Faith Leaders Collectively Raise Alarm as AI and Nuclear Weapons Systems Merge

Eighty-one years after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear landscape is dire. Experts say arms control is on “life support,” if not dead, while diplomacy and negotiations are overrun by conflict and confrontation. In February, the expiration of the New START Treaty marked the end of more than five decades of U.S.-Russian (Soviet) arms-control treaties.

Spending on nuclear weapons continues to rise sharply, growing by nearly 20 percent last year as nuclear arsenals are modernized and expanded. In May, for the third time in 16 years, negotiations over the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) failed to reach a consensus document, with one of the three central objectives of the treaty — nuclear disarmament — a distant and elusive dream.

In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the symbolic Doomsday Clock, which assesses the risk of global catastrophe, to 85 seconds to midnight, the highest level of risk in its 79-year history. As the nine nuclear-armed states and their allies continue to rely on nuclear deterrence and the threat of mutual nuclear annihilation, a 2025 YouGov public opinion poll reported 69 percent of U.S. respondents said nuclear weapons make the world a more dangerous place.

Politicians and policy makers from nuclear-armed nations and their allies continuously fail to pursue nuclear diplomacy and arms control, but religious leaders and faith groups are increasingly calling for nuclear risk reduction and disarmament, and warning against the rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into nuclear weapon systems.

Faith in Disarmament

Opposition to nuclear weapons by religious leaders is almost as old as the bomb itself. In 1945, two weeks after the U.S. killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a group of dozens of religious and educational leaders published a statement calling the atomic bomb “an atrocity of a new magnitude” and offered its “unmitigated condemnation.”

In a 1955 Christmas radio message Pope Pius XII renounced nuclear weapons, a position which has strengthened in the papacy over time. In 2017, Pope Francis marked a significant change with his firm condemnation of the “very possession” of nuclear weapons. That same year, the Holy See was among the first to adopt and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which is now supported by a majority of nations.

One Catholic leader actively working to reduce nuclear risk is Archbishop John Wester of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, a jurisdiction which includes the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, a group advocating for nuclear justice and restitution, and other communities affected by nuclear contamination.

“Over the years, we’ve had many people in my archdiocese who’ve suffered the maleffects of radiation poisoning,” Wester told Truthout. “We’ve certainly had a great preponderance of injury by nuclear weapon development.” Impacts of nuclear weapons include elevated rates of cancers and other illnesses as well as economic, social, and environmental harm.

While the Catholic church shifted its position from accepting nuclear deterrence to calling for disarmament more than a decade ago, much work remains to change attitudes and influence policies, said Wester. “The truth has a lot of competition with the deterrence narrative for 80 years, plus and the truth has competition with the great sums of money that are involved in nuclear weapon development into the trillions of dollars.”

Wester’s archdiocese is located at the heart of the U.S. nuclear enterprise, including many of his own parishioners who are employees at Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center, and Kirtland Underground Munitions and Maintenance Storage Complex, which houses the largest number of nuclear weapons (many of them retired) in a single U.S. site.

Wester said it’s more important than ever to counter the lack of public understanding and engagement around the issue of nuclear threats. “The public’s been duped by our leaders for the last 80 years … into thinking: ‘You’re perfectly safe because we’ve got all these thousands of nuclear warheads on trigger alert.’”

For those who think disarmament is naïve, he asks, “What’s more naïve, to think that our luck’s going to hold out, that we can live with nuclear weapons or … thinking, ‘no, we’ve got to get rid of them?’”

In an era when people face so many competing crises, many may feel they don’t have the capacity to take on one more issue, but Wester urges his peers not to turn away. “This is a universal urgent matter that all of us have, so won’t you at least spend some time and some effort in educating your parishioners about [nuclear issues] and talking to your elected officials?”

Even as Pope Leo makes powerful statements calling for nuclear disarmament, Wester wants to see more interfaith dialogue. “It’s something that we don’t think much about and frankly it’s something that our government would rather we don’t think about,” he said.

He said his role as a pastor is to ring the alarm bell and say, “We need to start looking at this and if we don’t, we refuse to do so at our own peril.” Wester encourages people to educate themselves on the merits of nuclear deterrence over nuclear disarmament.

Speaking to Truthout on July 16, the 81^st anniversary of the first atomic explosion at the Trinity test site in the New Mexico desert, near his own archdiocese, Wester said, “These anniversaries serve a purpose.” August 9, the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, will be on a Sunday. Wester calls for people of faith “to pray about this, to preach on it, it’s a perfect time to do it.”

Filling the Leadership Vacuum

Also on July 16, half a world away from New Mexico, religious leaders, Nobel laureates, nuclear weapons policy and disarmament experts, and key individuals from the technology and AI sector gathered at the Vatican for three days of conversations, consultations, and presentations on artificial intelligence and nuclear war. The assembly concluded with the presentation of the Rome Declaration, a document calling for greater oversight and governance of AI as it pertains to nuclear and conventional weapons systems.

“AI built into nuclear systems leaves little time for, or even replaces, human judgement in a crisis,” the document reads. “This technology changes the context in which nuclear-armed states compete with each other.” It also states: “In the midst of a worsening nuclear arms race, we are embarking on an equally dangerous AI race.”

The Global Nobel Laureates Assembly on Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear War came on the heels of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence which warns against the integration of AI into weapons systems and calls for the safeguarding of “humanity, promotion of truth, dignity of work, social justice, and peace.”

The declaration also called for “urgent, sustained, and good-faith negotiations leading … to the verifiable and irreversible elimination of nuclear weapons.”

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, was a presenter at the Vatican assembly. In an interview, he told Truthout that the declaration is a “warning and a call to action.”

“We’re reaching a tipping point with artificial intelligence as it enters into military affairs and military systems, particularly nuclear weapons command, control, and operations that create new dangers that already exist with respect to nuclear weapons and the theory of deterrence and how it is practiced and how human decisions are made in a crisis,” Kimball said. “[AI] will complicate that already dangerous equation.”

How much sway will these warnings have on men like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping? For heads of state who worship raw power and force, what are the words of a pope? This spring, Trump, who himself threatened Iran saying “a whole civilization will die tonight,” later falsely accused Pope Leo of supporting a nuclear-armed Iran.

In May, just before the NPT Review Conference, representatives from more than 100 faith organizations signed a joint interfaith statement calling for the creation of “a world free from nuclear weapons.” Signatories said that the NPT’s obligation to negotiate disarmament “has been deferred, diluted, and in many cases openly dismissed.”

Taking Enlightened Action

Soka Gakkai International (SGI), a prominent global Buddhist movement seeking the abolition of nuclear weapons, has focused on education and raising awareness about the dangers of nuclear war since the 1950s.

Anna Ikeda, SGI’s representative to the UN for disarmament, told Truthout that as a Buddhist movement, a core belief is that each person possesses “Buddhahood,” or enlightened nature, and is dignified and worthy of respect. Nuclear weapons, which she described as “the manifestation of our darkest tendencies,” impact the dignity of human life, human rights, and our ability to thrive as human beings, and they are diametrically opposed to what SGI values and believes.

Ikeda said that SGI wants to counter the myth that nuclear weapons are completely irrelevant to the lives of ordinary people. Discussion of these issues, she said, must not be limited to technical experts and policy wonks. “There’s this sort of disempowerment and we want to tackle that by educating people, informing them that this is an ongoing threat,” Ikeda said.

She acknowledges it is discouraging when political leaders aren’t listening, people don’t seem to care, and change happens faster than can reasonably be followed. But rather than give up, Ikeda said her faith tells her there is no other option than confront the threat. “My faith tells me that we must [act] … So in that sense, faith is so important to me. It fuels my action and hope.” She wants to believe that when there is a critical mass of people who care, government leaders have to pay attention.

An important challenge to the nuclear disarmament community is to increase engagement with people outside that bubble, said Ikeda. Faith groups can play a positive role by connecting the dots between nuclear weapons, human rights, social justice, and climate change.

Ikeda said there is an urgent need for more public engagement, harkening back to the grassroots movement of the 1980s, when global mass gatherings, protests, and an organized nuclear freeze movement proved effective in pressuring leaders who eventually slashed the number of nuclear warheads. In 1982, an estimated 1 million people marched from Central Park to the United Nations headquarters to demand nuclear disarmament. Today, collaboration between faith organizations can again motivate others to call for disarmament, Ikeda said.

SGI, along with the World Council of Churches, Pax Christi International, and other human rights and religious groups, are taking action to counter automated weapon systems through the Stop Killer Robots campaign. They are advocating at the UN and at regional levels against the integration of AI in targeting and other aspects of weapons.

“When we started to learn more about the advances in AI in the military domain, and the application in weapons, we really felt like it was the moment that we have to take a stance because it really defines who we are as human beings,” Ikeda said. “Do we let this technology get a hold of our capacity to destroy to a degree that we cannot even control?”

Facing the expansion of AI in weapons systems, including nuclear arsenals, Ikeda asks: “Is it really true that our ability to basically automate killing based on this algorithm and data how we create peace, or is there a better way?”