Guterres warns: Is the world witnessing a nuclear war?
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has warned that the world is facing risks unseen since the Cold War era and is “one step unmeasured” away from a devastating nuclear war.
In a press statement quoted by the BBC, Guterres added, “Amid the escalation of tension in the world, humanity is one misunderstanding or one slip away from nuclear annihilation.”
The UN chief said: The “luck” that has allied the world to avert a nuclear catastrophe may not last, and the world is urged to renew the push for the disarmament of all such weapons.
“Luck is not a strategy, nor does it protect against geopolitical tensions that are boiling over into a nuclear conflict”, Guterres said.
He warned that those global tensions were reaching high levels, referring specifically to the Russian-Ukrainian war and tensions on the Korean peninsula and the Middle East, for example.
Guterres made his statement at the opening of the Conference of the States Signatories of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which was signed in 1968, after what was known as the Cuban missile crisis, an event that was portrayed as being the closest to causing a global nuclear war. Subsequently, a number of States acceded to the Treaty with the ultimate goal of preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Around 13,000 nuclear weapons are likely to be in the arsenals of the 9 nuclear powers, far fewer than the estimated 60,000 in the mid-1980s.
