Nuclear weapons helped ensure peace and security during the Cold War. We live in a different world. We do not need 26,000 nuclear weapons, more countries are seeking nuclear arms, and the proliferation of fissile material expands every year. Multilateral nuclear weapons reductions and far superior verification controls would both provide tangible security gains, and help to make the elimination of nuclear weapons a genuine possibility. The Global Zero initiative is an essential part of making that process a reality.

Malcolm Rifkind is a former British Foreign Secretary, and a current Member of Parliament. He was a long-serving minister in the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Mayor, working in a number of capacities. He was Secretary of State for Defence from 1992 to 1995 and was Foreign Secretary from 1995 to 1997. In 1997, he received knighthood, becoming a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George.

He was educated at George Watson's College and Edinburgh University where he studied law before taking a postgraduate degree in political science.

For more than half of a century, nuclear weapons have coexisted with us and remained the most powerful means of destruction. The “Club of Nuclear Powers” has been steadily joined by new members of whom not all can boast of internal stability or absence of conflict with neighbor-countries. Moreover, the weapons can fall into the hands of terrorists.

Let us stay sober in our judgments. The way to full and comprehensive elimination of nuclear weapons is hard and long. The fighters for the nuclear disarmament will have to laboriously untangle the complicated web of governmental and business interests. Yet the hardships should by no means force us to abandon the noble goal of delivering the world from the nuclear threat. 

Mikhail Margelov is a Russian political figure and international relations expert who is Chairman of the Committee for Foreign Affairs in the Federation Council of the Russian Federation. In 2000, Margelov served as a consultant to Vladimir Putin’s Electoral Headquarters, in charge of contacts with the foreign media. Margelov graduated from the Institute of Countries of Asia and Africa, affiliated with Moscow State University.
 

One could argue that nuclear weapons played a significant role during the Cold War because of the deterrent value they brought to the strategic calculations used by both sides. The premise of the calculations was that both sides were rational actors and the realization of the destruction that their use would bring to either side caused both sides to modify their behavior. It has been argued that in today's terms, Strategic Parity was in fact a stable environment albeit not without major concerns. The proliferation of weapons today and the rise of non-state actors who have access to this technology has changed the strategic balance and calculations. The existence of these weapons has increased global uncertainty and it is now time for the global community to work toward a regime that eliminates the existence and possible use of these weapons.

General (Ret.) John J. "Jack" Sheehan is a retired United States Marine Corps general. He was Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic for NATO and Commander-in-Chief for the U.S. Atlantic Command (1994-1997).

He served in various command positions ranging from company commander to brigade commander in both the Atlantic and Pacific theater of operations. General Sheehan’s combat tours include duty in Vietnam and Desert Shield/Desert Storm. In 1998, General Sheehan joined Bechtel International as a Senior Vice President.

Ambassador Richard Burt is an accomplished American diplomat with special expertise in the area of nuclear weapons. He successfully concluded a nuclear arms treaty as the U.S. Chief Negotiator in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks with the Former Soviet Union. Previously, he was U.S. Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany.

From 1977 to 1980, Ambassador Burt worked in Washington as a national security correspondent for The New York Times. He gained his Bachelors’ Degree in government from Cornell University in 1969, and his Master’s Degree in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in 1971. 

Richard Burt serves as Managing Director at McLarty Associates.  McLarty Associates works with clients worldwide to identify and pursue business opportunities.

Ambassador Thomas Pickering is a former American diplomat who held the personal rank of Career Ambassador, the highest in the U.S. Foreign Service. In a diplomatic career spanning five decades, he served as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation, India, Israel, El Salvador, Nigeria, and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. From 1989 to 1992, he served as Ambassador and Representative to the United Nations in New York. He speaks French, Spanish, Swahili, Arabic, and Hebrew.

Ambassador Pickering is currently vice chairman of Hills & Company, an international consulting firm providing advice to U.S. businesses on investment, trade, and risk assessment issues abroad, particularly in emerging market economies. He retired in 2006 as senior vice president international relations for Boeing.

The sheer folly of trying to defend a nation by destroying all life on the planet must be apparent to anyone capable of rational thought. Nuclear capability must be reduced to zero, globally, permanently. There is no other option.

Her Majesty Queen Noor is an international humanitarian activist and an outspoken voice on issues of world peace and justice. Born Lisa Najeeb Halaby to an Arab-American family, she met His Majesty King Hussein bin Talal of Jordan while working abroad and married him in 1978. Today Her Majesty Queen Noor plays a major role in promoting international exchange and understanding of Arab and Muslim culture and politics, Arab-Western relations, and conflict prevention and recovery issues such as refugees, missing persons, poverty and disarmament. The initiatives of the Noor Al Hussein Foundation (NHF) have transformed development thinking in Jordan through pioneering programs in the areas of poverty eradication, health, women’s empowerment, microfinance, and arts as a medium for social development and cross-cultural exchange.

The world would be far more secure if no one had nuclear weapons.... [I]t is so critically important that the United States lead a new effort to frame, structure, and build a twenty-first-century nuclear arms-control regime.... We must once again convince the world that America has the clear intention of fulfilling the nuclear disarmament commitments that we have made. Building a new global nuclear consensus is the only way to achieve lasting solutions to challenges such as Iran's nuclear ambition.

Senator Chuck Hagel is a former United States Senator from Nebraska. Senator Hagel served on the Senate's Committees for Foreign Relations; Banking; Housing and Urban Affairs; and Intelligence and Rules.

Prior to holding office, Senator Hagel served in the Vietnam War and earned many military decorations and honors, including two Purple Hearts. Hagel is the author of America: Our Next Chapter, a straight-forward examination of the current situation of the United States and which offers strategies to address twenty-first century challenges.
 

Colonel General (Ret.) Evgeny Maslin is the director of ANO “Aspect-Conversion” specializing in the upgrade of physical protection systems at Russian nuclear hazardous facilities within the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program and Global Partnership. He is a retired Colonel General, having joined the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union (later, the Russian Federation) at the age of 17.  He graduated from the Budenny Military Signal and Engineering Academy and began his service in nuclear divisions. He retired in 1997 after serving as Head of Strategic Forces for the Main Directorate at the Russian Ministry of Defense.
 

General (Ret.) Jehangir Karamat is a Pakistani military officer and diplomat. General Karamat graduated from the Pakistan Military Academy and joined the Armored Corps of the Pakistan Army. He was in combat in the 1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan Wars and eventually rose to the position of Chairman of the Pakistani Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee before retiring from the armed forces.

He was the Pakistani Ambassador to the United States from November 2004 to June 2006. After this ambassadorship, General Karamat founded a sociopolitical policy and analysis institute, Spearhead Research, which focuses on social, economic, military and political issues connected to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
 

Wolfgang Ischinger is an experienced German diplomat with the current mandate as Chairman of the Munich Conference on Security Policy to bring people together to discuss the central security issues of our time. From 1998 to 2000, Ischinger served as Deputy Foreign Minister. From 2006 to 2008, he was the Federal Republic of Germany's ambassador to the United Kingdom, and before that the German ambassador to the United States for almost five years. His long career in the German Foreign Service gave him specific expertise in international negotiating processes, having been involved with the Bosnia Peace Talks at Dayton, Ohio and negotiations on NATO enlargement and the Kosovo crisis.
 

Eliminating the threat of nuclear weapons is critically important for the future of all humanity. To this end, it is essential to create a world-wide consensus that a world free from nuclear weapons should be the common good. The Global Zero initiative will serve this purpose.

Yukio Satoh is Vice Chairman of the Japan Institute of International Affairs in Tokyo and was an accomplished Japanese diplomat, including serving as the Permanent Representative of Japan to the United Nations. He also served as the Ambassador of Japan to the Netherlands (1994-1996) and to Australia (1996-1998).

Ambassador Satoh entered the foreign service in 1961 from the University of Tokyo’s Faculty of Law, and studied history at Edinburgh University from 1961-63. He has written numerous articles on security issues both in English and in Japanese.
 

Time and events have made it increasingly obvious that the only dependable way to prevent nuclear weapons from causing devastation at any time or anywhere, deliberately or accidentally, is to not let them exist. If there is any single possessor of even a single device meant for explosion, single is bound to become multiple. The complexities of reaching Zero are immense, but the risks of not reaching it are just too great to live with. We can only try, but try we must.

K. Shankar Bajpai is an experienced Indian diplomat and expert in security issues. He joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1952, serving in Germany, Turkey, and Pakistan. He was the ambassador to Pakistan (1976-1980), China (1980-1982), and the United States (1984-1986). He was Secretary of the Ministry of External Affairs from 1982 to 1983. Since his retirement from government service in 1986, he entered academic life, working as a professor at the University of California, Stanford University, and other institutions. He was also the co-founder and chairman of the Delhi Policy Group, an independent think tank in India.

Dr. Evgeny Velikhov is an accomplished Russian scientist and is the current president of the national research center, the Kurchatov Institute. He is an important scientist in the field of plasma and thermonuclear controlled fusion. Since the mid-1970s, he has been the head of scientific studies on thermonuclear controlled fusion in the USSR and Russia. From 1977 to 1996, Dr. Velikhov served as Vice-President of the Soviet/Russian Academy of Sciences, and in 1986 he oversaw the cleanup of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. Dr. Velikhov has also been a principal arms control negotiator, having major impact on the development of American-Russian nuclear treaties in the 1980s and 1990s.

Jimmy Carter was the 39th President of the United States of America. As a young man, he was a submariner in the Navy, serving in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets and rising to the rank of lieutenant, senior grade.

Significant foreign policy accomplishments of his administration included the Panama Canal treaties, the Camp David Accords, the treaty of peace between Egypt and Israel, the SALT II treaty negotiated with the Soviet Union, and the establishment of U.S. diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China.

Since his Presidency, Jimmy Carter has championed human rights throughout the world, founding the Carter Center and working to observe numerous elections internationally.  He is a frequent volunteer for the housing charity Habitat for Humanity and was the 2002 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for his international work. He is a member of The Elders, a collection of world leaders working to address difficult global challenges.
 

Anthony Lake is Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Lake served as National Security Advisor under U.S. President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1997. He joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1962, and his State Department career included assignments as U.S. Vice Consul in Saigon and Hue in Vietnam, Special Assistant to the National Security Advisor, and Director of Policy Planning.
 

Richard Branson is a British businessman and philanthropist. In 1970, he founded the now ubiquitous Virgin as a mail order music record retailer, and not long afterwards opened a record shop in London. The Virgin Group has now expanded into international music megastores, air travel, mobile phones, finance, retail, internet, drinks, rail, hotels and leisure, with approximately 200 companies in over 30 countries.

Branson has also innovated in the world of the philanthropy, sponsoring The Virgin Earth Challenge, a prize to spur technical innovation to address climate change. He is a founder of The Elders, a collection of world leaders working to address difficult global challenges.
 

I am committed to a nuclear weapons-free world not only for moral reasons, which are well known, but for strategic reasons. The world will be free of weapons of mass destruction only when the people of the world feel secure and are at peace with themselves. In working towards "Global Zero," we will indeed be working towards a more peaceful and secure world. 

Air Chief Marshal (ret.) Shashindra Pal Tyagi is a retired Indian military officer who served as the Chief Staff of the Indian Air Force. Tyagi was commissioned as a fighter pilot in the Indian Air Force in 1963. He held many important staff appointments in the Indian military, including Director of Air Defence, Assistant Chief of the Air Staff (Intelligence), Assistant Chief of the Air Staff (Operations) at Air Headquarters, and Senior Air Staff Officer, HQ Central Air Command.  He is one of the few officers to command three separate Air Commands in the Indian Air Force: the Central, South Western, and Western Air Commands. In 2004, he became Chief of the Air Staff of the Indian Air Force, a post he held until 2007.
 

Dr. Jiemian Yang is the President of the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS), a leading think tank advising the Chinese and Shanghai governments. Prior to joining SIIS, Dr. Yang was the Vice President of the Institute for Peace and Development. Dr. Yang has published numerous papers and books on American foreign policy, international terrorism, and U.S.-China relations.

Lee H. Hamilton is a former United States Congressman and is the President and Director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, an intellectual center in Washington, D.C. where scholars engage in non-partisan dialogue on public policy issues. Hamilton represented an Indiana congressional district for thirty-four years.

Hamilton established himself as a leading congressional voice on foreign affairs, serving as chairman and ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Hamilton also served as co-chair of the Iraq Study Group and as Vice-Chair of the 9/11 Commission.
 

Desmond Mpilo Tutu is an Anglican priest who became the first black General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches in 1979. As General Secretary, he spoke strongly against apartheid, leading to strong counter reaction by the South African government. A month after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, Tutu was elected the first black Anglican bishop of Johannesburg, and in 1986 he was elected Archbishop of Cape Town, the highest position in the Anglican Church in South Africa.
 
In 1994, after the end of Apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela, Tutu was appointed Chairman of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate apartheid-era crimes. His stance of forgiveness and reconciliation has become a celebrated international example of conflict resolution.

He is a member of The Elders, a collection of world leaders working to address difficult global challenges.
 

Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Peng Guangqian was a military strategist with the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences of the People's Liberation Army (PLA).  A leading military thinker, Maj. Gen. Peng offers advice for China’s powerful Central Military Commission of the PLA. He is a respected defense analyst and edits the Science of Military Strategy, a major publication of the Academy of Military Sciences.

Ambassador Jianmin Wu began his diplomatic career in 1960.  He worked as Second Secretary in the Chinese Mission to the UN in New York from 1971-1978 and as Political Counselor from 1985-1988.  He served as Charge d’Affaires of the Chinese Embassy in Belgium and of the Chinese Mission to the European Community from 1989-1990. He was Director-General of the Information Department and Spokesman of the Foreign Ministry before becoming Ambassador to the Netherlands in 1994, Permanent Representative to the UN Office in Geneva from in 1996, and Ambassador to France from 1998-2003.  Returning from overseas post, he became President of China Foreign Affairs University and Deputy Director of the Foreign Affairs Committee of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.  He is now Chairman of Shanghai Center for International Studies, Vice-Chairman of China Institute of Strategy and Management, and a member of the Foreign Policy Advisory Committee of the Foreign Ministry.

Ambassador Wu is the author of books on communications, diplomatic case studies, and often takes part in international conferences.

Ambassador Shaharyar M. Khan is an accomplished former Pakistani diplomat. After serving as Pakistan’s ambassador to Jordan, the United Kingdom, and France, he became Pakistan's Foreign Secretary, holding the post for four years between 1990 and 1994. He was then appointed the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative to Rwanda where he remained for two years overseeing the United Nations activities in the country. In his retirement, Ambassador Khan has written a number of books on history and contemporary affairs, including an account of the events in Rwanda.