UN Secretary-General António Guterres, speaking in Japan on Saturday, August 6, on the 77th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, once again called on the world to completely abandon nuclear weapons. “Crisis with serious nuclear implications are spreading rapidly – from the Middle East to the Korean Peninsula and the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Guterres said at a memorial ceremony at the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima. “Humanity is playing with a loaded gun,” he added.

Guterres addressed conference participants to review the operation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in New York with a call for an urgent end to the world’s nuclear arsenals “that threaten our future”. “We must always remember the horrors of Hiroshima and recognize that the only solution to the nuclear threat is the complete absence of nuclear weapons,” Guterres said.

For the first time in 12 years, the UN Secretary-General participated in the annual event dedicated to the memory of the victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Representatives from Russia and Belarus were not invited, points out the dpa agency.

The resumption of the nuclear arms race

According to the Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), at the beginning of 2021, nine countries had 13,080 nuclear warheads, by 2022 this number had dropped to 12,705. However, the decrease in arsenal was not due to disarmament, but to the withdrawal of obsolete US and Russian systems. The number of active warheads has barely changed over the year.

After Russia attacked Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin put Russian deterrent forces “in a special mode of combat readiness”. “The prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now possible again,” Guterres said after the start of the war.