COMMENTARY / World

The new urgency of nuclear disarmament

Some 60 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world finds itself again faced with the threat of nuclear escalation

The president of the International Red Cross, Peter Maurer (left), and Austria's international affairs minister, Alexander Schallenberg, hold a news conference prior to the start of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons Meeting in Vienna on Tuesday. | AFP-JIJI

By Phil Twyford and Alexander Schallenberg
Project Syndicate

Jun 22, 2022

VIENNA/WELLINGTON –

Austria and New Zealand may be far apart geographically, but we are connected by shared values and principles.

Particularly relevant today is our longstanding opposition to nuclear weapons and our shared concern about the lack of progress on nuclear disarmament.

While the threat of nuclear weapons never went away after the end of the Cold War, steep cuts to nuclear stockpiles in the early 1990s represented progress. But the trend toward disarmament stalled. Three decades on, nine nuclear-armed states possess some 13,000 nuclear warheads, and, far from phasing out their arsenals, these states are modernizing and expanding them. The risks of nuclear escalation, miscalculation and accident are mounting, even though we have a better understanding than ever of the catastrophic consequences that would follow from the use of nuclear weapons.