The U.S. and United Kingdom made their first appearance on Monday at the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, where they were encouraged to reduce their weapon stockpiles.
The U.S. said last month there "were real prospects for constructive engagement with conference participants," when explaining why it had decided to attend the event. Despite President Barack Obama's campaign to bring about a nuclear-free world, the U.S. stated it would not conduct disarmament negotiations at the meeting, according to Reuters.
Russia, France and China - the three other officially recognized countries that have nuclear weapons - shunned the two-day meeting.
The 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty stipulated that the five countries who already had nuclear weapons should work towards getting rid of their bombs, while the other countries pledged to not acquire them.
Pakistan and India did not sign the non-proliferation treaty, but, along with Iran, attended the conference anyway. Israel is the ninth country to be suspected of having nukes, but also did not attend.
A total of 157 countries attended the 3rd annual event, and many are, according to U.N. disarmament chief Angela Kane, "increasingly exasperated" at the slow rate of nuclear disarmament, also claiming that more effort goes into preventing countries from acquiring nukes than it does ensuring the five nuclear powers uphold their end of the disarmament deal.
The attendance of two of the five recognized nuclear powers was a "first success" of the conference, according to Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz. "It is a high time to move from words to real action," he said.
Leading up to the event, a letter signed by former British defense secretaries warned that ready-to-launch nuclear weapons increase the risk of an accidental strike by a country, and reminded the world that insecure stockpiles could be targeted by terrorists, reported The Guardian.
The U.S. has eliminated 85 percent of its arsenal since the Cold War, when it had 4,800 weapons, one U.S. official told Reuters. An estimated 16,300 nuclear weapons exist worldwide.
However, it was revealed in September that the U.S. plans to invest $1 trillion effort into "extensive atomic rebuilding, while getting only modest arms reductions in return," according to The New York Times.
