Archbishop of Canterbury calls for a nuclear-free world

Friday, 25th September 2009
By Judy West

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has called for a world free from nuclear weapons. He made his comments during a visit to Nagasaki in Japan, where he is on an official visit to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the church there.

He took part in an Act of Remembrance at the epicentre of the atomic bomb blast in Nagasaki. During the service, Dr Williams laid flowers at the memorial and spoke about the pressing importance of working for a world free from nuclear weapons:

“There are no victories in human history without their element of tragedy. Victory in human affairs always means that someone has lost ...sometimes the victory has been gained at the price of such violence that we have to say that everyone has lost. Those who have won the conflict have lost some dimension of their own life, their own welfare and integrity. “To see the effects of the use of the atomic bomb here in Nagasaki is to see how this degree of slaughter and violence leaves everyone defeated. The wholesale killing of the innocent and the destruction of an entire environment, natural as well as cultural, the long-term effects, physical and psychological, on those who survived – all of this constitutes a would that affects the attackers as well as the victims. the rest