by bfitzgerald on 06 July 2005 @ 11:57 AM

It was 1985. Gorbachov was in the Kremlin, Reagan in the White House. The world was perpetually on the brink of nuclear war.

Greenpeace was working to stop nuclear weapons testing as a first step toward disarmament. We'd protested above ground testing by the US in Amchitka, delayed underground testing by the UK and US in Nevada, sailed into Soviet waters to protest testing at Novaya Zemlya in the arctic. And in the South Pacific, where France tested their weapons, we'd been locked in a fierce and public battle since 1971.

The French government had had enough. They ordered the Rainbow Warrior sunk. On the evening of July 10, 1985, French agents placed two underwater mines on the ship, sinking it at harbour in Auckland, New Zealand and killing one of our crew members.

They sank the ship. They didn't stop our campaign. We came back stronger and continued to send ships, including a newly rebuilt Rainbow Warrior, to the test site at Moruroa. Our motto was "You can't sink a rainbow."

And in fact, the rainbow won. The French abandoned nuclear testing at Moruroa in 1991.

Today, as we look back 20 years, we're proud of the work of millions of people around the world who opposed nuclear testing, and who pressured the superpowers toward disarmament.

But more than 30,000 nuclear weapons remain in the world today.

And while the prospect of an all out exchange of arsenals between Russia and the US has receded, the 15 kilotons of destruction that obliterated Hiroshima could today be accomplished with a lunch-box sized bomb. George Bush talks openly of developing new "more useable" nuclear weapons.

The prospects of a nuclear weapon actually being used are perhaps greater today than during the cold war.

A growing number of countries are lining up to join the nuclear club, increasing the chance that a nuclear catastrophe will happen somewhere on the planet.

The world needs to choose between a world where nobody has nuclear weapons, or everyone does.

Here's the challenge: how do you think the world can best achieve an abolition of nuclear weapons? On this, the 20th anniversary of the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, we're moving from commemoration to celebration of the overwhelming will for peace in the world. Opinion poll after opinion poll shows that if the questions were left to the world's people, nuclear weapons would be abolished forever. So what's it going to take to make our political system respect that? How do we make the voice of peace heard?

Post your answers here.