Ban on nuclear weapons is coming
Today, the United Nations will start negotiations on an international treaty to ban nuclear weapons. It will be a milestone marking the beginning of the end of an age of existential peril for humanity.
This day was bound to come. From the beginning, even those who set the world on the path to nuclear weapons understood the mortal danger and moral challenge confronting humanity. In April 1945, United States Secretary of War Henry Stimson explained to President Harry Truman that the atomic bomb would be ‘‘the most terrible weapon ever known in human history’’. Stimson warned that the world ’’would be eventually at the mercy of such a weapon’’.
Soon afterwards, the newly created UN took the threat posed by nuclear arms as its first priority. In January 1946, in its very first resolution, the UN called for a plan ‘‘for the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons’’.
The Soviet Union submitted such a plan that June. At the time, only the US had nuclear weapons. Where it led, others soon followed, forcing humanity to endure the decades of weapons development, arms races, proliferation, and nuclear crises that followed.
Anti-nuclear movements took root, and, in a phrase made famous by the historian EP Thompson, began to protest to survive.
As the number and destructive power of nuclear weapons grew, and as even developing countries began to acquire them, recognition of the danger gave rise to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which entered into force in 1970. ‘‘Considering the devastation that would be visited upon all mankind by a nuclear war,’’ the NPT begins, there is a ‘‘consequent need to make every effort to avert the danger of such a war‘‘.
The treaty committed all signatories to ‘‘undertake negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament’’. The US, the Soviet Union, and Britain signed the NPT. France and China, the only other nuclear weapon states at the time, held out for more than 20 years, until 1992. Israel, India, and Pakistan have never signed, while North Korea signed and then withdrew. Although all professed support for achieving a nuclearweapon-free world, disarmament negotiations never began.
Countries without nuclear weapons took matters into their own hands. Through the UN General Assembly, they asked the International Court of Justice to rule on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons. In July 1996, the ICJ issued an advisory opinion. Nuclear weapons were essentially declared to be in conflict with international law, and there was an obligation to pursue disarmament.
But, in the 20 years since the highest court in the international system issued its judgment, the states affected by it have still failed to launch ‘‘negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament’’. Instead, they have set out on long-term programmes to maintain, modernise, and in some cases augment their nuclear arsenals.
Non-weapon states began to take action through a series of international conferences and UN resolutions. Finally, we arrive at the resolution relevant to today.
The new resolution’s instructions are straightforward: ‘‘States participating in the conference’’ should ‘‘make their best endeavours to conclude as soon as possible a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination’’. The treaty could be ready this year.
The nine nuclear weapon states will finally be put to the test. Will they keep their promises to disarm and join the treaty, or will they choose their weapons over international law and the will of the global community? The nonweapon states that join the treaty will be tested, too. How will they organise to confront countries that choose to be nuclear outlaws?
Zia Mian is co-director of the programme on science and global security at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University.