CHRISTIAN anti-nuclear campaigners last month lobbied the London embassies of UN member states involved in discussions on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and new talks on a worldwide ban of weapons of mass destruction.

Each year, members of the Christian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament stage an Embassies Walk, on which they make pre-arranged visits to diplomats of a variety of countries to seek support for their campaign. This year, after a service at St Martin-in-the-Fields, they held talks at the church with Indonesian officials before visiting 17 embassies.

“It is not a march — there are no banners or placards,” the campaign’s spokesman, Michael Pulham, said. “At some, we just handed in a letter listing questions we would like them to consider, while at others we were invited in to talk to officials. . .

“We are a single-issue campaign; so we only talk about nuclear weapons. We are pressing the members of the UN to achieve the treaty. These are nations we consider to be crucial in all this; some of them have nuclear weapons, but many are opposed to them.”

The campaign has been organising the walk since the Millennium, to support progress on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This year it is also lobbying in support of negotiations on a ban on nuclear weapons. The diplomats’ responses to questionswill help to inform the observers being sent to the proliferation talks in Vienna, and the weapons-ban discussion at the UN in New York.

The embassies visited were: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Egypt, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States.