Cuba advocates in Geneva for the total elimination of nuclear weapons

Havana, March 22 (RHC)-- Cuba's First Deputy Foreign Minister Gerardo Peñalver reiterated Tuesday in Geneva the island's call for the total elimination of nuclear weapons.

Speaking at the opening session of the Cuban presidency of the Conference on Disarmament, the senior official stressed that eradicating lethal devices of mass extermination is and must continue to be the top priority in disarmament and the entity.

"This is the only guarantee against the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons," Peñalver noted and called for a complete elimination process materialized in a transparent, verifiable, and irreversible manner.

"We express deep concern and alarm at the looming danger of a nuclear conflagration, from which no nation will escape its devastating effects", he warned.

The First Deputy Foreign Minister described as encouraging the decision to reactivate the work of the Conference on Disarmament as a vital component of the United Nations disarmament machinery.

"It is now necessary to fulfill its negotiating mandate, ensure its vitality and preserve its procedures and practices," he said.

He emphasized that Cuba is convinced that the Conference can simultaneously negotiate important norms to prevent and protect humanity from danger.

In this regard, he mentioned a legally binding instrument to prohibit the arms race in outer space; another to provide security guarantees for States that, like Cuba, do not possess nuclear weapons; and a third to prohibit the production of fissile material for the manufacture of nuclear weapons or other devices of that nature.

In his speech, the diplomat also ratified the island's commitment to promoting the universalization of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which he considered a materialization of the humanist thought of the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz.

"We are proud to be the fifth State to ratify it, to integrate the first Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone in a densely populated area of the planet and to belong to the first region in the world proclaimed as a Zone of Peace," he said in allusion to the position of Latin America and the Caribbean, since January 2014.