You're listening to the European Parliamentary Research Service podcast on the new treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Seven decades after the world witnessed the devastating atomic bomb blasts over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

122 countries have signed a new treaty to ban nuclear

weapons.

But absent from the signing ceremony were the nine states known to have nuclear weapons,

and many others who would prefer to strengthen the existing non-proliferation agreement,

a doomed start for the new treaty. Stay with us.

In July 2017, amid rising tensions over North Korea's nuclear and missile tests, UN Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez warned the world that the threat of a nuclear attack was at its

highest level since the end of the Cold War.

The truth is that there are still an estimated

15,000 of them in the world today and many on high alert status. But how do we reach this situation?

A world free of nuclear weapons is a long-standing objective of the UN and the Treaty on the

non-proliferation of nuclear weapons has guided non-proliferation and disarmament

efforts since the 1970s.

It grants the five nuclear weapons states, China, France, Russia, the UK and the US exclusive

rights to possess nuclear arsenals, but also encourages them to move towards nuclear disarmament.

One problem is that there are four other countries with nuclear weapons outside that treaty,

India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.

Moreover, the non-nuclear states and civil society representatives are not happy with the pace of disarmament,

and therefore called for a legally binding instrument to increase the pressure

to disarm. Advocates of the total elimination of nuclear arms such as a humanitarian initiative

and the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize winner, the International Campaign to Abolished Nuclear Weapons,

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