News - NATO in talks to put nuclear weapons on standby

NATO member countries have started consultations on the matter of the need to put their nuclear weapons on standby. The Secretary General of the Alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, informed about this in an interview with The Telegraph, the latter reports. "I won’t go into operational details about how many nuclear warheads should be operational and which should be stored, but we need to consult on these issues. That’s exactly what we’re doing," said Stoltenberg. According to him, transparency in this matter "helps to communicate the direct message" that NATO is a "nuclear alliance." "NATO’s aim is, of course, a world without nuclear weapons, but as long as nuclear weapons exist, we will remain a nuclear alliance, because a world where Russia, China and North Korea have nuclear weapons, and NATO does not, is a more dangerous world,” Stoltenberg noted. He warned that China in particular was investing heavily in modern weaponry including its nuclear arsenal, which he said would grow to 1,000 warheads by as early as 2030. “And that means that in a not-very-distant future,” he said, “NATO may face something that it has never faced before, and that is two nuclear-powered potential adversaries—China and Russia. Of course, this has consequences.”