Sergio Duarte

Sergio de Queiroz Duarte, U.N. High Representative for Disarmament, praised EWI’s recent report, Reframing Nuclear De-Alert: Reducing the Operational Readiness of U.S. and Russian Arsenals, at a briefing on the report’s recommendations at U.N. headquarters in New York. “The incisive report deserves close attention,” said Duarte, who chaired the briefing, “especially its conclusion, which approaches de-alerting in the context of further irreversible and deeper cuts in the U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals.”

Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and Russia still have thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at each other on high alert and can be fired within minutes of a decision to do so. The briefing at the U.N. offered recommendations that can help the two countries step back from this Cold War legacy and set an example for global disarmament efforts.

“The world has changed and so should the strategies and doctrines of nuclear weapons,” said Duarte, opening the session. “Let us put this concept to rest, as we have other relics of the Cold War, as we move forward toward a world free of nuclear weapons, a world no longer under the cloud of mutual assured destruction.”

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Also speaking at the briefing were retired General Eugune E. Habiger, former Commander-in-Chief of the United States Strategic Command and Sergey Rogov, Head of the Institute of U.S.A. and Canadian Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, both of whom contributed to the report.

“Today nuclear weapons are on alert to deter other nuclear weapons, not adversaries,” said Habiger, suggesting that political realities have changed since the end of the Cold War but policies do not yet reflect those changes.

“Russia and the U.S. have become hostages of the perverted logic of nuclear weapons,” added Russia’s Sergey Rogov, arguing that the two countries “have to change the essence of their political relations to get out of the deterrence business.”

Alfredo Labbe, Chile's disarmament chief, added a further endorsement to the EWI report. Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Sweden, and Switzerland plan to postpone their joint U.N. General Assembly resolution, ‘Decreasing the Operational Readiness of Nuclear Weapons Systems,’ until next year, relying instead on EWI’s report to further the cause of this critical issue.

“The dangers of accidental nuclear war have been with us for decades and been the subject of many motion pictures and novels,” said Duarte. “We are quite lucky that these are works of fiction and not documentaries of actual tragic events. Virtually everybody agrees that good luck is an unacceptable basis for maintaining international peace and security.”