With the Doomsday Clock now 90 seconds to midnight, the closest to nuclear war ever, it’s clear diplomacy must be brought back into action to reduce the threat.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just made the annual Doomsday Clock announcement which is meant to show how close the world is to nuclear annihilation. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has escalated nuclear fears. The Doomsday Clock statements reads “Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict — by accident, intention, or miscalculation — is a terrible risk.”

The war in Ukraine must come to an end with Russia withdrawing its troops. Instead there should be what President Dwight Eisenhower called a “declared total war, not upon any human enemy but upon the brute forces of poverty and need.” Eisenhower proposed such an idea 70 years ago in his Chance for Peace speech when he became president.

Today, negotiations should take place to reduce all nuclear arsenals starting with Russia and the United States. Such disarmament would enhance security and the savings can be diverted to fighting hunger, poverty, disease and climate change.

Every nation, for its own security, needs to combat these silent dangers. For every nation has problems with hunger, poverty, diseases and the extreme harsh weather events brought on by climate change. These problems will only get worse over time, unless there is a robust effort to stop them. Spending money on war and nukes is senseless and simply takes resources away from the fights that are actually needed.

When Eisenhower became president he was trying to end the Korean War and tackle the new, fast developing threat of nuclear weapons. Eisenhower, in his Chance for Peace speech, said the world was at risk of “atomic war” and also “a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples;”

Eisenhower said “This Government is ready to ask its people to join with all nations in devoting a substantial percentage of the savings achieved by disarmament to a fund for world aid and reconstruction.”

That is the kind of plan we need today, to reduce spending on nuclear weapons and put that money toward the many humanitarian emergencies ongoing. It is totally unacceptable to be spending billions a year on nuclear weapons and other armaments while children starve to death from drought and other disasters. So many more lives could be saved and nations restored if we just got our spending priorities in order.

Eisenhower, who started the Food for Peace program, envisioned a world where money spent on nukes would instead go toward feeding the hungry. That is the kind of world we can try to achieve today, if we have the heart and courage.

There is no alternative. War is senseless and futile as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown us. Nothing can be gained by continuing the war. Russia needs to end its invasion and focus on the security issues that really matters to all people, including its own, which are fighting hunger, poverty, disease and climate change.

Russia and the United States need a successor nuclear arms treaty to the soon to be expired New START Treaty. This time the two nations should bring their nuclear arsenals from the current levels of thousands down into the hundreds.

The next steps involve all nuclear weapons states reducing their arsenals. There are still close to 13,000 nuclear weapons worldwide according to the Arms Control Association. Russia and the United States own about 90 percent of these nukes. Despite previous arms control treaties this number is still massive, so we need to make deep cuts to get the arsenals down.

We can end the Ukraine war and begin with deep cuts to nuclear arms. Security and peace can be enhanced for all nations using the Eisenhower disarmament plan to divert precious resources to humanitarian needs.

William Lambers is the author of Nuclear Weapons, The Road to Peace and partnered with the U.N. World Food Program (WFP) on the book Ending World Hunger.

His writings have been published by The NY Times, Newsweek, History News Network, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and many other news outlets.

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