Dear Fellow Mayor,

Dear Member of Mayors for Peace,

The 65th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated clearly the recent sea change in the international community with respect to nuclear weapons. The Honourable Ban Ki-moon became the first UN Secretary-General ever to attend the Peace Memorial Ceremony. While wholeheartedly embracing the 2020 Vision of a world free of nuclear weapons by the year 2020, he paved the way for first-ever participation by Britain, France, and the United States.

The essential question facing us now is how to build the momentum imparted by the 2010 May NPT Review Conference and the 65th anniversaries into an unstoppable movement to end the nuclear threat.

Mayors for Peace now counts over 4,400 members in 150 countries, and this number grows every day. We are determined to continue expanding our campaign and to make this the decisive decade for nuclear disarmament. Mayors for Peace is demanding that negotiations for a nuclear weapon free world begin now.

We make this demand because this planet still bristles with 23,000 nuclear weapons. Cities are still threatened with instantaneous obliteration, and just a few of these weapons igniting fire-storms in a few cities would be enough to cause catastrophic climate change that would end human civilization as we know it. As Mayors responsible for protecting our citizens, we are standing up to declare that we will no longer be held hostage, and we reject the right of any nation to destroy this planet’s ecosystem for any reason whatsoever. Cities are not targets!

Unfortunately, Mayors for Peace lacks the funds to give cities the voice they deserve at the national and international levels. During the past 28 years, we have been financed almost exclusively by the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with an average annual contribution of about 250,000 Euros. Recently, some of our members have started contributing, as shown in the attached list. We are profoundly grateful to those who have helped thus far. We urgently appeal for your city to start making a small annual financial contribution towards the success of the campaign.

The attached file “City Council Resolution” is a sample resolution describing the urgency of the situation and the political and financial support we hope to receive from your City Council. The list of contributing cities indicates which have adopted resolutions like this, and we urge you to do so as well. Of course, we understand that each city has its own special circumstances, so we will be more than grateful for any amount and any commitment. At the end of the document, we suggest ways that Mayors for Peace can offer wide recognition of your valuable contribution to a nuclear-weapon-free world.

The attached file provides information to guide you in calculating and deciding your annual contribution.  Taking into account the size of your city and per capita Gross National Income in your country, the formula can help you decide what to contribute.

We count on your support.

Sincerely,

Dr. Tadatoshi Akiba

Mayor of Hiroshima

& President Mayors for Peace