Juan Antonio Quintanilla Román, Cuba's permanent representative to the United Nations Office in Geneva.

Havana, Jan 27 (RHC) Juan Antonio Quintanilla Román, Cuba's permanent representative to the United Nations Office in Geneva, emphasized Thursday at the Conference on Disarmament the priority that should be given to nuclear disarmament.

In his intervention in that forum, the Cuban diplomat denounced that in 2022, there were 12,705 nuclear warheads in the world and 2,000 of them were in a state of high operational alert.

Only 100 of them would be enough to provoke a nuclear winter, so their immediate and complete elimination is urgent, Quintanilla Román said.

He added that there is no justification for allocating multimillion-dollar sums to perfect weapons of mass extermination and neglecting the fulfillment of Sustainable Development Goals.

The Caribbean representative reiterated the rejection of unilateral coercive measures such as the economic, commercial, and financial blockade maintained by the U.S. government against the island, as well as the inclusion of Cuba in the list of countries sponsoring terrorism.

The Conference on Disarmament is a multilateral disarmament negotiating forum founded in 1979 as a result of the first Special Session on Disarmament of the United Nations General Assembly and can negotiate legal instruments related to the issue. (Source: ACN)