Hiroshima, 08/03/2025 (II mandato)
It is with a sentiment of deep respect and emotional involvement that I take the floor.
I would like to thank co-Chairman Mimaki for his words of greeting and the local authorities who decided to join this meeting at the end of the touching visit that I just concluded at the Peace Memorial Park.
With its Flame of Peace pointing to the sky, the heart-wrenching Children’s Peace Monument, and the gaunt and silent A-Bomb Dome, it is the universally recognizable symbol of Mankind’s destructive fury and, at the same time, of its resilience.
The eloquent and evocative architecture of this monumental complex speaks of the drama of war and the value of life but is nothing compared to your testimonies: the personal testimonies and the life experiences of all the citizens in those fatal moments in August 1945 and in the dreadful weeks that followed the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It is the collective testimony that, ever since 1956, Nihon Hidankyo organization has been offering as a lofty and severe warning to the whole of humankind with untiring dedication.
The Nobel Peace Prize awarded in 2024 is the well-deserved tribute to the incommensurable value of your constant commitment to reflect over the tragedy of the atomic bombing and over the ineffaceable scars that it left on the Planet and in the world’s collective conscience.
May this prestigious recognition – for which I congratulate you – be inspiration to future generations in understanding the value of remembering the tragedies of Humankind, so as to not lose its meaning and to learn to put it to good use while exercising their responsibilities.
Dear Hibakusha,
It is no rhetoric when I say that it is a privilege to be here with you.
It makes us think over what Professor Terumi Tanaka said when he received the Nobel Prize.
In Oslo, he recalled devastation of Nagasaki with extraordinary detail.
With touching words and an effective clarity of mind, he went back over the events that marked his life and that of millions of people.
He recalled the roar of the explosion, the blinding light that converted reality into a nightmare, and the surreal silence that ensued.
He shed light on the physical suffering and the trauma that indelibly marked the people.
But he didn’t merely recall the suffering of the past, the ordeal, the diseases that affected the people, the agony suffered by the survivors of the atomic bombings of the 6th and 9th of August 1945.
Your organization’s commitment to peace and against the proliferation of nuclear weapons has always launched a heartfelt appeal for the future: may no other people and no other Country ever have to face such a tragedy.
Never again!
Your action – and its universal value – has succeeded to be an inspiration for a great many movements around the world that have testified to being against nuclear weapons and their use.
In Italy too – to quote the words of writer Elsa Morante – we are consciously against the “hidden temptation to blow ourselves to pieces” with “ogress-whale” bombs.
Thank you, dear Hibakusha, for having underscored the fact that the horror that you experienced must remain a unique, tragic watershed in History.
An irreversible watershed in the history of humanity to avoid crossing the red line of nuclear annihilation ever again.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
We must ask ourselves some questions.
Is the drama that took place in Hiroshima and Nagasaki a sufficient reminder to our conscience of the self-destructive capacity that Mankind has generated?
Today, eighty years later, do those two blinding flashes of light, those two unimaginable shock waves, still constitute an intangible warning, the focus of a conscious awareness?
The atrocity of those moments and the terrible consequences of radiations contributed to forming an international consensus around a moral imperative: that atomic bombs should never be used again.
That horrific incident gave new momentum to the debate on disarmament.
The 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty – which is still the backbone of international coexistence – enshrines a commitment that every State has pledged to honour.
Yet today, the architecture of disarmament and of the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction appears to be undermined by the irresponsible rhetoric of conflict if not of the conflicts actually underway.
Threats of using nuclear devices are expressed with an unsettling recklessness.
The destiny of humanity is at stake.
Fundamental treaties are blocked or abandoned.
People even toy with the idea of “arming” outer space, removing it from the sphere of a peaceful cooperation that benefits all.
The nuclear taboo – which has underpinned international relations for decades – is eroded by disclosing the existence of nuclear armaments that are defined to have a controllable, so-called “limited” range, assertedly used in single theatres of operations, thus implicitly suggesting that they are presumably acceptable in would-be local warfare.
The Russian Federation in particular has been the promotor of a renewed and dangerous nuclear narrative, that goes to add on to blocking the proceedings on the Non-Proliferation Treaty, withdrawing from the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, and addressing threats to Ukraine, thus instilling the unacceptable idea that nuclear devices can become an ordinary instrument in conflict management, as if they were not inevitably conducive to total destruction.
The Italian Republic firmly condemns this dangerous drift.
We must reaffirm with unequivocable determination that no one can win a nuclear and that it must never be fought.
Nuclear powers – especially those sitting as Permanent Members on the United Nations Security Council – cannot shirk their responsibility of complying with the obligations that they themselves contributed to defining.
Up to now, strategic dialogue has avoided a nuclear holocaust. We must now stop the logic of conflict from taking roads that can only lead to unspeakable suffering, mourning and destruction.
Threats are multiplying with the stockpiling of arsenals whose only justification appears to be aggression and domination and not defence.
In this area of the world that has undergone so much suffering, the attitude of North Korea appears to be unforgivable. Pyongyang must immediately abandon its nuclear and missile programmes and commit to denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula.
At the end of a disastrous war, of which Japan and Italy were unfortunately jointly responsible, these two Countries nonetheless contributed to re-establishing a world order grounded on shared rules valid for all, aimed at safeguarding peace, stability and, therefore, also economic and social development.
It would now be unimaginable to be jointly responsible for returning to criteria leading to imperialistic conflicts that contradict the laborious path taken by humanity over the last eighty years.
Together, we are called up to uphold our civilizations and the legal order that has enabled them to recover and grow.
The contribution that Japan and Italy have made and continue to make to international affairs is all the more valuable when witnessing domineering drives that rotate around concepts of power and the logic of division in which other Countries’ populations become objects.
Allow me to thank Japan for its leading role in the global debate on nuclear disarmament.
Its position lays its roots in the shattering experience of nuclear devastation.
It is not a coincidence that during Japan’s presidency of the G7, world leaders adopted the Hiroshima Vision on Nuclear Disarmament, firmly reaffirming the hope for a world free from such threats. Italy resolutely champions this process while renewing its commitment to fully implement Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Rome acknowledges the urgency of joint action necessarily involving all nuclear powers.
Fully convincedly, we continue to support these processes and the activities of international organizations – essential, albeit imperfect – fora of debate and exchange, convinced as we are that effective multilateralism is the best bulwark of peace.
This is not – as some suggest – a clash between delusional “beautiful” souls and “realists” but rather between reasons to live and reasons to die; between the reasons for peace and the reasons to fight.
Among the reasons that have given rise to international orders in which the States committed to respect norms that are never against the dignity of human beings and unalienable individual rights, there are those that conversely fall into the recurring temptation to assume behaviours that deny them de facto.
The tragedies suffered in the 20th century witnessed States sign international Conventions aimed at preventing the horrors of the past, including the nuclear holocaust of civilian populations.
Every time that we drift away from this, we undermine peace and international coexistence, as well as individual rights and dignity.
Dear Hibakusha,
Your testimony is a priceless gift because through you we can understand what could never be told. The history written in textbooks cannot express the scars that you bear and that speak directly to the conscience of people.
Your eyes transmit the horror of nuclear devastation as nothing else ever could.
We cannot allow that the disappearance, year after year, of the direct witnesses of those tragic events make their memory fade and fall into oblivion and, along with it, allow that these dramatic events be repeated.
Your experience must be handed down to future generations as a shared responsibility so that they may not fall into the illusion that the past is but a remote shadow devoid of any teaching.
Memory is resistance against ignorance. It is educating for peace, human dignity and the awareness of the fragility of our existence.
Your teachings represent a message of hope.
Hope in a humanity capable of learning from its mistakes, of building a world in which nobody should ever again experience what you have lived through.
You have fought for a better world. It is now up to all of us to keep up the fight.
Allow me to thank you for having chosen to transform pain into a warning, suffering into hope, tragedy into commitment.
I am grateful to you for this meeting.