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Mayors for Peace appeals for nuclear abolition on major online news site in America

On September 26, an opinion piece from Mayors for Peace (for which Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui serves as president) appeared in “The Nation,” a major online news site in the United States, and appealed to the leaders and citizens of all nations to support a legal ban on nuclear weapons. Mayors for Peace hopes to expand public support for the start of negotiations for a nuclear weapons convention while the United Nations General Assembly is meeting in New York.

The article, about 1,000 words in length, appeared under Mr. Matsui’s name. The meeting of the U.N. working group on nuclear disarmament, which closed in August, adopted a report by a majority which recommends that negotiations for a legal ban on nuclear weapons begin in 2017. Mayors for Peace says it “welcomes” this outcome and hopes that the First Committee of the U.N. General Assembly, which focuses on disarmament issues, will engage in cooperative dialogue toward negotiations. It also requests that the nuclear-armed states opposing such a ban and countries under a “nuclear umbrella” move away from a security policy that relies on nuclear arms and cooperate with this effort.

Mayors for Peace pursued this opinion piece through American staff members of Mayors for Peace and others, and the article was published on the day designated by the United Nations as International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. According to the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, which serves as the secretariat of Mayors for Peace, it took this step to convey its message to a wide audience with the aim of boosting momentum for the movement seeking nuclear abolition.

(Originally published on September 28, 2016)

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