Rabat – Morocco and The Netherlands led a working group at the Creating an Environment for Nuclear Disarmament (CEND) Initiative on Friday, April 23.
Morocco is co-chair of a working group tasked with devising possible incentives to offer to states in exchange for reducing their nuclear arsenal. The CEND initiative currently features three working groups, each with the task to resolve specific barriers towards nuclear disarmament.
Morocco shares the chair of the “State incentives to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons” working group with the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Finland and Germany are co-chairing another working group, and the US and South Korea are leading the other.
Morocco’s participation in the CEND initiative highlights its contribution and effort to reduce the global nuclear stockpile, which continues to present a real threat of humanity’s destruction, even by mere human error.
At the initiative, Moroccan diplomats work on opening dialogues, developing new ideas, and collaborating on implementing the current arms control framework.
The CEND launched in 2018 in order to promote a path towards nuclear disarmament, proposed by the US at a May preparatory committee meeting of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. At the time US officials described the initiative as a way to discuss necessary “discrete tasks” that could “create the conditions conducive to further nuclear disarmament.”
The initiative came from the US, which itself still maintains an arsenal of 5,800 nuclear weapons. The world’s foremost nuclear powers, the US and Russia, still possess 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, despite the drawing down of the Cold War that pitted the two nations against each other.
