UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Tuesday denounced the “pure madness” of a new nuclear “arms race”, while North Korea warned of a Korean peninsula “on the brink of nuclear war”. “.
” I’m engaged […] to do everything in my power to mobilize countries around the need to remove these devices of destruction from the face of the earth,” Guterres said on the final day of the high-level session of the General Assembly of the United Nations 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 denounced, regretting that “the global architecture of disarmament and non-proliferation is falling apart.”
“Thanks to the modernization of nuclear arsenals, these weapons are becoming faster, more precise and more stealthy. Once again, the threat of the use of nuclear weapons is raised. This is pure madness. We must turn the tide,” insisted António Guterres.
In this context, he called on nuclear powers to “show the way” by pledging to “never, under any circumstances, use nuclear weapons”.
“The world has lived in the shadow of nuclear weapons for too long. Let’s move away from the precipice,” he further pleaded, hoping that these weapons could be relegated “to the rank of vestiges of the past”.
The secretary general did not name any country but his remarks on the occasion of the international day for the total elimination of nuclear weapons come at a time when the war in Ukraine has awakened fears of the use of atomic weapons.
“Fratricidal confrontation”
Amid heightened geopolitical tensions, the nuclear arsenals of several countries, China in particular, increased in 2022 while other nuclear powers continued to modernize their tools, according to a report by researchers published in June.
The total number of nuclear warheads among the nine nuclear powers — the United Kingdom, China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, the United States and Russia — fell to 12,512 at the start of 2023, from 12,710 at the start of 2022. according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Researchers fear, however, that the world has reached the end of a long period of decline in the number of nuclear weapons.
Certain parts of the world worry the international community.
In particular Iran, which denies wanting to obtain nuclear weapons but whose stocks of enriched uranium have exceeded the levels authorized by the 2015 agreement on Iranian civilian nuclear power.
And North Korea, which warned on Tuesday at the UN that the peninsula was “on the verge of a nuclear war”, pointing the finger at Washington and its strategy in Asia.
The “reckless” actions and “continued hysteria of the United States and its allies in terms of nuclear confrontation […] are leading the Korean peninsula towards a military situation on the brink of nuclear war,” warned its UN ambassador Kim Song in a speech to the General Assembly.
Attacking American policy in the region, he denounced a “current, dangerous situation [qui] is the work of the United States, which seeks to perfect its hegemonic ambition by all means by overestimating its power.
For the representative of Kim Jong-un’s communist regime, “the responsibility also lies” with South Korea which “seeks to impose the scourge of nuclear war”.
Seoul would be “obsessed with voluntary submission to the United States and with fratricidal confrontation,” concluded the North Korean diplomat.