MOSCOW. Nov 12 (Interfax) - Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has called on countries around the world to continue nuclear disarmament and not to seek to increase the number of conventional weapons.
"Our practical mid-term task should include involving all of the nuclear powers in the nuclear disarmament process and reducing their arsenals to the minimum [several dozen warheads]. But this decision should only be an interim step en route to the total liquidation of nuclear weapons," Gorbachev said in an address to the Nobel Peace Prize winners' meeting in Hiroshima, which he was unable to attend for health reasons.
"We need to support the UN secretary-general's proposal to launch work on a convention or a treaty banning the use, development, production, accumulation and transfer of nuclear weapons, technologies and components," he said.
However, "nuclear arms remain built into the security policy of all of the countries holding nuclear weapons and their strategic plans," Gorbachev said.
"Ambitions of one country or a group of countries to hold military dominance in the sphere of non-nuclear weapons are incompatible with the idea of a nuclear-free world," he said.
"That is why I will have to repeat that one country's absolute military dominance would create an insurmountable obstacle on the path toward a nuclear-free world. That is why it is important to speak about the demilitarization of global politics and thinking, the need to cut military budgets and the unacceptability of developing new types of weapons as we continue campaigning for nuclear disarmament," Gorbachev said.
"We should welcome the signing of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty by Presidents Medvedev and Obama and should call for its soonest possible ratification," he said.
"The main challenges facing mankind today include climate catastrophe threats, environmental degradation, mass poverty that generates extremism and migration flows, the incompetence of governments, diseases and outbreaks, organized crime, drug trafficking, and mass violations of human rights," Gorbachev said.
"There is no military solution to any of these challenges," he said.