US, Russian nuclear shift as dangerous as N Korean threat

GENEVA: A recent shift in nuclear weapons policies in the United States and Russia, involving upgrades, modernisation and growing arsenals is as dangerous as North Korea’s nuclear threat, campaigners warned Thursday.

Beatrice Fihn, who heads the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), hailed an upcoming summit between the United States and North Korean in what Washington hopes will persuade Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

But she said there needed to be more focus on the dangers posed by the United States and other traditional nuclear-armed states, which have recently engaged in “dangerous escalatory activities.”

“The new nuclear policies from the United States and Russia that increase the arsenals and create new types of more usable nuclear weapons, these are very dangerous changes,” she told journalists in Geneva.

“I think they are equally dangerous as North Korea’s nuclear threats,” she said. Five of the world’s nine nuclear-armed states — Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States — are parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which will be the subject of a preliminary review in Geneva next week.

But Fihn said they were clearly not respecting their commitments under the treaty, and were all engaged in modernising their arsenals and making nuclear weapons a more central part of their defence strategies.

Washington for instance recently decided to upgrade its nuclear weapons arsenal and to complement massive “strategic” bombs with smaller “tactical” weapons, in a move Fihn said would make them easier to use.

She also decried the threatening rhetoric from US President Donald Trump and other leaders of nuclear-armed states. “We are now seeing some of these states making explicit threats to use weapons of mass-destruction to indiscriminately kill innocent civilians.”