EIRNS—Daisaku Ikeda, the president of the Buddhist Soka Gakkai International and a long-time opponent of nuclear weapons and promoter of peace, issued a call on April 27 for the G7 members, who are holding its leaders’ Summit in Hiroshima on May 19-21, to take advantage of being at ground zero of the first use of nuclear weapons to declare a “No First Strike” pledge for nuclear weapons, as a step to end the current crisis in which “the taboo against the use of nuclear weapons has been eroded among the nuclear weapons states and frameworks for managing and reducing nuclear arsenals verge on collapse.”

Komeito, a political party founded by members of Soka Gakkai in 1964, has been in a coalition government with the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) since 2012, which has been the governing coalition in Japan since then. While the party platform is opposed to the remilitarization of Japan, it has not had the power to prevent the current moves in that direction, although there is a significant popular opposition to those policies.

Ikeda has cooperated with the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), founded by American cardiologist Dr. Bernard Lown and Russian cardiologist Yevgeny Chazov, who together with others founded the IPPNW in 1980. In 1986 Drs. Lown and Chazov visited Hiroshima, where they chaired a symposium “Let’s Live Together, Not Die Together—What Must We Do Now To Prevent Nuclear War?”

Ikeda’s statement equally calls for resolving the Ukraine war, pointing to the now multiple threats of nuclear confrontation, noting: “Indeed, the risk of catastrophe arising from the current path cannot be denied.” He notes the statement issued by presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin following their summit in March, reading “The two sides call for stopping all moves that lead to tensions and the protraction of fighting to prevent the crisis from getting worse or even out of control.” The Hiroshima G7 Summit must provide a “prescription for hope,” Ikeda asserts, noting that “the current crisis is without parallel in the length of time that the threat of use and the fear of actual use of nuclear weapons have persisted without cease.” He bemoans the collapse of the arms limitation treaties between the U.S. and Russia, and believes a “no first use” pledge could begin a new arms control environment. He denounces the “nuclear deterrence policy, premised on the thinking that other countries’ nuclear weapons are dangerous but one’s own are the basis for security,” which leaves “humankind to stand on a precipitous ledge, never knowing when it might give way.”

At the core of the crisis, Ikeda states, is the decline in human security—“the right of people to live in freedom and dignity, free from poverty and despair.” He concludes: “I believe it is vital to make the shift to a ‘common security’ paradigm congruent with the spirit ‘Let’s live together, not die together’…. Now is the time! Let us once again change the course of history through the power of people, paving a path toward a world free from nuclear weapons, a world free from war.” (https://www.daisakuikeda.org/sub/resources/works/lect/2023apr27-g7-hiroshima-stmt.html) [mob]