guide

pressing social needs.

For many of the world’s poor people, war and criminal violence are directly impeding their chances of development. By 2010, half of the world’s poorest people could be living in States that are experiencing, or are at risk for, violent conflict, according to the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development.

THE WORLD IS AWASH IN WEAPONS. There are an estimated 875 million or more small arms in circulation, according to the United Nations Secretary-General’s report to the Security Council (April 2008).

At the beginning of 2008, nuclear-weapon States possessed more than 23,000 nuclear warheads, more than 8,000 of which are operational and several thousand of which are kept on high alert, ready to be launched within minutes. World stocks of fissile materials, the material used to make nuclear weapons, are in the thousands of (metric) tons, enough to produce tens of thousands of new warheads.

Seventy-three countries continue to stockpile billions of cluster bombs or munitions, which, according to Human Rights Watch, have been used in Iraq, Lebanon and Georgia in recent years. More than 75 countries are still affected to some degree by landmines and unexploded ordnance or other remnants of war.

Increasingly women and children are casualties of war. More than 250,000 children have been exploited as soldiers and hundreds of thousands of women have been raped in conflict situations.

IT IS A MOMENT OF CHALLENGE for many arms control regimes, most notably the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), whose nuclear- and non-nuclear-weapon States parties have been at loggerheads over what their priorities should be. Nuclear-weapon States, 40 years after the NPT entered into force, have failed to hold up their end of the nuclear bargain, to pursue “in good faith” 3