Its been over seven decades that the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki lost around 200 thousand people on 6 and 9 August 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs, which marked the beginning of Nuclear race between the nations.
The 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) by the ‘United Nations’ bought us a ray of hope for the world free of nuclear warheads. But, most of the nuclear-armed countries conveyed their disinterest to join the treaty. The previous year, The Treaty that had been holding decades of peace on Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) between the United States and Russia, has lapsed. Meanwhile, increasing tensions between the United States, and Russia could fuel the ongoing situation of border clashes and absurd claims of China.
On the other hand, Iran started stockpiling its nuclear power, and North Korea still increasing its armoury. Of all nuclear weapons in the world, the United States and Russia together own almost 90 per cent of them, around 14,000, and only a few of them could be enough to bring chaos or completely wipe out the planet. China alone carries 320 nuclear warheads, and the ballistic missile Dongfeng is one of them, which can carry both nuclear and conventional warheads.
Besides, the evolving technology and the way we use weapons today has completely transformed. For example, cyber-attacks have the potential to overwrite the nuclear command and control systems or introduce a glitch in its decision making capability.
History must never repeat to what occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is the need of an hour for the call to have a global mechanism of arms control to address nuclear risks.
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