Pope calls for global ban on nuclear weapons

Pope Francis on Sunday, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, called for a global ban on nuclear weapons, reports the Patria news agency.

"In war there are only losers, the only way to win a war is not to wage it," Pope Francis said in his weekly address.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945 "have become a symbol of mankind's immense destructive power when it misuses the progress of science and technology," he said.

Those "tragic" bombings, he stressed, "are a constant appeal to humanity to forever reject war and ban nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction." In the attack on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, 74,000 people were killed and 80 percent of buildings were destroyed.