Kids deliver 80,000 no-nukes signatures

GENEVA — A group of 12 high school students Thursday presented 80,000 signatures calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons to the secretariat of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament in Geneva.

The group includes four students from the atomic-bombed prefectures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as two from Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, which was severely damaged by the March earthquake and tsunami.

It is the 14th time that Japanese high school messengers of peace have visited the U.N. office since 1998. The signatures were collected both in and outside Japan.

The cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are preparing to open this fall a permanent A-bomb exhibition at the U.N. European headquarters in Geneva, where the secretariat of the disarmament conference is housed.

"A permanent exhibition is an achievement of what we have done to date," said Nobuto Hirano, who once headed a group of the childrean of atomic-bomb victims. "It will help make the plain call (for abolition of nuclear weapons) of the peace messengers more concrete and persuasive."

The students are to return to Japan on Wednesday after conducting a signature-collecting campaign in the cities of Bern and Zurich.

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