ACDN France wishes you a Happy New Year, for you and all your loved ones.

Like you, we wish for a world at peace, for the cessation of hostilities in all parts of the globe, and for a just and sustainable peace to be sought and achieved in those places where it seems slow in coming and even where it seems beyond the reach of our hopes.

Like you, we wish to see improvements in living conditions for every human being, beginning with the most deprived. We want the eradication of hunger and poverty, of illnesses that are conquerable and illnesses that humans cause, and of violence against children, women, elderly people and all human beings.

We wish to see a reduction in the things that feed violence and wars - ignorance, factionalism, racism, fanaticism and hatred in all their forms.

We condemn the arms merchants and their criminal trade. We hope that their shadowy backers will be disowned by the earth’s populations and particularly by the people of France.

We hope that humanity will join together in finding solutions for the problems that threaten the survival of our species and each of its members. We denounce the fact that nations continue to threaten one another with mutual destruction; we want them to make agreements to eliminate all their weapons of mass destruction as quickly as possible, and to replace the spirit of domination with the spirit of cooperation.

We hope that the idea of nuclear weapons abolition, which in 2008 made unexpected progress in the minds of the leaders of half the nuclear powers, will make similar progress in 2009 in the minds of the others and will result in concrete decisions in 2010 at the latest. We wish for this hope - a hope already shared by three-quarters of world opinion - to become reality.

Lastly, we hope that the effects of constantly growing artificial radioactivity and the immense dangers of nuclear energy (which has not much future anyway) will become known and recognized by the general public, particularly in France, and that the world’s leaders will decide to do without it in tackling the energy crisis.

We wish to bequeath to our children and grandchildren a France, a Europe and a world with no nuclear weapons and no nuclear power-plants, a world that is ecological, equitable and peaceable. A world that is alive, habitable and convivial.

We wish to work with you to bring all that to reality. There is much to be done!

ACDN, Saintes, France, January 1, 2009