Nuclear States Quotes

Let me remind you that nuclear disarmament is not just an ardent desire of the people, as expressed in many resolutions of the United Nations. It is a legal commitment by the five official nuclear states, entered into when they signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

We've already seen proliferation. We started it with Britain, then France. Then we benignly let the Israelis do it. The Pakistanis and the Indians have recently done it. The Chinese have nuclear weapons.

We call upon the nuclear-weapon states to immediately cease their plans to further invest in modernizing and extending the life span of their nuclear weapons and related facilities.

Several studies, and a number of public statements by senior military and political personalities, testify that - except for disputes between the present nuclear states - all military conflicts, as well as threats to peace, can be dealt with using conventional weapons.

The Pacific had great hope that when the former President Mitered decided to halt nuclear testing, we had put behind us the issue of nuclear states testing their weapons in our Pacific region.

A fundamental part of the non-proliferation bargain is the commitment of the five nuclear States recognized under the non-proliferation treaty — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — to move toward disarmament.

Negotiations with Iran, especially, will not be easy under any circumstances, but I suspect that they might be somewhat less difficult if the nuclear-weapon states could show that their requests are part of a broader effort to lead the world, including themselves, toward nuclear disarmament. Preventing further proliferation is essential, but it is not a recipe for success to preach to the rest of the world to stay away from the very weapons that nuclear states claim are indispensable to their own security.

This diffusion of nuclear weapons is terrible…terrible. Imagine a world with a large number of states with nuclear bombs.

It is time for the rest of the world to join ... in demanding that ALL the nuclear weapons states -including Israel, India and Pakistan, but above all the US and Russia - negotiate concrete steps on a definite time-table toward the global, inspected abolition of nuclear weapons.

For some twenty years the window that opened at the end of the Cold War has been allowed to hang flapping in the wind. It is high time that the five nuclear-weapon states take seriously their commitment to negotiate toward nuclear disarmament.

All nuclear weapon states should now recognize that this is so, and declare - in Treaty form - that they will never be the first to use nuclear weapons. This would open the way to the gradual, mutual reduction of nuclear arsenals, down to zero.