Peace is more than the absence of war

'The Secretary General, Bonabes de Rougé, had never abandoned his commitment to peacetime work, wherever that was possible in a world at war. Now, as the final Valhalla in Berlin led inexorably to the suicide of Hitler on 30 April 1945, and the surrender of German troops, de Rougé told staff that the world had a chance of 'a new beginning'. His optimism was much diminished when, on 6 and 9 August 1945, atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima und Nagasaki in Japan - bringing the war in the Far East to an end, but at a terrifying human cost. The Secretary General could do no more than endorse the statement of the ICRC: 'Now that the utilisation of atomic energy has found its first application in the creation of a weapon of inordinate destructive power, the development of the technique of war, and therefore of war itself, seems to be clearly headed for ... maximum extermination.' A similar theme was taken up in the first issue of The Bulletin after the cease-fire in Europe, in an editorial headed Towards a New Era: 'For the first time the terrifying formula of 'total war,' utterly merciless, is being put into effect ...Women, old people, children, - all are torn from their homes, sent into slavery, exposed to hideous suffering, or even put to death.' Such horrors, the article continued, could only be avoided in future if the men and women of the Red Cross movement realized that peace war 'more than the absence of war'.'

Beyond Conflict, p. 138