“Humanity will not be able to survive an Oppenheimer sequel,” stressed Antonio Guterres in reference to the Oscar-winning film biography of the man considered the father of the atonic bomb.
The Secretary General of the United Nations (UN) sounded all the alarms in the Security Council on Monday due to the escalation of a possible nuclear conflict, at the highest point in decades.
“The clock of the end of the world is ticking loud enough for everyone to hear it,” he insisted in a session dedicated to nuclear disarmament and the non-proliferation of these weapons that Japan convened in its capacity as president of the council this month. “Japan knows better than any other country the brutal cost of nuclear massacre,” Guterres insisted, alluding to the application in 1945 of the technological development led by the American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.
“Nearly eighty years after the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons represent a clear and present danger to global peace and security,” he continued.
After recalling that in 2018 he launched the disarmament agenda, in which he warned that there would be an increase in the threat if each country sought its security without taking into account the others, the secretary general remarked that “we find that geopolitical tensions and mistrust have escalated the risk of nuclear war to the highest level in decades.” We must go back to the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962.
“Nuclear weapons are the most destructive weapons ever invented, capable of eliminating all life on earth,” he recalled. “An accidental launch is a mistake, a miscalculation, a reckless act,” he added.
He maintained that academics and civil society leaders demand an end to nuclear madness, that Pope Francis describes the possession of these weapons as “immoral” or that young people around the planet are worried about their future “and ask for changes.” Even Hollywood, he reiterated, shows with the Oppenheimer film “the harsh reality of the end of the lives of millions of people around the world.”
Guterres stressed that all voices demand to take a step back and stop being on the edge of the precipice. “Which is the answer? The states that possess nuclear weapons are absent from the dialogue table,” he denounced.
“Investments in weapons of war exceed investments in tools of peace. Budgets for weapons are growing, while those for diplomacy and development are shrinking,” he insisted.
Furthermore, emerging technology such as artificial intelligence only exposes new vulnerabilities and creates more risks, as countries continue to pour resources into the new nuclear architecture, expanding the danger.
Without citing Russian President Vladimir Putin, so given to the rhetoric of the nuclear threat, Guterres criticized that “some statements have raised the possibility of causing a nuclear hell.” Faced with this, “we must denounce it clearly and forcefully,” he claimed.
However, these weapons are growing “in power, range and stealth,” he added. And all humanity will pay the price. “A nuclear war should never be fought, because a nuclear war will never be won,” she predicted.
He indicated the only possible way to avoid that tragic fate. “We need disarmament now.” For this, there must be dialogue, transparency and trust among nuclear countries in the measures against this weaponry, as well as establishing controls so that new technologies do not lead to this threat.
What happened in the session? The United States and Russia, which reiterated how catastrophic the use of nuclear weapons would be, accused each other of increasing that danger.
