“Nuclear disarmament in our time is a utopian idea”, says the assistant director of the Department of External Relations of the Patriarchate of Moscow, Father Vsevolod Chaplin. “I stress – writes Chaplin in a letter published in the journal “Index of Security” – that all weapons, and especially nuclear weapons, are an evil. But evil cannot be avoided in the world, corrupted by sin”. The Russian Orthodox priest says he is convinced that “until the Second Coming of Christ there will be a struggle for power and conflicts between peoples. The contemporary world is far more dangerous than that in the time of the Cold War, because, with technological progress, the control of the spread of nuclear weapons is becoming ever more problematic and the idea of total disarmament is being transformed into utopia”. With the expansion of the number of countries possessing nuclear armaments the threat of nuclear terrorism increases and now it’s not a question of knowing whether, but when, nuclear technologies will fall into the hands of terrorists”. “There are those who want to build a global America – concludes Father Chaplin -, others a universal caliphate. All claim that their values are universal. But if both sides don’t learn to live together in peace, global conflict will be imminent. That’s why we are faced by the urgent task of promoting dialogue between the religions and civilizations”.
