UN treaty members seek to prevent ‘absolute evil’ of nuclear war theSun theSundaily nuclear weapons war Russian NATO
: Suechi Kido was five years old when he lived through the bombing of Nagasaki. This week he has been in Vienna to meet the architects of a new treaty that seeks to abolish nuclear weapons.
In a press conference opening the meeting on Tuesday, Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg alluded to the ways Russia's invasion of Ukraine had raised the spectre of nuclear conflict. Collin told AFP the volatile conflict in Ukraine shows “we can’t simply rely on the belief that will never happen”.Amid heightened tensions, the world’s major powers “appear to be increasing the salience of nuclear weapons in their military strategies”, according to a report earlier this month from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
He hopes Russian President Vladimir Putin’s references to the possibility of using nuclear weapons can serve as “a wake up call to move away from the nuclear deterrence paradigm, which is precarious and risky”.