Atomic Weapons Still an Intolerable Risk, says German Bishop

A German bishop has warned against the continuing threat of nuclear weapons sixty years after the first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.

Head of the Council of the German Evangelical Church (EKD), Bishop Wolfgang Huber, said in his address marking the sixty year anniversary on Saturday that “all the evil that one can possibly imagine in human beings’ destructive anger” was brought to bear on that day.

According to the bishop, people comfort themselves with the thought that the atom bombs have not been dropped since Hiroshima. He said, however, that “this risk, that these weapons will be inadvertently dropped is real; indeed, it is intolerably high.”

Huber went on to say that the nuclear warheads worldwide speak for themselves and that there was no justifiable reason to be concerned only with the atomic weapons of North Korea and Pakistan. He said: “Whoever wants to limit or remove the power at their disposal, must also be prepared to break down their own.”

He also alleged that the Cold War has simply continued, pointing to the failed UN conference in May 2005, which attempted to revise and improve the Non-Proliferation Treaty. “Even now atomic destruction depends less on negotiations than on the decision - or to put it more precisely, wrong decision – of a few.”

Bishop Huber called for the problem of atomic weapons to be brought back into peoples’ consciousness and to be anchored into the public conscience: “Only when the urgency of the issue is perceived can we hope for change.”

He said it is not enough to consider simply how to remove the causes for the deployment of atomic weapons. “We must also remove the possibility for their deployment.”

Bearing in mind the German desire for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, Bishop Huber said: “When our country expresses its readiness to take on a greater responsibility within the UN, then it must give expression to this responsibility also with regards the existence of atomic weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in our world.”