United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday called the expiration of the New START treaty a grave moment for international peace and security and urged Russia and the United States to negotiate a new nuclear arms control framework without delay.
New START, which was due to run out at midnight on Wednesday, capped the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the United States and Russia can deploy, and the deployment of land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers to deliver them.
“For the first time in more than half a century, we face a world without any binding limits on the strategic nuclear arsenals of the Russian Federation and the United States of America – the two States that possess the overwhelming majority of the global stockpile of nuclear weapons,” Guterres said in a statement.
He said the dissolution of decades of achievement in arms control, “could not come at a worse time – the risk of a nuclear weapon being used is the highest in decades.”
