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Guterres says that the world has been “lucky” not to have suffered a nuclear war.
The world is one miscalculation away from a devastating nuclear war, a risk not seen since the Cold War, the UN secretary-general has warned.
“Until now we have had extraordinary luck,” Antonio Guterres said on Monday.
At a time of rising global tensions “humanity is only a misunderstanding, a miscalculationof nuclear annihilation,” he said.
Guterres offered this reflection at the beginning of a conference of the signatory countries of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The agreement was signed in 1968, five years following the Cuban missile crisis, an event often described as the closest the world came to nuclear war.
The NPT was designed to stop the spread of nuclear weapons to more countries and move toward the ultimate goal of complete nuclear disarmament.
Almost every nation on the planet signed the treaty, including the five largest atomic powers.
But, among the States that never signed it, four are known or suspected of possessing nuclear weapons: North Korea, India, Israel and Pakistan.
The UN secretary general considered that the “luck” that the world has had so far to avoid a nuclear catastrophe may not last and urged the international community to join a new drive to eliminate all these weapons.
“Luck is not a strategy. Nor is it a shield once morest geopolitical tensions that lead to a nuclear conflict,” he said.
And he warned that these international tensions are “reaching new heights”, with references to the invasion of Ukraine, tensions on the Korean peninsula and conflicts in the Middle East.
image source, Getty Images
Putin has been accused of raising tensions and the risk of nuclear war since the invasion of Ukraine.
Russia has been accused of escalating tensions when, days following invading Ukraine in February, its president, Vladimir Putin, put on high alert to the powerful nuclear forces of his country.
He also threatened anyone who stood in Russia’s way with consequences “unseen in its history.”
Russia’s nuclear strategy contemplates using atomic weapons if the state’s existence is threatened.
Putin delivered a statement to the non-proliferation conference on Monday in which he said “there can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be triggered.”
Despite this, Russia was criticized at the NPT conference.
The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, condemned Russia’s war escalation and recalled that In 1994 Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons. of the Soviet era following receiving guarantees of future security from Russia and other countries.
“What message does this send to any country in the world that might think of the need to have nuclear weapons to protect, defend, deter, an assault on their sovereignty and independence?” he asked.
And he replied: “The worst possible message.”
There are an estimated 13,000 atomic weapons in service today in the arsenals of the nine states with nuclear military capabilities, well below the approximately 60,000 in stock in the mid-1980s.
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