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By Hon. Douglas Roche, O.C.
CIPS Policy Brief, October 2025

At a glance…

• Mr. Roche was 16 years old when the atomic bombs were used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• He spent time as a journalist in the 1960s, traveling through Africa, Latin America and Asia, which helped him come to the realization that “we’d better all get along”.
• The statistics on poverty, to be fully understood, need a human face. So too the statistics on nuclear weapons. He returned to Hiroshima and Nagasaki several times over the years, each time deepening his commitment to the abolition of nuclear weapons.
• The two themes of development and disarmament have driven his political thinking since his early days as a parliamentarian.
• The theme of common security became, and stayed, the central tenet of his political life even though the major governments cast cooperation aside in the post- 9/11 world.
• As our understanding of the universality of human rights grows, we will come to understand that the existence of weapons of mass destruction is absolutely incompatible with every human being’s right to live in peace.
• The movement from a culture of war towards a culture of peace is unquestionably one of the greatest human shifts of all time.

Hon. Douglas Roche, O.C. was a Senator, Member of Parliament, Canadian Ambassador for Disarmament, and Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta. The author of 25 books, his latest is Keep Hope Alive: Essays for a War-Free World (2024).