Quakers join global call for nuclear disarmament
On International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, Quakers in Britain joined more than 275 organisations in urging governments to take bold action towards disarmament.
The joint appeal called on leaders at Friday's UN High Level Plenary Meeting to present concrete plans to prevent nuclear war.
They should redirect military budgets to peacekeeping, climate action and human need, and honour Article 26 of the UN Charter, signatories including Pax Christi and the International Peace Bureau said.
With 2025 marking 80 years since the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the founding of the United Nations, campaigners said there is no better moment to recommit to a nuclear-weapon-free world.
The UN made nuclear disarmament its very first resolution in 1946. Yet progress has stalled, and today the risk of nuclear war is higher than ever.
Doomsday Clock
The Doomsday Clock now stands closer to midnight than at the height of the Cold War.
The detonation of even a small fraction of the world's 12,500 nuclear weapons would have catastrophic human, economic and environmental consequences.
Quakers are guided by words first agreed in 1955: “To rely on the possession of nuclear weapons as a deterrent is faithless; to use them is a sin."
Earlier this year, they criticised the UK government's Strategic Defence Review for focusing on military expansion rather than addressing the real causes of insecurity.
Cuts to overseas aid and retreat from climate action only deepen the risks, they said.
In July Nukewatch reported that US nuclear weapons had returned to RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk for the first time since 2008.
Speaking at a peace camp outside the base, Paul Parker, recording clerk for Quakers in Britain, said the return of US nuclear weapons was a stark illustration of the intersecting crises facing the world.
True peace can only come from addressing the linked issues of democratic decline, growing militarism and environmental destruction, he said.