“The achievement of a nuclear weapons agreement between the two most heavily armed nations in the world is news that the World Council of Churches (WCC) has awaited for a long time”. With these words WCC General Secretary Olav Fykse Tveit – the world ecumenical organisation that gathers 349 Christian Churches (Protestant, Orthodox, Anglican) – defined the START 2 Treaty, signed by US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dimitri Medvedev in the Spanish Hall of the Castle of Prague.
The new treaty replaces the 1991 START 1 Treaty, signed by Gorbaciov and George Bush senior. “We see this agreement – continued Tveit – as a sign of the leadership needed for establishing a sustainable and just peace in the world”. The two governments – observed the WCC General Secretary – have negotiated rather modest cuts in the number of their most destructive weapons that they deploy. But the most promising element of their success is in also agreeing to be more open about their respective nuclear arsenals. If the world’s most powerful states practice new levels of nuclear transparency and verification, as we hope they will, they will be able to bring new leadership” and a new “confidence between them can also pave the way for more and deeper cuts in their still-prodigious nuclear arsenals”.