The world must unite to eliminate the growing nuclear threat

Christopher Weeramantry

As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists declared this year: "We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices." The significant threats caused by North Korea and Iran's increasing nuclear ambitions are among a long and terrifying list of reasons driving us closer to disaster. They include unsecured nuclear materials in Russia and elsewhere, the continuing launch-ready status of thousands of American and Russian weapons, escalating terrorism, increasing availability of the materials with which to make a bomb, and a dangerous lowering of the threshold for use in several nuclear weapons states.

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