I graduated from Williamsport High School in the Class of 1962.

Members of our class, born in 1944-45, were the earliest post-WWII Baby Boomers.

We were also the first children born into the nuclear era, in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Classmates with whom I car-pooled to school during our senior year frequently discussed the need for nuclear disarmament.

A few months after our graduation, the Cuban missile crisis brought the US and the Soviet Union to the brink of war. This made nuclear disarmament seem even more urgent.

From 1963 to 1968, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was negotiated. In the NPT, non-nuclear-weapon states agreed never to acquire nuclear weapons. In exchange, nuclear-weapon states (the US, Soviet Union, UK, France and China) agreed to share the benefits of peaceful nuclear technology and to pursue nuclear disarmament aimed at the ultimate elimination of their nuclear arsenals.

Nuclear-armed nations never carried out their promised disarmament. Since the NPT came into force, at least three previously non-nuclear nations have developed nuclear weapons.

Today, the US is engaged in a $1.7 trillion, 30-year program to update and modernise its nuclear weapons.

Nuclear-armed states cannot forever prevent others from developing their own nuclear arms. Bombing or invading states thought to be developing nuclear or other “weapons of mass destruction” is a hypocritical, short-sighted policy. It will likely convince additional states that they need their own nuclear deterrent.

I wonder what my fellow car-poolers from 1962, all of us now in our 80s, think about the expansion of nuclear arms since our graduation, and the absence of our much hoped-for nuclear disarmament?

This August, residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will remind the world that after 80 years, it is overdue for nations to mutually eliminate nuclear weapons once and for all.

JOHN GAULT

Orsieres, Switzerland

Formerly of Williamsport

Submitted by Virtual Newsroom