The UN chief denounced on Tuesday the “pure madness” of a new atomic “arms race”, while North Korea threatened the United States and South Korea to be “on the verge of a nuclear war” on the Korean peninsula.
“I am committed (…) to doing everything in my power to mobilize countries around the need to remove these destructive devices from the face of the earth,” declared Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
“There is urgency. A worrying arms race is brewing. The number of nuclear weapons could increase for the first time in decades,” he warned, regretting that “the global architecture of disarmament and non-proliferation disintegrates.
“Thanks to the modernization of nuclear arsenals, these weapons are becoming faster, more precise and more stealthy. Once again, the threat of resorting to nuclear weapons is being brandished. This is pure madness. We must reverse the steam,” insisted Antonio Guterres.
“The world has lived in the shadow of nuclear weapons for too long. Let us move away from the precipice,” he implored.
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.
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 — Britain, 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 regions 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 driving the Korean peninsula towards a military situation on the brink of nuclear war”, warned its ambassador to the UN Kim Song.
Attacking American policy in the region, he denounced a “current, dangerous situation (which) 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 a nuclear war”.
Seoul would be “obsessed with voluntary submission to the United States and with fratricidal confrontation,” concluded the North Korean diplomat.
On the other side of the world, Seoul organized its first major military parade in ten years on Tuesday with unprecedented American participation, a show of force at a time when tensions with Pyongyang are at their height.
“If North Korea uses nuclear weapons, its regime will be stopped by an overwhelming response from the U.S.-South Korean alliance,” President Yoon Suk Yeol, a conservative who has stepped up military cooperation with states, previously said. -United States and Japan.
“Do you really believe, as North Korea claims, that South Korea and the United States are plotting to provoke a nuclear war on the peninsula?” one of Seoul’s representatives said at the UN on Tuesday, calling these “allegations” are “absurd”.
09/26/2023 22:18:56 – United Nations (United States) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP