Over the summer, the Global Nobel Laureates Assembly on Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Weapons took place at the Vatican’s Borgo Laudato Si’. At the meeting, the participants assembled adopted the Rome Declaration: Humanity at the Thresholds: A Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Weapons. The statement included six principles aimed at disarming the AI arms race through responsible development, use, governance, and leadership, while working towards still disarming the previous nuclear arms race. Reports on the meeting quoted several Nobel laureates and even actress and activist Sharon Stone.
One of the Catholic Re-Visions co-conveners, Jacques Linder, sat down with one of the participants of the Assembly, Ira Helfand, MD, co-founder of the Physicians for Social Responsibility, member of the steering committee for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, and past president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. In the following interview from August 25, 2026, he provides some background on how this meeting emerged, where the Vatican’s influence was present, and what the connection between Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Weapons means for those organizing against these threats.
Jacques Linder: Thank you, Dr. Ira Helfand, for joining me in this conversation about the most recent meeting of Nobel Laureates at Castel Gandolfo. Could you provide some background on how this meeting came about and what its purpose was?
Ira Helfand: Sure. The meeting was initiated by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. One of our doctors, Dr. James Mueller, a cardiologist in Boston, met in October with Cardinal Tomasi at the Vatican and proposed that there be a meeting at the Vatican to talk about the danger of nuclear war, as an effort to draw attention to the teachings of the Catholic Church on this issue.
Internationally, I think the community of people working to prevent nuclear war has been greatly heartened by the very clear position taken by Pope Francis and reiterated by Pope Leo: that nuclear weapons pose an existential threat that must be eliminated. That is to say, the weapons themselves must be eliminated. The Vatican was the first country to sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and has been steadfast in its support for that treaty ever since.
Unfortunately, although the Vatican within diplomatic circles has spoken very forcefully on this issue, many, many people are unaware of the Church’s teaching on the need to eliminate nuclear weapons. The hope was that this meeting would be a way of drawing attention to the Church’s teaching, and perhaps also encouraging the Church itself to be more active in promoting its own teaching on this question.
Given Pope Leo’s intense concern about the dangers posed by artificial intelligence, the conference kind of morphed into a combined event focusing on the intersection of artificial intelligence and nuclear war.
Jacques Linder: Looking at the program, how did the conversations at the meeting produce the Rome Declaration? And as someone who works with Back from the Brink and IPPNW, what are you and your organizations taking away from the declaration?
Ira Helfand: The attendees were a cross-section of people from the Nobel Peace Laureate community, a group of other Nobel Laureates from the sciences and economics, experts on artificial intelligence from several of the major artificial intelligence corporations in the United States, and people from the disarmament community.
There was a very lively conversation about the extreme danger posed by the mating of artificial intelligence with nuclear weapons command-and-control systems. It was interesting that people who represented, or who at least work at, major artificial intelligence companies were putting forward this danger quite clearly.
There was some controversy within the group about the nuclear weapons question—whether to focus on the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons as the necessary solution to the danger, or whether we should focus instead on interim measures and defer work on abolition to the indefinite future.
We at the IPPNW and the Back from the Brink campaign here in the United States believe strongly that we need to be putting forward now the need to eliminate these weapons. Both because it is necessary—the danger of nuclear war is great, and we’re not talking about a danger 20 or 30 years from now. We’re talking about a danger right now, this month, this year, this decade. And also because we think it’s possible. A mystique has grown up around nuclear weapons where they’re viewed as part of the natural order, almost, and the idea of getting rid of them is dismissed as being unrealistic. We are putting forward the view that, on the contrary, it’s unrealistic to think we’re going to maintain these arsenals and not have something catastrophic happen.
Ultimately, the conference in its Rome Declaration did include very strong language about the urgent need to move now for the elimination of these weapons, and we were quite gratified by that outcome.
Jacques Linder: Could you say a bit more about the risks that artificial intelligence poses to the nuclear question, and how the groups you work with are thinking about it?
Ira Helfand: At the most fundamental level, we simply don’t know what artificial intelligence is going to do to nuclear command-and-control systems. This is a technology which even the people who’ve created it admit we don’t understand. We don’t know how it works, and we don’t know what it’s going to do.
We’re performing this experiment on a global scale that puts all of humanity at risk. It’s as if someone had come up with a new medical treatment that might have some good effects but might also have terrible effects. And to find out which is the case, we’re making everybody on the planet take this treatment. Then we’re going to see what happens.
No one would allow such an experiment to take place in the medical world, and we shouldn’t allow it to take place in the world of artificial intelligence. That’s the best light you can put on the artificial intelligence situation.
In fact, there’s much reason to believe that it will have very negative consequences, primarily because it’s just speeding up the decision-making. In the event of a nuclear crisis, the heads of the United States, Russia, and China would have very little time to make a decision about what to do. If they get an alarm that nuclear missiles have been launched against their country, they literally have five to ten minutes to decide what to do. They have to evaluate whether this is a real attack or a false alarm, and there have been many false alarms in the past that have brought us to within minutes of nuclear war.
When we get a warning, we’re not going to know what role artificial intelligence devices played in generating that warning. And we’re not going to know if this is a true warning, an artificial intelligence hallucination, or artificial intelligence deliberately misleading us because of some internal bias that’s been built into the device.
And we’re not going to have time to evaluate these questions.
This is assuming, by the way, that there’s still a human in the loop—that the ultimate decision is being made by a human being.
Jacques Linder: I appreciate the reports of some of the investigative journalists who are letting people know what AI models the government relies on within their chain of command, such as Grok and ChatGPT, and of course the fight between DoD and Anthropic. What does the integration and progress of these technologies mean for your organizing efforts?
Ira Helfand: Let’s just say the technology is progressing, and the development of the technology is progressing at breathtaking speed. There is sort of an arms race within the AI world. The companies here in the United States that are developing AI are terrified that they’re going to fall behind their competitors and lose the market.
And as a group, they’re terrified that the Chinese will get ahead of American AI development and create a significant economic and military advantage for China. This arms-race mentality is leading AI to be developed as quickly as possible, not as safely as possible.
We’ve seen this now with Anthropic. They actually asked for a pause on AI development in June because they have become so concerned that this is out of control at this point.
And when you take this out-of-control technology and integrate it into nuclear command-and-control systems, this is a recipe for disaster, which we are not responding to adequately.
And since I don’t think it’s possible at this point to control AI, this situation becomes a powerful argument—further argument—for the need to eliminate nuclear weapons.
Jacques Linder: I’m wondering what the Back from the Brink campaign or IPPNW is doing on the ground to eliminate these weapons. And what steps would you recommend that others take? What does the organizing work look like, and what could regular people do?
Ira Helfand: Back from the Brink has launched a national campaign in the United States to try to bring about fundamental change in U.S. nuclear policy, leading to the elimination of these weapons. Specifically, we’re calling on the United States government to sit down now with the leaders of the other eight countries that have nuclear weapons, help them understand the extraordinary danger that we face today, understand the likely outcome if we continue with the current nuclear policy—which is nuclear war—and convince these governments to join with us in eliminating these weapons once and for all.
We do not believe that any of the countries which have nuclear weapons will give up their arsenal unilaterally. And so this must be an effort that involves all of them. What we hope will happen is that the leaders of the nine nuclear-armed states will sit down together and negotiate an agreement for the verifiable, enforceable elimination of their nuclear arsenals according to an agreed-upon timetable.
This could be done in a relatively short period of time. The negotiations could probably be completed in one to two years, and the process of actually dismantling the weapons would take another three or four years. It is relatively simple, actually, compared to, for example, dealing with the climate crisis, which requires huge changes in every aspect of the way we live.
It’s a very ambitious goal, but it’s a necessary goal. This is what has to happen if we’re going to survive the current crisis.
In the 1980s, we were literally on the brink of nuclear war then also. In 1983, the United States deployed Pershing missiles in Europe with a stated goal of being able to fight and win a nuclear war in Europe. This was a totally crazy proposition, but it was U.S. policy at the time. After the deployment of those missiles, we almost went to war with the Soviet Union twice, in September and again in November. The situation could not have been more dangerous.
And yet, less than two years later, Reagan and Gorbachev sat down and said nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought. They essentially ended the Cold War arms race, something which in 1983 everyone would have said was impossible. It took two years.
I think that the same kind of profound change in global nuclear policy can take place again. It’s going to require some visionary leadership in the nuclear-armed states, and it’s going to require a large mobilization of the public, which was the key ingredient back in the ’80s.
That’s what Back From the Brink is trying to do right now: build a similar movement in this country. We have gotten resolutions passed in 70 cities around the country. Six states now have had their state legislatures pass resolutions urging this course of action on the U.S. government, including most recently Massachusetts just a few weeks ago.
In Congress, we have a resolution before the House of Representatives that has 60 co-sponsors. In the Senate, we have a resolution that has 10 co-sponsors. More than 500 nongovernmental organizations have endorsed this campaign, including most of the national faith communities. We’ve demonstrated some significant progress toward creating this movement. There’s a long way that we need to go, but that long journey can take place in a fairly short period of time, as we have seen in the past.
Internationally, the IPPNW has been working very hard to reinvigorate the contacts that exist between physicians here in the United States and physicians in Russia and China. One of the key contributions that IPPNW was able to make in the ’80s was to create a common effort among American and Soviet doctors working together to bring about change in their governments’ policies.
We found a very receptive audience. People in the medical community in China were not aware of some of the more recent findings about the medical consequences of nuclear war. Specifically, they were not aware of the data about nuclear famine following even relatively limited nuclear war. They very quickly understood the implications of this data and are anxious to help us promote broader understanding within the Chinese medical community.
Jacques Linder: As we draw to a close, Pope Leo had a lot to say about these themes in Magnifica Humanitas. Did what Leo had to say about AI and nuclear weapons loom over the meeting in Rome? And does it help your groups think differently or more deeply about grappling with the existential risks that nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence pose to humanity?
Ira Helfand: I think most Catholics are not aware of the fact that the last two popes have both called unequivocally for the urgent need to eliminate nuclear weapons, and have said that the policy of deterrence, which got conditional approval back in the ’80s as an interim strategy as long as nuclear weapons existed, is now condemned by the Church as being unacceptable and posing unacceptable risks to humanity. That is a profoundly important contribution that the Church has made, and we do wish that the Church would raise its voice more loudly on the subject.
With regards to artificial intelligence, Pope Leo has played a very important role in focusing attention on the potential for harm with this technology. The emphasis, as I understand it, in Magnifica Humanitas is on the need for artificial intelligence to be used responsibly and wisely.
The one theme that came out at the conference in Rome that perhaps suggests that this position is not fully appreciative of the danger was the observation that technology is not always neutral.The assumption, I think, underlying the encyclical was that the technology is neutral—it depends on how we use it—and a charge to people to use it wisely.
It was pointed out by one of the speakers at the conference that technology isn’t necessarily neutral. Sometimes technology is designed in such a way that it predisposes people to use it poorly. Specifically, artificial intelligence is designed to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few people. For these reasons, I think we need to be even more concerned about the dangers posed by this technology. It’s not just that it may be misused. It’s that, by its design, it is probably going to be misused.
And to me, that becomes a very, very powerful argument for the urgent need to eliminate nuclear weapons, because artificial intelligence is being integrated into the command-and-control systems that determine how nuclear weapons will be used.
And if we can’t eliminate the artificial intelligence, and if the artificial intelligence is unreliable and dangerous, then we have to eliminate the weapons themselves.
We cannot let AI get the bomb.
