Speaking to Kyodo News, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate said: “Now the task of preserving disarmament agreements is one of the most important.”

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The international nuclear disarmament treaties (the INF Treaty, the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons) “all are parts of a single architecture that can collapse if one of its elements is undermined,” Gorbachev said. “I still hope that the leaders of our countries have enough wisdom to prevent this.”

“I urged the presidents of Russia and the US to tackle the problem personally; to reaffirm commitments to the treaty, and to instruct diplomats and militaries to solve the problems,” he said.

“We must not forget that the movement towards a world without nuclear weapons is the most important obligation of the nuclear powers enshrined in the Non-Proliferation Treaty.”

Signed in Washington, DC in 1987 by then-US President Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev, the landmark Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles, commonly referred to as the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty, contributed to the end of the Cold War and still remains crucial to stability in Europe. It required the “destruction of the Parties’ ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, their launchers and associated support structures and support equipment.”

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