Five Washington University students warned a crowd of 40 about the dangers of nuclear proliferation after attending a forum on the issue at Fudan University in Shanghai last summer.

Seniors Hillary Moffet and Meghan Luecke, junior Neehar Garg and third year law student Kay Parish shared their experiences at a presentation titled “Nuclear Weapons and You,” which took place this past Wednesday in the Danforth University Center. The fifth member of the group, University alum Michael Morgan, is still in China.

The University students noted that Russia and the United States maintain the two largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons and that China is rapidly developing their missile delivery systems. While the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty names five legal nuclear states, other states have developed nuclear weapons as well, according to the presentation.

Moffet said that the treaties have been rendered ineffective since other countries developed nuclear weapons despite signing treaties against their development, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), ratified in 1968.

“The success of the NPT has been dwindling, but there’s a real push by a lot of different people to try and get it enforced again,” Moffet said.

Luecke listed a number of reasons why states are willing to eliminate nuclear weapons, such as the threat of terrorism, which has recently become a major concern and is gaining importance, according to Luecke.

“The idea that nuclear technology could get into the hands of a non-state actor, a terrorist group, is pretty powerful,” she said, “The idea of reducing or limiting all nuclear weapons would be in part to make sure there’s nothing available for terrorist groups to get their hands on.”

Moffet said that while there are still thousands of nuclear weapons in existence, there has been significant progress made toward disarmament.

“The good news is that both [the U.S. and Russia] have begun massive scale-downs. There really has been a lot of progress since each of these nations were at their peak,” she said.

According to Moffet, Russia was believed to have 70,000 weapons at one point and is now down to 15,000, while the U.S. decreased their arsenal from 30,000 to about 10,000 weapons.

“The real problems we run into [is] the game theory idea of ‘chicken model.’ No one really wants to get rid of their weapons first because they’re not assured that the other nation would then follow,” Moffet said. “We’re really running into this issue on an international level of ‘who goes first?’”

Members of the presenting group also spoke on the influence of nuclear weapons in Taiwan, North Korea and Georgia.

James Wertsch, a professor and director of the International and Area Studies program, attended the event and is interested in sending another group to the nuclear weapons forum next year.

“[The forum] is kind of an ongoing diplomatic experience,” Werstch said. “We do talk about nuclear arms; we’re very interested in nuclear disarmament. More broadly, it’s about forming long-term relationships with colleagues in China. These relationships are absolutely core if we’re going to make any progress on this and other issues.”

Wertsch said that Fudan University is one of the participating institutions in the McDonnell International Scholars Academy at Washington University, but that this is the first time that University students have attended the forum.

According to the students who attended the forum, many agreed that the United States and Russia would need to act first toward disarmament.

“I think that the United States needs to take the first step. We have France, India, China—a lot of the big nuclear states have very openly said that they would be willing to get rid of their stockpiles if the United States and Russia did,” Moffet said.

Garg pointed to the United States’ large program as evidence that it would need to be the first to act.

“Consider the obvious that the U.S. and Russia have several orders of magnitude more weapons than anyone else, so if you’re trying to convince everyone else to reduce their weapons, they’re not likely to do it,” Garg said. “Even if other countries say they’ll do it, they won’t do it if they feel it threatens their security.”

Sophomore Caitlin Brady attended the event as an extra-credit opportunity for a class.

“[It is important] because of the global consequences of any nuclear device going off,” Brady said. “During the election I think the focus is on Iran or North Korea, so I don’t think [politicians] are focusing on other countries as much as they should, because there are [other countries] that have nuclear weapons.”