United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called the new nuclear “arms race” unfolding on Tuesday (9/26/2023) “madness,” while North Korea warned that the Korean peninsula is “on the brink of nuclear war” due to the Attitude of the USA and South Korea”.
“I am committed (…) to do everything in my power to mobilize countries around the need to remove these devices from the earth’s surface,” Guterres said on the occasion of the International Day for the Total Abolition of Nuclear Weapons. which coincided with the end of the UN General Assembly’s high-level week in New York.
“It’s urgent. A worrying arms race is brewing. The number of nuclear weapons could increase for the first time in decades,” he warned, lamenting that “the global disarmament and non-proliferation architecture is crumbling.”
Nuclear arsenals are being “modernized to make these weapons faster, more precise and less conspicuous,” he warned. “The nuclear sabers are ringing again,” he said, calling it “madness” before making a case for “reversing” the arms race.
“The only way to prevent the use of nuclear weapons is to eliminate them” before they can “trigger a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions,” he said.
Although he did not mention any state, the fear of nuclear conflict resurfaced with Russia’s nuclear threats after the invasion of Ukraine or North Korea’s race.
Amid rising geopolitical tensions, the nuclear arsenals of several countries, particularly China, grew in 2022, even as other nuclear powers continued to modernize their arsenals, according to a report published in June by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri).
The total number of nuclear warheads among the nine nuclear powers – Britain, China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, the United States and Russia – fell from 12,710 in early 2022 to 12,512 in early 2023, according to Sipri.
However, researchers fear that the trend will reverse.
In particular, Iran, which denies that it wants to acquire nuclear weapons, but whose reserves of enriched uranium have exceeded the amounts authorized in the 2015 agreement on Iran’s civilian nuclear program.
And North Korea, which warned at the United Nations on Tuesday that the Korean peninsula was “on the brink of nuclear war,” blaming Washington and its strategy in Asia.
gs (afp, TRT World)