Nuclear Weapons the Human-Made Problem

You have spent much of your career working on nuclear diplomacy, arms control and disarmament.

When you look at the nuclear landscape today, Ukraine, China's rise, nuclear modernization, the weakening of arms control and the renewed emphasis on deterrence, do you feel we are entering a genuinely new nuclear age or are we seeing another cycle of nuclear competition? I

think we are already in the middle of an over-accelerating geopolitical competition.

of which the nuclear issue is a component.

I think we are already in a nuclear arms race, both qualitative but also unfortunately again quantitative, that is compounded by the challenges of new technologies, in particular artificial intelligence, but others as well.

where we also see arms race dynamics happening.

So we are already seeing all of this happening.

And unless we manage to find a way to turn this around, we are entering an extremely dangerous situation.

It's not for nothing that doomsday clock is as its closest to midnight than it's ever been.

I always find it confusing why the public is not paying more attention to this.

I think it's really important that this absolutely existential risk for all of us, no matter where we are on this planet, should be much more on top of the political agenda than it seems to be.

And the indicators at the moment, unfortunately, seem to look in this direction.

So it's very important that we focus on turning the ship around.