In Japan, Pope Francis denounces the "false security" of nuclear deterrence

A "false security" that poisons tensions in the world. It is with these words that Pope Francis, visiting Japan, has denounced since Nagasaki, Sunday, November 24, the logic of nuclear deterrence guaranteeing peace.

The Argentine pontiff, arrived Sunday morning on the island of Kyushu (south-west of Japan), where the city of Nagasaki is, first prayed silently in the pouring rain in front of the main monument of the "Park of the peace ", place of impact of the atomic bomb. He laid a wreath of white flowers that were given to him by survivors.

He denounced "the indescribable horror experienced in their own flesh by the victims and their families" in this city where an American atomic bomb dropped on 9 August 1945 killed at least 74,000 people. The pope also has to go to Hiroshima at the end of the day, where three days earlier another nuclear bomb was dropped, which killed 140,000 people.

"The possession of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction is not the most appropriate response" to the aspiration of peace and stability, attacked the pope.

"Our world is living the perverse dichotomy of wanting to defend and guarantee stability and peace on the basis of false security backed up by a mentality of fear and mistrust that ends up poisoning relations between peoples and preventing any dialogue." he added, dismantling the classic argument of nuclear deterrence.

Break with the past

The horror of war and arms, a recurring cry of the Argentine Jorge Bergoglio, is a continuation of the popes who preceded him.

But a clear rejection of the theory of nuclear deterrence is a break with the past. Before the United Nations in 1982, John Paul II defined nuclear deterrence as a necessary evil "under present conditions". The Holy See ratified in 2017 the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TIAN).

Japan, endowed with a pacifist Constitution, was also given in 1967 for principles of "not to produce, to hold or to introduce on its territory of nuclear weapons". Still, the country depends on the US nuclear umbrella for its security.

Barely 440,000 Japanese are Catholics out of a total population of 126 million.

François will also meet on Monday victims of the magnitude 9 earthquake off northeastern Japan and the tsunami, which killed some 18,500 people on March 11, 2011, a natural disaster followed by the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

With AFP