WASHINGTON, January 5. /TASS/. The Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapons States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races shows how serious the nuclear threat is nowadays, Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University Peter Kuznick said in an interview with TASS.

"The fact that the P5 nuclear powers (and permanent members of the United Nations Security Council - Russia, China, the UK, the US, and France - TASS) felt compelled to issue this statement now is both reassuring and deeply, deeply troubling," he said.

"The world is in an extremely precarious situation at the moment. Relations between the US and Russia and the US and China and between the US, NATO, and Russia are the worst they’ve been in decades. Talk of a new cold war abounds. Even worse, there is more talk about the possibility of a hot war between the major powers of late than there has been at least since the Cuban Missile Crisis almost 60 years ago. And this is not just idle chatter. Much of it is coming from top military and political leaders," Professor Kuznick said.

"The potential confrontations between the US, NATO, and Russia over Ukraine and the US and China over Taiwan are extremely alarming," he believes.

Kuznick recalled that in 2020 and 2021 "the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists put the hands of the Doomsday Clock," which shows how close humanity is to destroying itself, "at 100 seconds before midnight." It was the closest they had ever been "since the clock was started in 1947," he said.

"It is not exaggerating. I'm afraid we're actually closer than that [to midnight]," he warned.

"And when I hear members of the Senate Armed Services Committee like Roger Wicker from Mississippi call for ‘rain[ing] destruction’ on Russia refusing to ‘rule out first use nuclear action’ if Russia invades Ukraine, I take such lunacy seriously as I do recent statements by Admiral Charles Richard, the head of US Strategic Command, who said last year, ‘There is a real possibility that a regional crisis with Russia or China could escalate quickly to a conflict involving nuclear weapons’," Kuznick added.

 

Starting point

 

The professor emphasized that he was glad that "the P5 nations issued this statement."

"I think it reflects the seriousness of the crisis the world is in at present," the scientist believes.

"But it is just a starting point. We need real progress to resolve the most pressing conflicts," he said.

"Addressing the growing threats of war between nuclear-armed nations is a necessary first step in that direction. Now that the P5 nations have issued this forward-looking statement about the need to defuse the nuclear threat, I would like to see the leaders of those nations sit down in a global summit meeting and begin to put some of those positive understandings into real action," he said.

According to the scientist, the steps, which can be taken right now to mitigate the threat of nuclear war, should include "a no-first-use policy, taking US and Russian weapons off hair-trigger alert, eliminating ICBMs, and making substantive reductions in nuclear arsenals to get them below the threshold for nuclear winter."

 

Joint statement

 

On Monday, the leaders of the five nuclear powers and permanent members of the United Nations Security Council adopted a joint statement. The leaders emphasized that they consider "the avoidance of war between Nuclear-Weapon States and the reduction of strategic risks as our foremost responsibilities." They affirmed that "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." They spoke out against the further spread of nuclear weapons and underlined their "desire to work with all states to create a security environment.".