Catholics and other people of faith can work for the prevention of nuclear war by adding their voices to those calling for measures to reduce the risk of nuclear war, creating moral and political pressure on leaders, according to a group of Nobel laureates and others who gathered at the University of Chicago July 14-16.
Among the participants was Cardinal Silvano Maria Tomasi, 84, a retired Vatican diplomat, who is an advisor to Pope Leo XIV on nuclear issues.
“The religious aspect of this event may offer some ideas on the complexity of the problems, the difficulty in communicating to everybody the disastrous consequences that eventual use of even one atomic bomb can create,” Cardinal Tomasi said at a July 16 press conference at the end of the assembly. “There are some specific ways emerging from the assembly in which religious communities can contribute to the global architecture of disarmament and restraint.”
That would include creating an interfaith group that could participate in witnessing disarmament inspections, adding a level of transparency, and creating regional interfaith networks who could meet with policy leaders to “identify early signs of arms racing.”
The Nobel Laureate Assembly for the Prevention of Nuclear War took place on the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test, when the first nuclear bomb was exploded in the New Mexico desert July 16, 1945, under the observation of Manhattan Project scientists. The test was a few short weeks before the U.S. released nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so far the only time nuclear weapons have been used in war.
Masako Wada, assistant secretary general of Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese organization founded by survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, which was awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, spoke in a video segment, saying that survivors are “trying to save humanity from its crisis.”
“We do not want others to experience what we did,” she said. “We have been working tirelessly to end the use of nuclear weapons without a single day of rest.”
The group released a “Declaration for the Prevention of Nuclear War,” calling on all nuclear powers to abide by their treaty obligations, to work together to expand and make new treaties calling for not just a ban on explosive testing of nuclear weapons, but also to reduce nuclear stockpiles as they move towards eradicating nuclear weapons.
“Despite having avoided nuclear catastrophes in the past, time and the law of probability are not on our side,” the declaration says. “Without clear and sustained efforts from world leaders to prevent nuclear war, there can be no doubt that our luck will finally run out.
“While the only way to truly eliminate the risks of nuclear war is to eliminate nuclear weapons, there are important, timely steps that can support the longer-term effort to achieve nuclear disarmament.”
Such work is especially important in the United States and Russia, which together control more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons and seem poised to allow the 2010 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty to expire, and in China, which is expanding its arsenal, according to the declaration.
Cardinal Tomasi, who previously served as secretary of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and was the Vatican’s permanent observer to the Office of the United Nations and Specialized Agencies in Geneva, said after the conference that he sees the election of Pope Leo XIV, who has been “accepted with great love and great esteem” as a sign of hope.
“He started off in the first moments of his pontificate to say that he wanted disarmament,” the cardinal said. “That is a big signal of the importance to not use force to solve problems, but to continue what his predecessors did, to have dialogue and negotiation to avoid conflict and violence. He is encouraging the pursuit of peace in a continued way. Often he speaks about it, and encourages heads of governments and other people responsible for the common good to work for peace and to rely on a fraternal approach to life instead of insisting on conflict and the law of power and maintaining power.”
Speakers at the conference, including keynote speaker Robert Floyd, executive secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization; Alexandra Bell, president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; David Gross, a string theorist who won the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics and others all agreed that the people of the world must demand that their leaders pursue disarmament to avoid catastrophe.
Against that backdrop, Cardinal Tomasi called on Catholics to do so with hope.
“We are Christians,” he said. “We are men and women of hope. The problems exist; sometimes they are tough and very difficult to unravel and to understand. We know also that we are guided … by a God who loves us, and, in the end, he wants our good, so with this conviction we can work even in difficult situations and pursue what is of benefit for the whole community, not only for myself or for a few people.”