GENEVA, February 26. /TASS/. The shadow of nuclear apocalypse, which loomed over humanity last century, has made a comeback, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.

"Geopolitical divides, relentless arms competition <...> have created a total deadlock," he said at the Conference on Disarmament. "Militaries are developing terrifying new applications of new and emerging technologies - including artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons systems."

"The nuclear shadow that loomed over humanity last century has returned," he went on to say.

"Some statesmen regularly imply that they are fully prepared to unleash nuclear hell - an outrageous threat that the world must condemn with clarity and force," the UN chief continued.

Guterres repeated his call to implement all nuclear disarmament commitments, including under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and to bring the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty into force.

In October, the US Department of Energy said a "subsurface chemical explosion" was conducted in Nevada to improve the US ability to detect low-yield nuclear explosions around the world. Vladimir Yermakov, director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's department for nonproliferation and arms control, said that Russia believes the US is not giving up on the idea of conducting a nuclear test.

In February, Gennady Gatilov, Russia’s envoy to the UN office and other international organizations in Geneva, said the Conference on Disarmament has no alternative, but its substantive work is currently hampered by the collective West's lack of interest or political will to develop effective legally binding instruments for arms control. The problem, the diplomat said, is that the US and its allies, as they pursue a policy to secure their global hegemony, aim to achieve overwhelming economic, political and, most importantly, military superiority over other centers of power that are rapidly gaining international prominence, so they do not want to bind themselves by any additional legal obligations.