G7 SUMMIT IN HIROSHIMA SEEN AS CHANCE TO COOL GLOBAL TENSIONS

▶ Leaders should tackle nuclear proliferation by pushing for stockpile reductions, experts say

The skeletal dome of Hiroshima’s city council building provides the backdrop for a G7 summit as the international threat of nuclear catastrophe is at its highest in decades.

The building survived the cataclysmic blast of an atom bomb that killed thousands of people on August 6, 1945. Two days later the death toll reached 226,000 when Nagasaki was similarly bombed.

The setting of Hiroshima reminds the world of the horror of nuclear war, as tensions rise between Russia and the US and other countries increase their warhead stockpiles, or try to join the nuclear club.

Of the world’s 13,400 nuclear warheads, Russia possesses nearly 6,000 and America 5,400. China is building more warheads, Britain has considered a 40 per cent increase in its stockpile, Iran is on the cusp of producing weapons-grade uranium and North Korea is producing ever more sophisticated missiles. Given the vivid backdrop of the G7 summit, what can the leaders do to curtail nuclear proliferation?

The summit can at least start a conversation about tackling the growing nuclear threat.

“There’s such a strong link with Hiroshima, which gives the meeting huge symbolic importance,” said Dr Matthew Harries, director of Proliferation and Nuclear Policy at the Royal United Services Institute think tank (Rusi). It is “a moment to reopen the discussion on proliferation”.

The enduring Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty still offers hope in a world edging towards catastrophe, with 191 countries signed up to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

At the time the NPT was proposed in 1965, it was predicted that within two decades the number of nuclear-armed states would rise from five to 30. It currently stands at nine.

The treaty has served to curtail membership of the nuclear club, with only North Korea, Israel, India and Pakistan ignoring it. Nuclear warfare expert Hamish de Breton-Gordon said the G7 should therefore pressure the UN Security Council to urgently address reducing the size of nuclear arsenals.

“Hiroshima should be the starting point to rein this all back in,” he said. Persuading the US and Russia to discuss reduction may prove a challenge.

“International agreements regulating nuclear weapons have either got weaker or collapsed,” said Dr Harries.

Former president Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty in 2018.

Then in February this year Mr Putin announced that Russia was suspending the New Start treaty, the last remaining nuclear arms control agreement between Washington and Moscow, which allows 18 stockpile inspections a year. Meanwhile, Iran’s nuclear agreement is “pretty much unrecognisable at this point”, Dr Harries said.

Marion Messmer, of the Chatham House think tank, said states are beginning to lose trust in various arms control agreements, “because some of the really important existing ones have fallen apart”.

“There are a lot of states that previously were not that interested in nuclear weapons that might now have changed their minds,” she said.

Dr Harries wants the G7 to announce a “political recommitment” to the NPT to highlight that it is still in a state’s national interest to “go without nuclear weapons because the world is safer if your neighbour does not have nuclear weapons.” Part of that would be getting momentum behind the proposed Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty, which would prohibit production of enriched uranium and plutonium, the two main components for nuclear bombs.

But both China and Pakistan object as they want fissile material to strengthen their arsenal. Ultimately it is down to the US and Russia to find a way to cut their nuclear armoury. Given the fallout over the Ukraine war, that appears a more insurmountable task. So what can the G7 hope to achieve?

“It’s a question of what they can work out and what conditions they want to set for an international agreement,” said Ms Messmer.

“But because Russia isn’t at that table, it’s really difficult to think about new arms control, because Russia needs to be a willing participant and that won’t happen if they’re not involved in treaty conversations from the start.”

The G7 should announce a recommitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an official at think tank Rusi said