Southern Oregon Peace Vets and Peace House to cosponsor speaker Peter Lumsdaine from Physicians for Social Responsibility 3:00 pm Sunday at Medford Public Library
A member of Physicians for Social Responsibility’s Committee for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons,
Peter Lumsdaine will lead an in-person briefing and discussion of his unique 2023 visit to Ukraine & Poland with a group seeking answers to questions like:
Where is the conflict going? Will it lead to global nuclear war?
Peter Lumsdaine is a long-term public-interest educator and organizer, having worked under UC Davis and US Department of Energy grant projects and on the program staff of NGOs such as Global Exchange and the Resource Center for Nonviolence. His work has taken him to armed resource-conflict zones in occupied Iraq, Mexico, and the Philippines – as well as to Jordan, Israel, Guatemala, Korea, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over the years he has been an invited speaker for more than 100 campus, church, community, and conference audiences across the US and beyond.
Shortly before the Ukrainian government’s military summer counteroffensive began, he traveled in Ukraine and Poland with a delegation of the Zaporizhzhia Protection Project (ZPP), which seeks to avert a military disaster at the nuclear power plant of that name – though his report will also cover the broader situation in Ukraine, the war’s technological escalation, and its rapidly accelerating global implications.
In Ukraine he and three other delegation members travelled to Kyiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, the countryside in between, and then through backroads army checkpoints to the mining town of Marhanets, near the Ukrainian military’s off-limits “red zone” and the Russian lines, across the river from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
Lumsdaine and other delegation members interviewed Ukrainian townspeople and refugees, miners and factory workers, journalists and teachers, church and community leaders, former Russian citizens, government officials, soldiers, and Ukrainian anti-war dissenters involved in their country’s semi-underground peace movement.
