Kazakhstan’s Foreign Minister Mukhtar Tileuberdi called in the UN General Assembly on Sept. 25 for relaunching high-level dialogue among the nuclear powers, and said Kazakhstan “is ready to host one of their next meetings.”

“New START has expired,” he said, “while the 2026 NPT Review Conference ended without substantive outcome for the third consecutive cycle. Nuclear weapon states must never confuse the absence of agreement with a vacuum of obligation. They remain responsible until we secure a world free of nuclear weapons.”

Kazakhstan gave up what was then the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal after the Soviet Union dissolved. “Our experience of renouncing the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal did not weaken our State,” he said.

The call for dialogue, and the offer to host it, are in the same spirit as the Schiller Institute’s Appeal to Pope Leo XIV, which asks the Pope to convene the heads of state of the three principal nuclear powers. The General Assembly’s annual high-level meeting on the elimination of nuclear weapons is Sept. 29.