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MINSK, 12 March (BelTA) – The weakening of strategic predictability is becoming an important factor in a new nuclear arms race, Permanent Representative of the Republic of Belarus Larisa Belskaya said during the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Switzerland, on 12 March, BelTA learned from the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“Ending the nuclear arms race today requires not only political will, but also a sober understanding of how the international environment has changed,” the Belarusian diplomat noted. “The weakening of strategic predictability is becoming an important factor in a new nuclear arms race.”
Larisa Belskaya stressed that for decades, international stability relied on a well-developed infrastructure of arms-control mechanisms, confidence-building measures, and verification tools.
“Today, this infrastructure has been largely dismantled. For the first time since the early 1970s, there are no longer any legally binding limits on strategic offensive arms between the two largest nuclear powers,” she emphasized.
She explained: “The problem is not only legal. These control regimes created in states a habit of verification, notifications, inspections, and professional dialogue even during periods of disagreement. Without this, states assess the nuclear capabilities and intentions of their counterparts, as well as their own risks, not through agreed procedures, but through political signals and assumptions based at best on objective intelligence assessments, and at worst on deliberate provocations and fakes.”
According to Larisa Belskaya, an additional challenge to curbing the nuclear arms race today is the qualitative transformation of military power itself. “These are new types of nuclear weapons, dual-use systems, high-precision non-nuclear systems, and broad-spectrum military technologies. They are capable of producing a strategic effect comparable to the nuclear factor. Hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence, and automation reduce the time available for understanding a situation, critically verifying facts, and allowing a human to make a considered decision,” she noted.
In her view, today nuclear security issues are not only tightly intertwined with geopolitical rivalry and ideological disagreements: they are increasingly subordinated to them. The information environment amplifies these effects, enabling the perception of crisis to form faster than verification mechanisms can operate.
“As a result, the arms race under current conditions develops objectively and inevitably under the influence of a lack of timely and adequate understanding of reality: a consequence of the destruction of verification mechanisms and the acceleration of military technologies,” she stated.
The diplomat also mentioned several political aspects that cannot fail to raise concern: “First, the trend toward undermining the control system embedded in the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. Second, the dangerous and manipulative use of the issue of military and peaceful uses of nuclear energy as a pretext for armed interference in the affairs of sovereign states. Attacks on nuclear facilities are unacceptable. Third, the unpredictable risks posed by the growing nuclear ambitions of certain states in various regions of the world, including in Europe. And finally, the dangerous obsession with militarization among some of our Western neighbors. This issue is especially sensitive and relevant for us. Belarus is located between two geopolitical centers of power, if you will, in the grip of an intensified European security dilemma and the risk of potential direct confrontation, and in immediate proximity to the ongoing armed conflict in the southeast.”
“In the context of the crisis of the normative and institutional foundations of the European security architecture and the escalation of military-political tensions in the region, my country is forced to take additional measures to ensure national security, including the deployment of Russian non-strategic nuclear weapons,” she continued. “We view this as an important security guarantee within the Union State of Belarus and Russia in the event of external aggression creating a critical threat to Belarus’ sovereignty and territorial integrity. We proceed from the understanding that this is a factor of strategic deterrence and national security.”
“I believe that not only the Belarusian leadership, but no reasonable politician in Europe wants the territory of their country to become a zone of a new, let alone nuclear, conflict,” Larisa Belskaya concluded.
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