By Kay Scrimger
May 11, 2009

U.S. Conference of Mayors Past President Akron Mayor Donald L. Plusquellic and Des Moines Mayor T. M. Franklin Cownie delivered addresses May 5 at the Mayors for Peace Meeting at the United Nations in New York. Conference of Mayors CEO and Executive Director Tom Cochran joined Mayors Plusquellic and Cownie in New York.

The meeting on nuclear disarmament was held in conjunction with deliberations of the third and final preparatory committee now being held at the United Nations, which will lead up to the 2010 review conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

The meeting brought together mayors from all over the world to promote Mayors for Peace 2020 Vision Campaign, which aims at realizing the elimination of nuclear weapons by 2020.

Mayor Plusquellic, who also addressed the Mayors for Peace meeting at the United Nations in 2005, and who serves as Vice President of Mayors for Peace, emphasized the leadership that mayors provide on this and other issues. He said,

“When our last administration failed to approve the Kyoto accords, it was America’s mayors who pledged to reduce carbon emissions and clean our environment, and to date more than 950 U.S. mayors have enacted strong policies and programs to reduce global warming pollution.

“And I believe it will be the force of mayors – from both our major political parties-- acting together, that will focus our nation’s attention on the threats of nuclear proliferation against our metropolitan areas.

“The U.S. Conference of Mayors has acted as America’s conscience when it comes to issues of nuclear disarmament. For more than two decades, the Conference has passed a variety of policy resolutions that support the issues of nuclear disarmament, nuclear non-proliferation, and, now, the elimination of nuclear weapons by the year 2020.”

Mayor Cownie described a conference he was instrumental in organizing, which was held in his city on October 23, 2008. Entitled “Nuclear Abolition, Climate Protection, and Our Cities’ Future,” the conference was designed to “stimulate thought and action by mayors, city officials, activists, and members of the public.

Mayor Cownie said, “We hope that this conference will be a pilot project, an event that other cities may wish to emulate in order to focus attention at the grassroots level on the important issues of abolishing nuclear weapons and the connection between climate change and nuclear power and nuclear disarmament.”

“Real action and change takes place at the local level,” he said.

He emphasized the need to educate national leaders throughout the world and their citizens to understand that, “Nuclear weapons are not protection. They are suicide.”

In Conference of Mayors CEO and Executive Director Tom Cochran’s words, “The Conference of Mayors was pleased to take part in this meeting of mayors from around the world. We congratulate our long-time friend Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, President of Mayors for Peace, for once again eloquently calling attention through this meeting at the United Nations to the need to rid the world of nuclear weapons so that never again will any cities will suffer attacks as Hiroshima and Nagasaki did sixty-four years ago.

“Our organization has strong policy on this issue, and we were pleased to be a part of this meeting at the United Nations.”