Dear friends,
A few months ago, on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the tenth edition of the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates was held in Berlin.
That occasion, attended by President Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, De Klerk, Yunus, Mairead Corrigan Maguire and many other men and women who have dedicated their lives to building a freer and fairer world, was to celebrate a historic event that changed the world, but it was also an opportunity to reflect on the too many walls still in place today that prevent the peoples of the planet from coexisting peacefully.
The years that followed the cold war, marking the end of the nightmare of nuclear war, appeared to be taking us toward a safer world, based on a new international order capable of ensuring development and prosperity. But then the wars of the 1990s in Africa and even in the heart of Europe, followed by 9/11 in the new millennium and the global threat posed by terrorism, have brought us to an age of new conflicts.
Ethnic and religious conflicts, the growing gap between the rich world and the billion people living in absolute poverty, the rapid deterioration of the environment, the increasingly violent tensions running through our societies: all of the above have made the world a less safe place, where we all feel under threat, and where fear prevails over hope.
The question of global security has returned, in new forms, to the top of national and international political agendas. A new nuclear armaments race, involving more and more States, threatens to take us back to a time that we thought had ended.
Today’s meeting seeks to fuel, in Italy too, a serious debate on the strategic value of nuclear weapons, and whether today they still have a role to play in ensuring global security and providing an effective solution to the new challenges threatening this security. Our country too, moving beyond the preconceptions of the past, should reflect carefully on the best strategies needed to meet these challenges, so as to arrive at the international meetings coming up in the next few months with a more informed position.
I thus thank Hans Blix for having accepted our invitation, and hope that this meeting can help all of us to imagine a future in which the security of all human beings is no longer guaranteed by the threat of nuclear weapons.
Walter Veltroni
25 March
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