Foreign ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) industrialized countries at a meeting in Japan have called for a world without nukes. US Secretary of State John Kerry and G7 foreign ministers called for a “world without nuclear weapons”, citing North Korea’s sabre-rattling as a key challenge to achieving that goal. The top diplomats cited deteriorating security conditions in Syria, Ukraine and particularly the Korean Peninsula as key challenges to achieving the goal.

• The declaration comes as some of the G7 member states including the US and Britain possess huge nuclear stockpiles.
• Nuclear weapons states have refused to destroy or reduce their stocks of nuclear weapons despite repeated promises to do so.
• Some of the advanced economies are spending billions of dollars to upgrade their deadly weapons.

Did You Know?

• Kerry is the first secretary of state to visit Hiroshima, which was obliterated by an American nuclear bomb on August 6, 1945 that killed 140,000 people. Three days later, another blast killed some 74,000 people in Nagasaki, on the last days of World War two.
• There has never been an official apology from Washington for its nuclear bombing of the two Japanese cities.
• The G7 group consists of the seven wealthiest countries in the world as reported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), namely Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.
• The group has its origins in the Group of Six or G6 formed in 1975. It then changed to the G7 in 1976 with the addition of Canada, and to the G8 with Russia joining in 1998.
• In 2014, Russia was excluded from the group over the Ukrainian crisis. The European Union has participated in the summit since the 1980s.
• The G7 is now criticized for its representational deficit, not including the world’s largest emerging economies such as Brazil, India, China and South Africa, as well as Russia itself.