Annual-Report-2024 - Flipbook - Page 26
An Appeal to Our Better Selves – From Hundreds of Nobel Laureates and Lindau Alumni
The Mainau Declaration 2024
on Nuclear Weapons
The bestowal of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to Nihon Hidankyo “for […] demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be
used again” will have triggered a sense of déjà vu among the participants of
the 73rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. Many of them had signed the Mainau
Declaration 2024 on Nuclear Weapons in July 2024 – with a warning that
the danger of nuclear war might be significantly higher today than in 1955.
On the closing day of the 73rd Lindau Meeting, exactly
30 Nobel Laureates in Physics and Chemistry signed
the “Mainau Declaration 2024 on Nuclear Weapons”.
Since then, more than 100 Nobel Laureates all together
have signed the appeal, while over 600 Lindau Alumni
have also added their names, demonstrating how seriously the younger generation regard the threat from
nuclear weapons.
The signatories urgently warn that “in today’s fragmented and polarized world, there is a significant prob-
ability that, either by accident or by deliberate act, these
horrible weapons may be used – with the likelihood of the
end of human civilization as we know it.”
The declaration states: “In July 1955, eighteen
Nobel Laureates in science, meeting in Lindau, issued a
declaration warning the world of […] nuclear weapons that give mankind the means to destroy itself. In
the subsequent decades, the number of countries with
nuclear weapons, as well as the number of warheads and
their destructive power, has increased ten-fold.”
30 Initial Signatories
First presented on the occasion of the 73rd Lindau Nobel
Laureate Meeting on Mainau Island in Lake Constance,
Alain Aspect, Physics 2022
J. Georg Bednorz, Physics 1987
Steven Chu, Physics 1997
Johann Deisenhofer, Chemistry 1988
Reinhard Genzel, Physics 2020
Walter Gilbert, Chemistry 1980
David J. Gross, Physics 2004
F. Duncan M. Haldane, Physics 2016
Theodor W. Hänsch, Physics 2005
Serge Haroche, Physics 2012
24 | Responsibility Extending Beyond Science
Germany, it was unanimously endorsed by all Laureates
present.
Stefan W. Hell, Chemistry 2014
Richard Henderson, Chemistry 2017
Gerardus ´t Hooft, Physics 1999
Brian D. Josephson, Physics 1973
Takaaki Kajita, Physics 2015
Klaus von Klitzing, Physics 1985
J. Michael Kosterlitz, Physics 2016
Anne L’Huillier, Physics 2023
John C. Mather, Physics 2006
Hartmut Michel, Chemistry 1988
W. E. Moerner, Chemistry 2014
Saul Perlmutter, Physics 2011
William D. Phillips, Physics 1997
Didier Queloz, Physics 2019
Brian P. Schmidt, Physics 2011
Dan Shechtman, Chemistry 2011
George F. Smoot, Physics 2006
Donna Strickland, Physics 2018
David J. Wineland, Physics 2012
Kurt Wüthrich, Chemistry 2002
