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A nuclear disarmament conference will be held at the Vatican in November this year.
Archbishop Silvano Maria Tomasi says the Vatican is working to convince the public that the world is safer without nuclear weapons, rather than with them.
Tomasi is the delegate secretary to the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, which is working to organize the disarmament conference.
It will build on the conference to negotiate the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty, which took place in New York in March this year.
It will also build on recent progress toward international bans on nuclear weapons – for example, the first-ever UN treaty to ban nuclear weapons, that over 120 countries signed at the UN conference in early July.
Until the treaty was signed, nuclear weapons were the only weapons of mass destruction not explicitly banned by any international document.
Antonio Gutierres, Secretary General of the United Nations, has been invited to address the Vatican conference, although it is not known if he will accept the invitation.
Pope Francis, who is firmly opposed to all forms of warfare including nuclear weapons, says “the doctrine of nuclear deterrence has become ineffective against 21st century threats like terrorism, asymmetrical conflicts, environmental problems and poverty.”
He says these are “even greater when we consider the catastrophic humanitarian and environmental consequences that would follow from any use of nuclear weapons, with devastating, indiscriminate and uncontainable effects, over time and space.”
Source
- CNA
- Independent
- Image: Twitter.com
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