UN General Assembly
1986

The offer of negotiations made by the Halifax meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Foreign Ministers still stands. The Warsaw Pact has responded favorably. Action must be taken before this year is over. The aim of future negotiations must be to create a situation in which the size of the forces of both sides is determined solely by defensive requirements. On our side this is already the case. We must never forget that even a war waged with conventional arms alone would in today's Europe be a thousand times more horrific than the Second World War and would amount to multiple genocide in Europe. Negotiations on the world-wide prohibition of chemical weapons have reached the stage at which it is possible for the community of nations as a whole to be freed from the scourge of chemical weapons. There is no longer any reason to delay an agreement.