David Krieger and Daisaku Ikeda  (Santa Monica, CA: Middleway Press, 2001, 202pp.)

"Hope does not just occur.  It is a conscious choice, an act of will.  One must choose hope in the face of all we know…Hope makes change possible.  It opens the door on a future that is generous and decent instead of simply a projection of the past" says David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation based in California and a long-time worker for a world order that prohibits war and weapons of mass destruction, that upholds human rights for all peoples everywhere and that holds leaders accountable under international law for crimes against humanity.

Ikeda agrees: "Today, we confront the need to turn human history away from its customary course of war and violence and toward peace and harmonious coexistence.  One of the most important aspects of the task is the abolition of nuclear weapons."  Daisaku Ikeda is president of Soka Gakhai  International, a lay Buddhist movement in the Nichiren tradition.  The two first leaders of Soka Gakhai had opposed Japanese war policies during the Second World War and had been imprisoned.  In the late 1950s, Soka Gakhai became an important strand of the Japanese anti-nuclear weapons movement, a spiritual voice in a movement largely dominated by more politically motivated groups - "to use the spirit arising from the depths of life to struggle against all external restricting forces - violence, authority, financial power - that violate human dignity."

The book is written as a Socratic dialogue between the two, for both also agree that dialogue is a crucial path to peace. "Dialogue is the surest way to open each available pathway to peace.  It is impossible to move the human mind without employing dialogue in which communication takes place at the deepest level of life" says Ikeda.  David Krieger likewise adds "Dialogue is a way that probes and explores, a way from which hopefully both participants grow in their own understanding of the world.  The world needs more dialogue, but dialogue that is aimed at action."

Thus we have a dialogue between two men who share a common three-point agenda:

1) There is a need for ecologically-sound development to "promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom" as the UN Charter presents it, with a special emphasis on those people mired in poverty.  The Soka Gakhai has been particularly active in support of the "Earth Charter" - a comprehensive statement of ecologically-sound development.

2) There is a need for a growth of international law among states, for the rule of law and respect for human rights within states, and for improved mechanisms for dispute settlement.  As Krieger has said "There are powerful forces at work against peace, driven by fear, greed, prejudice and hatred.  Peace is not an end that we achieve but rather a process of building and being.  In one sense peace means stopping wars from occurring.  It also means building institutions that will allow for conflicts to be resolved without violence…Lasting peace itself will only be achieved by creating a fabric of institutional structures based on underlying attitudes supporting non-violent means of resolving conflicts."

3) There is an urgent need for abolishing nuclear weapons and for progressive disarmament of all weapons.  Basically, this is a call to abolish war as a means to advance one's interests.  In this technological age, a global equitable community, to which we all belong as world citizens, has become a vital necessity.

None of these ideas is new, and both participants make repeated references to the choices presented in the 1955 Bertrand Russell-Albert Einstein Manifesto "There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom.  Shall we instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels?  We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity and forget the rest."

There has been slow and uneven progress on this three-point agenda for world action:

The UN's "Millennium Declaration" of September 2000 has focused attention on ecologically-sound development and poverty eradication.  There is a hope that these goals for poverty reduction, environmental sustainability and gender equality will galvanize disparate and sometimes competing development agendas and that monitoring mechanisms will be created.

Although there was a 1990-1999 UN Decade for Strengthening International Law, there has been relatively little progress in this field, apart from the creation of the International Criminal Court.  The World Trade Organization works on universal trading rules, but many question the justness of the rules and the ideological framework on which they are based.

It is in the field of disarmament that there has been the least progress.  As we see today, diplomatic efforts are concentrated on keeping such states as North Korea and Iran out of the "nuclear club" rather than on abolishing nuclear weapons from the nuclear-weapon holding states.  Yet both nuclear and general disarmament are called for in Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons: "Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament under strict and effective international control."

Yet in the UN Conference on Disarmament, general disarmament has fallen off the intellectual agenda, and the governments have been unable even to build a framework for nuclear-weapons negotiations, much less start any negotiations.

Hopefully, non-governmental organizations can bring the conscience of the global community to bear on serious problems that transcend territorial boundaries.  As David Krieger concludes "Eliminating nuclear weapons is a critical issue for democratic action.  It is incumbent upon people everywhere to understand that they are responsible and that this issue cannot be delegated to political leadership.  Leaders have to take responsible action, but political will arises from the people themselves…The world will change when the number of those united to seek a better world by non-violent means - with liberty, justice and dignity for all-reaches critical mass."

René Wadlow