Nuclear weapons treaty offers light for the world
Buried in the rubble of her school after the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, 13-yearold Setsuko Thurlow regained consciousness as a man dug her out and told her, “Don’t give up! Keep pushing! I am trying to free you. See the light coming through that opening? Crawl towards it as quickly as you can.” She crawled out of the burning ruins amid the charred corpses of 350 classmates and into unimaginable devastation and a feeble chorus of cries for water and mother.
Seventy-two years later, Thurlow accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, with whom she worked to bring about the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), the world’s first treaty designed to facilitate complete global nuclear disarmament.
The treaty has begun to change the global conversation on nuclear weapons, shifting the framing from national security to the humanitarian cost of their use. What security claim could ever justify 300 million people dead in an afternoon?
The TPNW was largely championed by women and the global south. Some 122 nations adopted the treaty text at the United Nations in July 2017. The treaty entered into force on Jan. 22, 2021, after the 50th ratification, essentially outlawing nuclear weapons internationally. Two years later, 91 nations have signed and 68 have ratified the treaty, with more in the pipeline.
Yet this year finds the world closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. We live amid threats of nuclear annihilation; all nine nuclear armed countries are modernizing their arsenals and infrastructure; two non-nuclear states are taking steps towards uranium enrichment programs; and next year should see an
increase in the number of nuclear weapons in the world for the first time since the Cold War. The metaphorical Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Scientists is set at 100 seconds to midnight, and on Tuesday is likely to be set closer still.
But now there is also a real alternative, though you would never know it. While the media and politicians talk of the Russian, North Korean and Chinese threats, they ignore the TPNW and its potential as a catalyst for real international security.
As the inventor of nuclear weapons, the only nation to use
them in war and the promised wielder of them on behalf of 33 other countries, the United States is the linchpin to global nuclear disarmament. Other countries got them because we had them. If the United States signed the TPNW (before ratifying), declaring its political will to disarm as part of comprehensive global nuclear disarmament, there is no telling what the other eight nuclear nations might do. For our nuclearized opponents, U.S. disarmament would not only bring more security but could be the cover they need to give up their own economy-crippling weapons programs.
But we have never given them the chance. The U.S. always insists that other countries won’t disarm, but we have never declared that we would be willing to, blocking any move toward a saner planet.
In contrast, Russia has expressed interest in complete nuclear disarmament. In 1986, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev raised the idea with President Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik, Iceland, only to be rebuffed. In April 2019, Trump wondered aloud on a call-in to Fox news about multilateral disarmament. The Russian response was that it would require negotiations and a plan.
The TPNW is that plan, and rather than raise security fears, it could ultimately placate them.
Thurlow ended her Nobel Prize acceptance speech saying, “Our light is now the [nuclear weapons] ban treaty. To [people] around the world, I repeat those words that I heard in the ruins of Hiroshima: Don’t give up! Keep pushing! See the light? Crawl towards it! Let us follow each other out of the dark night of nuclear terror.”