Aviano, Ghedi mayors sign petition to ban possession of nuclear weapons

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Aviano, Ghedi mayors sign petition to ban possession of nuclear weapons
By Kent Harris, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Tuesday, December 18, 2007

AVIANO, Italy — The mayors of two towns in Italy with U.S. bases thought to house nuclear missiles have signed onto a petition calling for a global end to such weapons by 2020.

Stefano Del Cont, mayor of Aviano since June, said he and Anna Giulia Guarneri, the mayor of Ghedi, joined hundreds of other city leaders around the globe in seeking the ban. They’re all members of Mayors for Peace, an organization started in the 1980s by the mayor of Hiroshima — one of two Japanese cities hit by atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

Del Cont, who calls himself an independent on the moderate left, said he was “absolutely not” calling for Americans to pack up and leave Aviano. The Italian and American populations have been intertwined for decades, he said, and he doesn’t want to change that.

But he said in an interview Monday that he saw no justification for having nuclear weapons on base — especially with the end of the Cold War — and believed they should never be used.

Officials at Aviano have a long-standing policy of not saying if the base has such munitions.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=51077