UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday urged the United States and Russia to urgently negotiate a new nuclear arms control agreement, warning.
That the expiry of the New START treaty marks a “grave moment for international peace and security.” The landmark pact, which expires on Thursday, will formally free Washington and Moscow from all remaining limits on their strategic nuclear arsenals.
“For the first time in more than half a century, we face a world without any binding constraints on the strategic nuclear arsenals of the Russian Federation and the United States of America,” Guterres said in a statement.
He noted that New START and earlier arms control agreements had “drastically improved the security of all peoples,” and cautioned that their collapse comes at an especially dangerous time.
“This dissolution of decades of achievement could not come at a worse moment — the risk of a nuclear weapon being used is the highest it has been in decades,” he said, without elaborating.
Guterres called on both countries “to return to the negotiating table without delay and to agree upon a successor framework.”
Russia and the United States together possess more than 80 per cent of the world’s nuclear warheads, but bilateral arms control agreements have steadily eroded in recent years.
Signed in 2010, New START capped each side’s deployed strategic nuclear warheads at 1,550 — nearly 30 per cent lower than limits set under the 2002 treaty. It also permitted on-site inspections of nuclear facilities, though these inspections were suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic and have yet to resume.
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