There is good reason to believe that Pope Leo XIV already has, or will soon have on his desk the “Appeal to Pope Leo XIV to Organize a Global Leaders Summit to Address the Questions of Peace and Nuclear Disarmament”, which was issued on August 19 and has already gathered signatures from political, religious and social leaders from around the world—including two former heads of government.
Theirs is an urgent appeal to the Pope, “as the leader who has made the greatest effort to speak for humanity as a whole, instead of for specific nations, religions, or constituencies, to call for an emergency international summit to guide the world away from the current path of war and potential nuclear disaster and to peacefully resolve the greatest crises facing humanity today.”
And none too soon.
The week’s developments have dragged the world into the very anteroom of nuclear war. It is not just the talk of the possible use of nuclear weapons, which is dangerous enough in itself:
President Trump’s reported current consideration of employing a tactical nuclear weapon against Iran, for the third time in his two terms in office;
the promotion earlier this month of lowering the threshold of nuclear war and use of tactical nuclear weapons by Elbridge Colby, the Under Secretary of War for Policy; the late 2024 discussion by US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) spokesman Rear Admiral Thomas Buchanan that the U.S. would consider using nuclear weapons so long as it could preserve a sufficient reserve for a second strike;
and the 2022 call for creating a “Cuban missile crisis on steroids” in Crimea to have a nuclear showdown with Russia, issued by Malcolm Chalmers, then Deputy Director General of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank of London, who today is Strategic Advisor to the Secretary of State for Defense in the U.K.
The talk of general war is now morphing into direct military engagements in Central Europe between NATO forces and purported Russian drones—twice in less than a week. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche today told the 168th weekly meeting of the International Peace Coalition:
“I think this may be the most important meeting of the International Peace Coalition ever, for the very reason that the concern which has brought us together finds a more dangerous situation—the potential of an escalation of the regional crisis in Southwest Asia, and Ukraine for that matter—that these could go out of control, and have never been as acute as now.”
Zepp-LaRouche explained that “the two wars, Ukraine and Southwest Asia… are one in any case, because the real reason has nothing to do with the regional historic specificities, but it is the underlying geostrategic collapse of the old order and the effort by powers in the West to not allow a new system to emerge, as it is expressed by the countries of the Global South, who want to end 500 years of colonialism.”
She urged the IPC participants to move Heaven and Earth to widely circulate the open letter to the Pope worldwide, since we are in a race against time.
She added: “I think the one big factor which we have to bring in is the Global South, because already at the Bandung Conference, the first Asian-African countries conference in 1955 in Indonesia, President Sukarno and Prime Minister Nehru said that, if it ever comes to nuclear war, maybe the countries of the Global South will be hit a couple of weeks later than others, but eventually they will die as well.
“So therefore, when some irresponsible forces in the West are playing with the extinction of the human species,” Zepp-LaRouche emphasized, “this is a topic which concerns everybody in Africa, in Latin America, in Asia. And given the fact that the Global South is the Global Majority, I think we have to catapult the leaders and the people from these continents into the debate.”
