Five UK churches have joined in encouraging those attending the UN in New York this week to negotatiate a legally binding treaty banning nuclear weapons and expressed their disappointment that the UK Government is among almost 40 governments – also including the US and Australia – which have declined to take part.
In a joint statement issued last week ahead of the talks, representatives of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Church of Scotland, the Methodist Conference, the Quakers in Britain and the United Reformed Church gave thanks for the “moral courage” of those countries participating in the negotiations and said they were praying for the success of efforts to create a legally binding treaty to ban nuclear weapons.
But they also expressed “disappointment” in the UK Government’s decision not to take part, saying that, “[i]n our view the UK Government is letting down not only the vast majority of countries in the world that are involved in these negotiations but also their own citizens”.
“We assure you that millions of people in the UK want to see a world free of all nuclear weapons regardless of the lack of co-operation from our government.”
The church representatives said they believed that the “possession and threat of use of nuclear weapons is a sin against God and humanity”.
“We repent of our complacency in allowing this state of affairs to continue for so long. Several of the nine countries maintaining nuclear weapons, including our own, have warheads that are several times more destructive than those that were used on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The very existence of such weapons violates the dignity and worth of every human being.”
They also wrote that while they “recognise that the elimination of nuclear weapons under an internationally agreed system of verification is a big undertaking”, they believed banning nuclear weapons is “a critical moral issue of our time”.
“We cannot leave this threat to hang over our children and over future generations to come. It is for us to take responsibility for resolving what the late Jonathan Schell called, the final ‘unfinished business’ of the 20th century and achieve the intention of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in all its aspects.”
Signatories to the statement include Rev Stephen Keyworth, faith and society team leader of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, Rev Dr Richard Frazer, convenor of the church and society council of the Church of Scotland, Rachel Lampard, vice-president of the Methodist Conference, Paul Parker, recording clerk for Quakers in Britain, and Rev Kevin Watson, general assembly moderator of the United Reformed Church.
It was estimated last year that there are more than 15,000 nuclear warheads in global weapons stockpiles.
