The international community must wake up to the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, the Australian chairman of a new disarmament body says.

"The scale of the havoc and the devastation that can be wreaked by one major nuclear weapon alone puts 9/11 and almost everything else into the category of insignificance." - Gareth Evans.

The newly-established International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND) has been meeting in Sydney for the past two days, with commissioners discussing growing nuclear weapons proliferation.

The Commission is being co-chaired by Australian former foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans and Yoriko Kawaguchi, one of Japan's former foreign ministers.

Other countries attending the commission's two-day meeting include Indonesia, Russia, Pakistan and China.

ICAN welcomes the establishment of the commission and will work to ensure that it considers fully the merits of a Nuclear Weapons Convention to outlaw the development, production, testing, deployment, stockpiling, transfer, threat, or use of nuclear weapons.

Click below to see the ICAN message from Gareth Evans:

It was time the world moved beyond stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, and on to outlawing "these awful weapons" for good, Mr Evans has said.
- 'Ban nukes for good, says Evans' - The Australian.

Speaking in Sydney on Tuesday, Mr Evans said everyone had been sleepwalking on the issue of proliferation since the end of the Cold War, with the past decade seeing a succession of newly nuclear-armed countries, such as Pakistan, India and North Korea, as well as the continued threat of a nuclear Iran.

"We are on the brink after years ... of containing rather well the emergence of new nuclear weapons states ... we are on the verge of another avalanche or cascade," Mr Evans said at a joint press conference with Ms Kawaguchi.

The scale of the proliferation problem was "right up there" with climate change and the current financial crisis, with estimates of between 13,000 and 16,000 warheads actively deployed around the world.

"The scale of the havoc and the devastation that can be wreaked by one major nuclear weapon alone puts 9/11 and almost everything else into the category of insignificance," he said.

"For the last decade or so, the international community has been sleepwalking when it comes to this potential catastrophe."

The ICNND has 13 commissioners, including Ali Alatas from Indonesia, Alexei Arbatov from Russia, Jehangir Karamat from Pakistan, former US defence secretary William Perry and China's Wang Yingfan.

It will meet all over the world in the next two years in an effort to shape a consensus in the lead-up to a 2010 conference reviewing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Mr Evans said efforts to reinvigorate the stalled US-Russia dialogue on disarmament would also be on the commission's agenda.

"It was felt that we needed a major new push to exercise the tension, debate, come up with workable recommendations that will actually snap us out of this torpor, snap out of this sleepwalking."

(with excerpts from the ABC and AAP).