Jonathan Frerichs, a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, has spent 40 years working in the field of peacebuilding and disarmament with the Middle East Council of Churches, Lutheran World Relief, the World Council of Churches and is currently Pax Christi International’s representative for disarmament at the United Nations in Geneva.

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Our Apocalypse-in-Waiting

by Jonathan Frerichs 07-24-2025
80 years after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, how can Christians abolish the first global threat entirely of humanity’s own making?

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Robert Gilhooly / The Hiroshima Peace Museum / Alamy
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THIS AUGUST MARKS 80 years since U.S. president Harry Truman issued orders to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The impact was so terrible that no head of state has done so since. Yet, eight decades later, 12,000 nuclear weapons are deployed around the world — a veritable apocalypse-in-waiting.

While many people are accustomed to thinking of climate change as our existential threat, we may overlook that nuclear arsenals are the first global threat entirely of humanity’s own making.

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