North Korea’s push for nuclear weapons and the lack of disarmament by major powers, emerged as main topics as countries started reviewing challenges to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), in Vienna, on Tuesday.
“North Korea’s nuclear and missile development has now reached a new level and is posing a real threat to the region and beyond in the international community,’’ Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida said at the UN in Austria.
The two-week gathering among 189 countries that have signed on to the global pact is the first of three preparatory meetings leading up to a formal review conference in 2020.
The NPT was drawn up in the late 1960s to prevent countries that did not already have atomic weapons from building them.
In return, the five powers that had nuclear weapons at the time, the US, Britain, France, Russia and China, promised to get rid of their warheads in the future, and to share civilian nuclear technologies with other countries.
However, 15,000 nuclear warheads still exist today.
“We encourage the United States and the Russian Federation to seek further reductions to their arsenals,’’ EU countries said in Vienna in a joint statement.
Frustrated with the lack of disarmament, 130 countries started negotiating a new treaty at the UN in New York in March that would impose an absolute ban on nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons countries are boycotting these weapons ban talks.
US envoy Robert Wood asked other countries in Vienna to “set aside proposals that cannot achieve consensus.” (NAN)