Any use of nuclear weapons will trigger a humanitarian Armageddon.
On Monday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres again called to the global abolition of nuclear weapons amid new threats by the President of the Russian Federation to use them in the war against Ukraine.
“Decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are once again hearing the rattling of nuclear swords,” Guterres said. at a special session of the General Assembly dedicated to nuclear disarmament.
“Let me be clear – the era of nuclear blackmail must end,” he said.
“The idea that any country can fight and win a nuclear war is wrong. Any use of nuclear weapons will provoke a humanitarian Armageddon,” he said.
“There can be no peace without the elimination of nuclear weapons,” Guterres emphasized, AFP reports.
In a speech last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a thinly veiled threat to use nuclear weapons after Ukrainian forces retook land seized by Moscow during its seven-month invasion.
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US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken replied that Washington had told Moscow, in particular through private channels, about the “catastrophic” consequences of any use of nuclear weapons.
< Guterres expressed his disappointment that a conference held last month to review the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons failed to reach a consensus.
Russia blocked the outcome after the draft document supported Ukraine's control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, whose occupation by Moscow has sparked fears of a major accident.
The US condemned Russia's position. But no nuclear power has supported the UN treaty adopted in 2017, which called for a comprehensive ban on nuclear weapons, with the support of mainly developing countries.
No country has used nuclear weapons on the battlefield except the United States in 1945, when they destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people. A few days later, Imperial Japan surrendered, ending World War II.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, in a speech to the General Assembly last week, pledged to work for a “world without nuclear weapons.”
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“The threat of using nuclear weapons, as Russia has done, let alone the actual use of nuclear weapons, is a serious threat to the peace and security of the international community and is completely unacceptable,” Kishida said.
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