Over 120 nations adopt first treaty banning nuke weapons

UNITED NATIONS — More than 120 countries approved the first-ever treaty to ban nuclearweapons Friday at a U.N. meeting boycotted by all nuclearnations.

To loud applause, Elayne Whyte Gomez, president of the U.N. conference that has been negotiating the legally binding treaty, announced the results of the “historic” vote — 122 nations in favor, the Netherlands opposed, and Singapore abstaining.

“We have managed to sow the first seeds of a world free of nuclearweapons,” Whyte Gomez said. “We (are) saying to our children that, yes, it is possible to inherit a world free from nuclear weapons.”

“The world has been waiting for this legal norm for 70 years,” since atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 at the end of WorldWar II, she said.

Setsuko Thurlow, who was a 13-year-old student in Hiroshima when a U.S. nuclear bomb destroyed the city, said survivors “have worked all our lives to make sure that no other human beings should ever again be subjected to such an atrocity.”

None of the nine countries known or believed to possess nuclearweapons— the United States, Russia, Britain, China, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel — is supporting the treaty. Many of their allies also did not attend the meeting.

In a joint statement, the U.N. ambassadors from the United States, Britain and France said their countries don’t intend to ever become party to the treaty.

They said it “clearly disregards the realities of the international security environment” and “is incompatible with the policy of nuclear deterrence, which has been essential to keeping the peace inEuropeand North Asia for over 70 years.”