PARIS, Sep 27 (IPS) – Any discussion of world peace and the future of humanity must address the issue of nuclear weapons, and it must do so now.
That was the message of a series of delegates at the conference ‘Imaginer la Paix / Imagine Peace’, held in Paris from September 22 to 24, and organized by the Sant’Egidio Community, a Christian organization founded in Rome in 1968 and now based in 70 countries.
The community describes its principles as ‘Prayer, Service to the Poor and Work for Peace’ and has organized 38 international, multi-faith peace rallies, bringing together activists from around the world. This is the first time the conference has been held in Paris, with hundreds of people traveling to France, itself a nuclear weapons state.
The meeting, which took place against the backdrop of brutal, ongoing conflicts in several regions and a new race by some countries to “upgrade” their arsenals, had a sense of urgency, with growing fears that nuclear weapons could be used by warlords. Participants highlighted current and past atrocities and called on world leaders to learn from the past.
“After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have been blessed with many who have said ‘no’ a million times – ‘no’, creating movements and treaties, (and) the consciousness… that the only reasonable insight we can learn from conception and using nuclear weapons means saying ‘no,'” said Andrea Bartoli, president of the Sant’Egidio Foundation for Peace and Dialogue, based in New York.
Bartoli and other speakers took part in a conference forum on Monday titled “Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Imagining a World Without Nuclear Weapons,” painting grim pictures of what living in a world with nuclear weapons would entail and highlighting developments since World War II.
“After the two bombs were used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, humans built more than 70,000 nuclear weapons and conducted more than 2,000 tests. Today we still have more than 12,500, each with a power far greater than the two that were used in August 1945.” said Bartoli.
Despite realizing the catastrophic potential of these weapons and despite a UN treaty banning their use, some governments claim that possessing nuclear weapons is a deterrent – an argument that is fallacious, the forum’s speakers said.
Jean-Marie Collin, director of ICAN (the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a movement launched in Australia in the early 2000s and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017), said leaders who cite deterrence “accept the possibility of violation ” international human rights.
“Nuclear weapons are designed to destroy cities and kill and maim entire populations, which means that all presidents and heads of government who pursue a defense policy based on nuclear deterrence and who are therefore responsible for giving this order are aware of this ,” says Collin. told the forum.
ICAN campaigned for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was adopted by the United Nations in 2017 and would enter into force in 2021. The approval came almost five decades after the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which came into force. came into effect in 1970.
The terms of the NPT consider five countries as nuclear weapons states: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China. Four other countries also have nuclear weapons: India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel.
According to a 2024 ICAN report, these nine states collectively spent €85 billion (USD 94.6 billion) on their nuclear arsenals last year, an expenditure that ICAN has called “obscene” and “unacceptable.” France, whose President Emmanuel Macron spoke about peace in broad, general terms at the opening of the conference, spent about 5.3 billion euros (about $5.9 billion) on its nuclear weapons in 2023, the report said.
The policy of ‘deterrence’ and ‘reciprocity’, which essentially means ‘we will lose our weapons if you lose yours’, has been rejected by ICAN and fellow disarmament activists.
“With the constant flow of information, we often tend to lose sight of the reality of the numbers,” Collin said at the peace conference. “I hope this will hold your attention: it is estimated that more than 38,000 children were killed in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Children!”
All the dead – an estimated 210,000 people by the end of 1945 – died gruesomely, as survivors and others have testified. Delegates said this knowledge should be the real “deterrent.”
At the forum, Anna Ikeda, disarmament program coordinator at the UN office of Soka Gakkai International, a global Buddhist movement, described the testimony of Hiroshima bomb survivor Reiko Yamada as one she would never forget.
“She (Yamada) stated: ‘A good friend of mine in the neighborhood was waiting for her mother to come home with her four siblings. She later told me that on the second day after the bombing, a moving black lump crawled towards the house They first thought it was a black dog, but soon realized it was their mother; she collapsed and died when she finally reached her children. They cremated her body in the garden,” Ikeda emotionally told the audience.
‘Who deserves to die such a death? Nobody!’ she continued. “Yet our world continues to spend billions of dollars to maintain our nuclear arsenals, and our leaders sometimes imply a willingness to use them. It is completely unacceptable.”
Ikeda said survivors, known in Japan as the “hibakusha,” have a fundamental answer to the question of why nuclear weapons should be abolished: “no one else should ever suffer what we did.”
Remark: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.
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© Inter Press Service (2024) — All rights reservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
