Global Courant
Guterres says the world is entering a new nuclear arms race as North Korea accuses the US of bringing the country to the brink of war.
UN chief Antonio Guterres has warned of a “humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions” due to the geopolitical mistrust and competition that have escalated nuclear risk to Cold War levels.
“Any use of a nuclear weapon – anytime, anywhere and in any context – would unleash a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions,” he told the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, as North Korea warned that the US would allow it to came to the brink of war.
With an evolving nuclear order in which armed nations are expanding and modernizing their arsenals, the UN chief called on countries to strengthen their commitments to reduce and ultimately eliminate nuclear weapons.
In a rack Released on the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, Guterres reminded UN member states of the recently launched policy brief on a new agenda for peace – calling for a renewed commitment to the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.
“On this important day, we reaffirm our commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons and the humanitarian catastrophe their use would cause,” Guterres said in the statement.
“This means that nuclear weapon states are taking the lead in meeting their disarmament obligations and committing not to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances.”
North Korea on ‘the brink of nuclear war’
Meanwhile, in one of the final speeches of the weeklong UN General Assembly debate, North Korea accused the United States of bringing the peninsula “closer to the brink of nuclear war” because of its closer cooperation with South -Korea.
Kim Song, North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations, pointed to the recent creation of the Nuclear Consultative Group, through which the US hopes to better integrate its nuclear capabilities with South Korea’s conventional forces.
The two allies would step up information sharing and contingency planning, which Kim claimed would carry out a “preemptive nuclear strike” against North Korea.
“Because of its sycophantic and demeaning policy of depending on outside forces, the Korean Peninsula is in a hair-trigger situation with an imminent danger of nuclear war,” Kim said.
An envoy from South Korea took the floor to object to the comments.
“Do you really believe, as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea claims, that the Republic of Korea is conspiring with the United States to provoke a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula without reasons that will cause catastrophic casualties?” he asked.
Hours earlier, South Korea staged its first military parade in a decade, with some 4,000 troops marching through rainy Seoul.
Yoon Suk-yeol, the president of South Korea, had earlier said that “if North Korea uses nuclear weapons, its regime will end through an overwhelming response from the ROK-US alliance.”
Emerging nuclear weapons
In June this year, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported that the world’s nuclear powers, and China in particular, have increased investment in their arsenals for the third consecutive year in 2022.
While the total number of nuclear warheads held by Britain, China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia and the United States had fallen by about 1.6 percent to 12,512 over the past year, SIPRI said the declining trend was increasing. harbinger of a turnaround.
