Global Security Newswire

Five recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize are urging U.S. President Barack Obama to renew efforts toward global nuclear disarmament by making a high-profile trip to Hiroshima, the Japanese city where an atomic weapon was first used in war, the Associated Press reported yesterday (see GSN, Aug. 6).

The 11th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates is scheduled to be held in Hiroshima from Nov. 12-14. While Obama is not scheduled to attend the event, he does appear set to visit Japan in the same time period.

The U.S. president, himself a Nobel Peace Prize winner last year, should offer the keynote address at the summit, according to a letter signed by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Poland's Lech Walesa, former South African President Frederik Willem de Klerk, East Timorese President Jose Ramos-Horta and former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez.

''There could not be a better venue for such a speech than Hiroshima -- nor, perhaps, a more fitting forum than one presented by fellow Nobel Peace Laureates,'' according to the letter.

Obama has said he aspires to a world without nuclear weapons, while acknowledging it might not occur in his lifetime. In a high-profile April 2009 speech in Prague, he pledged to pursue "concrete steps" on nuclear disarmament and to push ahead with key nonproliferation measures.

Since then, Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have signed a new arms control treaty that would cap their nations fielded strategic nuclear weapons at 1,550 warheads and deployed delivery systems at 700 (see GSN, Aug. 12). There has been less progress on other measures, such as U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (see GSN, May 26).

Hiroshima has never received a visit from a serving U.S. president, though Jimmy Carter traveled there after his term was finished. Around 140,000 people were killed by the U.S. atomic bomb used against the city in World War II (Associated Press/New York Times, Aug. 25).