Switzerland’s foreign ministry has expressed optimism about the nuclear disarmament agreement signed on Thursday by the United States and Russia.
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Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey called the new Start treaty, a replacement to a 1991 pact that expired in December, a first major step to a pledge between the two countries to create a world without nuclear weapons.
US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev signed the agreement at a ceremony in Prague.
“I hope that the signing of this new treaty will have a positive effect on the coming Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,” Calmy-Rey said in a statement. The conference will take place in New York in May.
Eliminating weapons of mass destruction has been one of Switzerland’s priorities for quite some time. In 2007, it was one of six countries to initiate the United Nations General Assembly resolution on making nuclear weapons more difficult to launch.
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