In May 2005 the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which has increasingly been ignored and fallen into serious crises, will be reviewed in a conference to be held at the United Nations in New York. In the face of this vital upcoming conference, churches have been called upon to focus their advocacy and education efforts during the coming months.

After 1989, a great hope arose that the end of the Cold War would signal the stop of nuclear power, which in turn could lead to a guarantee of “global security”. However, since that time the world’s superpowers have retained their nuclear weapons, and additional states have also developed their own nuclear capabilities.

A senior advisor with the Church World Service, Victor Hsu said, “We must continue the work that has gone before, when church leaders were active in capturing the imagination of the people in hoping for a world without nuclear weapons, and congregations were actively standing up for nuclear disarmament.”

Choice Ufuoma Okoro, working with the United Church of Canada added, “People don’t feel the threat [of nuclear war], especially the younger generation.”

The World Council of Churches (WCC) and its member churches have consistently advocated against nuclear arms over the past decades. Recently in February 2004, the WCC released a statement on the NPT, and the WCC executive committee reaffirmed that “the only ultimate protection against nuclear weapons is their total elimination.”

Following this statement, in March, a WCC delegation of church leaders visited a series of NATO non-nuclear states to argue the case for implementing alternatives to nuclear deterrence.

Speakers at the 16th November public seminar on ‘Churches’ quest for a nuclear arms-free world’ echoed the WCC position.

The seminar was part of the WCC International Affairs and Advocacy Week at the UN in New York, being held from 14th to 19th November. Speakers included the UN under-secretary-general for Disarmament, Nobuyasu Abe, the secretary-general of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (Blix Commission), Ambassador Henrik Sahlander, and the executive director of the Canadian organization Project Ploughshares, Dr Ernie Regehr.

The high-level of speakers were able to provide current information on the status of the NPT, and to identify the role of the churches within the context of the global political situation.

Henrik Sahlander said, “Nuclear weapons contradict the very notion of life that churches hold sacred. Churches can work from this perspective to revive the work against nuclear weapons and advocate for support of the non-proliferation treaty.”

Nobuyasu Abe concluded, “There are memorials in Nagasaki and Hiroshima that are very important to the Japanese people, but now the numbers of visitors to these memorials are declining, and this is tragic to me and my fellow Japanese citizens. We must remind political leaders of the world to remember the effects of these bombs. Unfortunately this memory is fading.”