The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, currently visiting the Anglican Church in Japan, on September 24 took part in an Act of Remembrance at the epicenter of the atomic bomb blast in Nagasaki. Dr Williams laid flowers at the memorial and spoke about the pressing importance of working for a world free from nuclear weapons:

"There are no victories in human history without their element of tragedy. Victory in human affairs always means that someone has lost ...sometimes the victory has been gained at the price of such violence that we have to say that everyone has lost. Those who have won the conflict have lost some dimension of their own life, their own welfare and integrity."

"To see the effects of the use of the atomic bomb here in Nagasaki is to see how this degree of slaughter and violence leaves everyone defeated. The wholesale killing of the innocent and the destruction of an entire environment, natural as well as cultural, the long-term effects, physical and psychological, on those who survived – all of this constitutes a would that affects the attackers as well as the victims."

"The Catholic writer Ronald Knox, commenting in 1945 upon the events that took place in August that year, said that the bomb was an attack on faith, hope and love – an attack on the central virtues of Christian existence."

"That attack will continue so long as weapons of mass destruction like nuclear armaments are used as threats in international conflict. They are necessarily indiscriminate; that is, the will always kill the innocent. They destroy the living environment; they have long-term effects on every aspect of the material and organic world. To plan a strategy around such weapons is to be defeated by them. To threaten such an outrage against humanity and its world is to begin to lose one’s moral and human dignity."

"To work for a world free from nuclear arms is to work for the sake of that moral and human dignity."

"It is tempting to think that the task is too difficult. Once we have discovered this destructive technology, we cannot pretend it does not exist. Yet equally we cannot -- if we are serious about our human dignity -- behave as though we had no choice … However precisely we seek to make real the hope of a world without nuclear arms, we should not lose sight of the need to make real moral choices about them. Even a small step is an act of witness."

The archbishop also paid a visit to the memorial to the 26 Christian martyrs who were crucified in 1549. Dr Williams offered prayers alongside the Most Rev Joseph Mitsuaki Takami, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Nagasaki.