Ban nuclear weapons
ON Aug 6 1945, the United States and its allies completely destroyed the city of Hiroshima with a single atomic bomb that instantly incinerated 70,000 civilians. Three days later, the city of Nagasaki suffered the same fate.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki must never be repeated. Unlike conventional weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons instantly wipe out entire populations, level cities, devastate the environment and eradicate the physical and social infrastructure necessary for recovery. Nuclear weapons threaten planetary and human survival. They are uniquely inhumane and must be abolished.
Today, nine countries – the US, Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea – still brandish 16,000 nuclear warheads, 95% of which are American and Russian.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated that no health service in the world would be able to provide adequate medical care for survivors of a nuclear conflict. At the height of the Cold War, doctors came together in 1980 and founded International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) based on the principles of preventive medicine; if there can be no meaningful medical response to nuclear war, then nuclear war must be prevented by eliminating nuclear weapons.
In 1985, IPPNW received the Nobel Peace Prize for “spreading authoritative information and creating an awareness of the catastrophic consequences of nuclear warfare.” IPPNW has since widened its activities beyond research and education to include advocacy for specific steps that would reduce the number of nuclear warheads and the likelihood of war by participating regularly in the UN conferences of the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
IPPNW is very familiar with Article VI of the NPT, which calls on all signatory states “to pursue negotiations in good faith” and bring about “the cessation of the nuclear arms race” and “a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
Unfortunately, “good faith” has been missing from the so-called step-by-step approach of the NPT process. There was some euphoria when the nuclear weapon states (NWS) reached a consensus at the NPT review conference in 2000 and pledged “an unequivocal undertaking to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals” through a programme of 13 Practical Steps. But the euphoria only lasted one year. When the George W. Bush administration took office in 2001, it declared that it could “no longer support” some of the 13 Practical Steps.
The Bush administration not only continued to renege on its commitments but also envisioned a permanent nuclear arsenal and announced the development of a new “bunker buster” nuclear weapon. Inevitably, the NPT review conference collapsed in 2005 when it failed to agree on any substantive issue.
This was a wake-up call and a turning point for IPPNW, which then called for the setting up of a nuclear disarmament process outside but parallel to the subverted and paralysed NPT set-up. It was similar to the “Ottawa process” which achieved a landmine ban treaty after years of deadlock.
So, in Vienna in 2007, IPPNW launched the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) which is now the main civil society vehicle for nuclear abolition.
When the Final Document of the 2010 NPT Review Conference noted “the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons” and reaffirmed the need for all states to comply with international humanitarian law, there was a shift in the nuclear disarmament debate from military considerations towards the unacceptable humanitarian consequences of nuclear warfare. It prompted the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent in 2011 to assimilate the significance of the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons and to appeal to all states to start negotiations on an international treaty to outlaw these weapons. This application of international humanitarian law has sensitised the global conscience, changed the thrust and political framework of step-bystep negotiations, and transformed nuclear disarmament from a security and military issue to a humanitarian and legal imperative. It has highlighted the “legal gap” between biological and chemical weapons, which have been legally prohibited, and nuclear weapons which are not prohibited. It has opened up an avenue, if not a highway, for like-minded states to press for a treaty to criminalise and prohibit nuclear weapons regardless of the participation of the NWS in the process. It has brought 127 governments together, including Malaysia’s, in a united effort to press for measures to stigmatise nuclear weapons and secure a treaty to prohibit them and fill the legal gap.
In October 2012, the UN General Assembly established an open-ended working group (OEWG) with the task of developing “proposals to take forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations for the achievement and maintenance of a world without nuclear weapons.” As a result, three major conferences on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons have taken place. In March 2013, 128 countries participated in the first conference in Oslo which concluded that “it is unlikely that any state or international body could address the immediate humanitarian emergency caused by a nuclear weapon detonation”.
A second conference in Nayarit in February 2014, attended by 146 states, concluded that a point of no return had been reached and that it was time for a strong diplomatic initiative to prohibit nuclear weapons. A third conference in Vienna in December 2014 attended by 158 states generated the Austrian Pledge, now called the Humanitarian Pledge, which calls on states to put in place multilateral negotiations to fill the legal gap in existing law and adopt a treaty to ban nuclear weapons. The three conferences became widely known as the humanitarian initiative.
On Nov 5, 2015, the First Committee of the United Nations General Assembly set up a new OEWG for “taking forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations.” The OEWG has met twice in Geneva in February and May 2016, with a third meeting to be held later this August, following which a report with agreed recommendations will be submitted to the UN General Assembly at its 71st session.
In its interim report in July 2016, the Working Group recommended the concluding of concrete, effective legal measures, provisions and norms in order to attain and maintain a world without nuclear weapons. It is envisaged that the General Assembly will convene a conference in 2017, open to all states, international organisations and civil society, to negotiate a legally-binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons and provide a path to their total elimination.