its first month, and 2000 faxes were sent to Manley. Paris-Ann Gfeller, another UBC student, was amazed by the response: “The generations before us worked so hard to end the Cold War it would be a true failure to let their work fail and see the arms race start again.”
Bombsaway is the latest among dozens of sites opposed to nuclear weapons. The IPPNW site, www .ippnw.org, provides a public health perspective on nuclear war and tells physicians what they can do to prevent it. IPPNW, a nonpartisan global federation of 60 medical organizations that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, provides the latest on the abolition of nuclear weapons, landmines, debt and health at its site. It's linked to the dynamic www.wesaidnonukes.org site launched by IPPNW in 1998. Another doctor-oriented resource, Physicians for Social Responsibility (www.psr.org), is a thorough source for news on the proposed US missile defence program.
Peacewire (www.peacewire.org/), a cooperative effort between the Public Education for Peace Society and End the Arms Race, offers multiple reports as well as a compelling photo gallery with horrific images from Hiroshima.
Finally, Project Ploughshares (www.ploughshares.ca) meticulously documents Canada's political response to the nuclear weapons issue.
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