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Press Release No. 10/37e15.09.10 13:52 Churches urge NATO to reconsider the role of nuclear weapons in Strategic Concept 2010 On 24 September, a delegation of the Church and Society Commission (CSC) of the Conference of European Churches (CEC) will visit NATO headquarters for a meeting with NATO Assistant Secretary General Jiří Šedivý, who is responsible for Defence Policy and Planning. The meeting is the result of a letter by CSC Director Rev. Rüdiger Noll to NATO Secretary General Rasmussen, in which he introduced a recent CSC statement on NATO’s nuclear policy. The statement, drawing on the results of an international CSC expert meeting held in Brussels in June, sets out proposals for the revised Strategic Concept that NATO is expected to adopt at the Lisbon Summit on 19-21 November. The statement explains why churches and ecumenical organisations are strongly endorsing the new momentum towards a world without nuclear weapons, as proposed by U.S. President Obama in his speech in Prague in April 2009 and as advocated by a number of (former) political leaders around the globe, including the former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. “It is contrary to our deepest beliefs and convictions that security should rely on a readiness to destroy the world that God has entrusted to humankind,” the statement says. In its proposals for overcoming the still existing Cold War logic of NATO’s nuclear policy and for moving on to an enhanced co-operation mode, CSC statement focuses on the U.S. tactical nuclear weapons that are still deployed in five non-nuclear NATO countries in Europe. The removal of those weapons and the ending of their role in NATO’s new strategy would allow NATO to put in practice its newly proclaimed commitment to arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation (the Declaration on Alliance Security 2009). It would reduce the number of countries in the world with nuclear weapons on their territory from the current 14 to 9. Moreover, it would end all doubts about the compatibility of NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangements with the Non-Proliferation Treaty that prohibits any transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear weapon states. The statement discusses several scenarios for changing or ending NATO’s current nuclear policy and also addresses the issue of the vast arsenal of Russian tactical nuclear weapons that equally need to be reduced and eliminated. For the full text of the statement, click here. In March 2010, CSC published a statement targeting the policy of the European Union for the Review Conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in May 2010 in New York. For the full text of this statement, click here.
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