We are here to remember that on August 6 and 9, 1945, 79 years ago, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Almost 200,000 men, women and children were killed instantly and many thousands more died later of burns or radiation sickness.
We are here to remember those who died in this horrific event and to remember all victims of nuclear war preparations including those who lived on Pacific Islands and our own first nations people who died during British testing.
Since that terrible event, France, Britian, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Israel have acquired nuclear weapons.
We say that no country should ever have nuclear weapons.
Civil Society has pushed back against nuclear weapons and an organisation founded in Melbourne – the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons ICAN – has successfully got the UN to pass the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. So far 70 States have ratified this treaty.
We demand that the Australian Government ratify the UN treaty to ban Nuclear Weapons, reject the AUKUS nuclear powered submarines and reject the Opposition’s proposal for nuclear power reactors on 7 sites.
Australia is supporting wars and preparing for war instead of concentrating on solving the social issues in Australia and the region.
There are no victors or vanquished in a nuclear war.
Today we solemnly vow to do everything we can to make sure that Hiroshima and Nagasaki never happen again.
More than 70 years after the Hiroshima bombing, a majority of countries are pushing for a legally-binding treaty against nuclear weapons. Tim Wright/ICAN/Flickr, CC BY-NC
In early December, the nations of the world are poised to take an historic step forward on nuclear weapons. Yet most Australians still haven’t heard about what’s happening, even though Australia is an important part of this story – which is set to get even bigger in the months ahead.
On October 27 2016, I watched as countries from around the world met in New York and resolved through the United Nations’ General Assembly First Committee to negotiate a new legally binding treaty to “prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination”. It was carried by a majority of 123 to 38, with 16 abstentions. Australia was among the minority to vote “no”.
Given that overwhelming majority, it is almost certain that resolution will be formally ratified in early December at a full UN general assembly meeting.
After it’s ratified, international negotiating meetings will take place in March and June-July 2017. Those meetings will be open to all states, and will reflect a majority view: crucially, no government or group of governments (including UN Security Council members) will have a veto. International and civil society organisations will also have a seat at the table.
This is the best opportunity to kickstart nuclear disarmament since the end of the Cold War a quarter of a century ago. And it’s crucial that we act now, amid a growing threat of nuclear war (as we discuss in the latest edition of the World Medical Association’s journal).
But the resolution was bitterly opposed by most nuclear-armed states, including the United States and Russia. Those claiming “protection” from US nuclear weapons – members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and Japan, South Korea and Australia – also opposed the ban. This is because the treaty to be negotiated will fill the legal gap that has left nuclear weapons as the only weapon of mass destruction not yet explicitly banned by international treaty.
Like the treaties that ban biological and chemical weapons, landmines and cluster munitions, a treaty banning nuclear weapons would make it clear that these weapons are unacceptable, and that their possession, threat and use cannot be justified under any circumstances.
It would codify in international law what UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said: “There are no right hands for the wrong weapons.”
Why treaties are worthwhile – even when some refuse to join
Of course, prohibiting unacceptable weapons is not the same as eliminating them entirely. So why bother?
Experience shows us that weapons treaties can make a difference – even when some countries refuse to sign, as we would expect (at least initially) with a treaty banning nuclear weapons.
For example, more than 80% of the world’s nations have signed on to the landmines ban treaty. Even though the US is not among the signatories, it has still proudly declared itself to essentially be in compliance with the landmines treaty (except in the Korean Peninsula) and plans to cease its production of cluster munitions.
Back in 1999, when the landmines ban first came into force, there were about 25 landmine casualties being reported every day around the world. According to the most recent Landmine Monitor report, those devastating landmines injuries and deaths have been reduced by 60%, to about 10 a day in 2014.
Biological weapons haven’t been used by any government since the second world war. All countries except for North Korea have stopped nuclear test explosions, even though the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty has not yet entered into force because key nuclear-capable countries have not yet signed up.
And when use of chemical weapons in Syria was confirmed by a UN investigation, Russia and the US forced the Syrian regime to join the Chemical Weapons Convention. Most – though tragically not yet all – of Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons has been destroyed.
Australia’s role in fighting a nuclear weapon ban
In voting “no”, Australia stuck out like a sore thumb among Asia-Pacific nations in at October’s UN committee meeting. All of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) members – including Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand – as well as New Zealand and ten out of 12 Pacific island countries voted yes.
Australia is signatory to all the key international treaties banning or controlling weapons. On some, like the Chemical Weapons Convention, Australia was a leader. Australia’s active opposition and efforts to undermine moves towards a treaty banning nuclear weapons stand in stark contrast.
Australia’s stated arguments for opposing a ban treaty have varied, including that there are no “shortcuts” to disarmament; that only measures with the support of the nuclear-armed states are worthwhile; that a ban would damage the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, causing instability and deepening divisions between states with and without nuclear weapons; that it wouldn’t address North Korea’s threatening behaviour; and that it does not take account of today’s security challenges.
Perhaps the most extraordinary justification of Australia’s position came from Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s first assistant secretary, Richard Sadleir, who said at a Senate estimates hearing on October 20, 2016:
it is not an auspicious time to be pushing for a treaty of this sort. Indeed, in order to be able to effectively carry forward disarmament, you need to have a world in which there is not a threat of nuclear weapons and people feel safe and secure.
Can anyone seriously imagine Australian officials arguing that we need to keep stockpiles of sarin nerve gas, plague bacteria, smallpox virus, or botulism toxin for deterrence, just in case, because we live in an uncertain world?
Yet that is what Australia continues to argue about nuclear weapons. Sadleir is saying that disarmament is only possible after it has happened, when we live in an impossibly perfect world. It’s a nonsensical argument that puts off nuclear disarmament indefinitely.
It’s 71 years since the Hiroshima bombing, and 46 years since the nuclear non-proliferation treaty came into force, committing all governments to bring about nuclear disarmament. But that treaty is too weak: no disarmament negotiations are underway or planned.
Instead, every nuclear armed state is investing massively in keeping and modernising their nuclear arsenals for the indefinite future. The US alone has said it plans to spend about US$348 billion over the next decade on its nuclear arsenal.
Nations like Australia cannot eliminate weapons they don’t own. But they can prohibit them, by international treaty and in domestic law. And they can push other nations to do more to reduce threats to humanity – just as Australia has done with every other weapon of mass destruction.
This is an issue that should be above party politics. In 2015, the Labor Party adopted a new national policy platform committing to support the negotiation of a global treaty banning nuclear weapons. At a public meeting in Perth last month, Bill Shorten said that a Labor government would support the UN resolution for a ban treaty.
In October 2016, our government let us down by voting to be counted on the wrong side of history. Thankfully, we can still expect to see the United Nations ratify the move towards a new treaty banning nuclear weapons in December, with negotiations set to begin in March 2017 in New York. It’s still not too late for Australia to change its vote, and participate constructively in the negotiations next year.
Tilman Ruff, Associate Professor, International Education and Learning Unit, Nossal Institute for Global Health, School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne
It is estimated that 73,000 people died within seconds in Nagasaki, the second Japanese city to fall victim to the atomic bomb. AAP/Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum
With the end of the Cold War, the nuclear arms race came to a virtual halt, but the nuclear threat remained. In regional rivalries, such as those in the south Asia subcontinent, northeast Asia, and the Middle East, the bomb still has great influence, while the threat of terrorists with a nuclear capability has become a new global concern.
The risk of nuclear weapons or fissile materials falling into the wrong hands has greatly increased since September 11. We know that thousands of weapons and tens of thousands of potential weapons – small lumps of highly enriched uranium and plutonium – remain in unsecured facilities in Russia.
These are highly vulnerable to theft by terrorists directly or by criminals who could sell them on to terrorist groups. In the years since the end of the Cold War, there have been numerous cases of theft of nuclear materials in which the thieves were captured, sometimes in Russia, on other occasions in the Czech Republic, Germany and elsewhere.
The grim reality
A sample of statistics from the global nuclear age provides a sobering reminder of the scale of the problem. Upwards of 128,000 nuclear weapons have been produced in the past 68 years, of which about 98% were produced by the US and the former Soviet Union.
The nine current members of the nuclear club still possess 17,265 operational nuclear weapons between them. Thousands are presumably ready to fire at a moment’s notice – enough to destroy the Earth’s inhabitants many, many times over.
As worries about nuclear proliferation have been mounting during the early years of the 21st-century, is there a danger of nuclear alarmism in the US and elsewhere?
Today it is hard to find an analyst or commentator on nuclear proliferation who is not pessimistic about the future. What apparently upsets these experts is that they find little in the current decades that offer means of containing nuclear proliferation.
But we challenge this overly pessimistic outlook. It’s increasingly clear that nuclear alarmism has resulted in overstated claims that emerge from a poor understanding of the history of nuclear proliferation and non-proliferation.
Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer are acknowledged for their contribution to developing the nuclear bomb. Ron Cogswell, CC BY-NC
We must learn from the past
There are significant lessons to be harvested from the history of the nuclear weapons era. Because 21st-century proliferation issues have deep roots in the past, for global policies to be successful, an understanding of this history is vital.
A number of myths drive the popular opinion that new nuclear threats are more dangerous than those of the past. For example, many believe that during the Cold War nuclear weapons readily stabilised international politics. Or the converse – that superpower rivalry alone drove proliferation during the same years. But the alarmists have oversimplified strategic dilemmas of the Cold War era and have ignored the regional security issues that contributed to proliferation during these years.
Those analysts who believe that Washington and Moscow alone created the nonproliferation regime ignore the very considerable role played by the international community.
No-one dismisses the fact that nuclear proliferation is an important policy matter. But overreacting to current dangers while wrongly characterising those of the past could drive misguided policies that fail to achieve their desired end. What, then, should be done, and what should leaders and officials consider when determining their nuclear policies and politics?
The future of nuclear thinking
There are two basic ideas that will dominate discussions in the years ahead: expanded nuclear deterrence and applying economic/military sanctions. And from these, we can foresee three general approaches to nuclear non-proliferation.
The carry-over from the First Nuclear Age is the deterrent (and “taboo”) approach that militates against any state’s first use of nuclear weapons. This approach doesn’t rid the world of nuclear weapons, but its supporters argue that it is the most effective way to prevent their aggressive use. However, its most prominent recent proponent and nuclear pessimist par excellence – former US president George W. Bush – clearly had Saddam Hussein in his sights.
Former US president George W. Bush is a believer in nuclear deterrence. EPA
Then there are those exponents of the “global zero” option approach, of which nuclear optimist and Bush’s successor Barack Obama is the chief proponent. These thinkers are persuaded that enforcement is best handled by the nuclear weapons states setting an example. Yet those European nations, Japan, and South Korea for whom the US provides a “nuclear umbrella” worry as the US reduces its nuclear stockpiles, wondering if it is also reducing its commitment to their protection.
The third approach – applying economic, military, and other (cyber/assassination) sanctions – also has its supporters. Economic sanctions are currently employed in the cases of North Korea and Iran.
The idea of military sanctions has also been advanced, such as those that Israel employed in the 1981 Osirak bombing of an Iraqi nuclear facility to destroy Iran’s nuclear power plants if diplomacy fails to bring about a satisfactory agreement. But the effectiveness of military sanctions hinge on the suitability of pre-emptive strikes.
Sanctions, in turn, raise important issues. Do nuclear weapons states have the legal right to interfere with states developing a nuclear weapons program? And are sanctions are effective at all?
Ultimately, the real question is: will any of these approaches actually work in ridding the world of the nuclear threat? We don’t know. But that is no reason not to try.
Joseph Siracusa and Frank Gavin are co-convenors of a conference on the global nuclear order being held at RMIT this week.
North Korea is more likely to use nuclear weapons if backed into a corner where the perpetuation of the Kim regime was directly threatened. Reuters/KCNA
North Korea’s sixth nuclear test confirms it is very close to perfecting a miniaturised warhead for deployment on its missile delivery systems. The 6.3 magnitude seismographic reading registered by the test blast is approximately ten times more powerful than that recorded from its nuclear test in September 2016.
There seems to be no outcome from this crisis in which US power is enhanced. This adds to the gravity of the Trump administration’s impending response to the nuclear test. Let’s walk through the possible scenarios.
If the US goes to war with North Korea, it risks the lives of millions of people across the region.
US Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis responded to the latest test with a threat of an “effective and overwhelming military response”. This is the kind of rhetorical overreach that is undermining US regional standing under the Trump administration.
There are high risks in any military action against North Korea. There are essentially no good options for compelling it with force. As recently departed White House adviser Steve Bannon said:
There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.
The US loses in any war scenario, even though its combined military forces with South Korea would inevitably win such a conflict.
If the Trump administration talks tough and doesn’t follow through, it leaves America’s regional allies exposed – and gifts China pole position in shaping relations in northeast Asia.
America’s northeast Asian alliances, particularly with South Korea, will be challenged regardless of what Donald Trump does next.
North Korea’s nuclear-capable intercontinental missiles increase the risk to the US of defending South Korea and Japan in the event of war. This undermines their governments’ faith in America’s security guarantee. It does not help that the Trump administration has been slow to fill the ambassadorial roles to South Korea and Japan.
Any military action that leads to an escalation to war risks a North Korean artillery attack on Seoul, and missile strikes on other targets in South Korea, Japan and further afield.
North Korea is more likely to use nuclear weapons if backed into a corner and the perpetuation of the Kim regime was directly threatened. US alliances with South Korea and Japan would come under great stress if they were attacked, given that those alliances are in place to prevent such an occurrence.
Sanctions
If sanctions continue to be ineffectual, North Korea completes its end-run to having a deployable nuclear weapons capability.
This outcome undermines the nuclear nonproliferation regime. North Korea’s successful nuclear weapons development weakens this system by serving as an example to other would-be proliferators that they can develop nuclear weapons without any meaningful consequences – the ineffectual economic sanctions regime notwithstanding.
This outcome will also demonstrate that the US cannot prevent a determined nuclear proliferator from undermining its nuclear hegemony.
Nuclear monopoly, underpinned by the limit on the number of countries with nuclear weapons built into the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, is one of the pillars underpinning US global power. The “nuclear shadow” cast by countries with nuclear weapons provides them with greater leverage in dealing with the US and narrows America’s menu of choice for exercising power.
Trade war with China
If the US threatens to squeeze China as a path to influencing North Korea, it risks a trade war it inevitably loses.
Trump has tweeted that the US “is considering, in addition to other options, stopping all trade with any country doing business with North Korea”. This is a not-so-veiled message to China, North Korea’s largest trade partner.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin doubled down on this proposition. He claimed his department was working on a sanctions package that would strangle “all trade and other business” with North Korea.
There have also been calls to urge China to embargo crude oil deliveries to North Korea to further squeeze the Kim regime.
Risking global recession through a foolish protectionist spiral or forcing China to drop the “dollar bomb” is not a credible strategy for soliciting Chinese assistance with handling North Korea.
Nuclear freeze
In the unlikely event that the US negotiates a nuclear freeze with North Korea, it simply kicks the can down the road.
When we strip back the ritualised tough talk that regional leaders routinely articulate after North Korean provocations, and the inane repetition of the meme that diplomacy equates to “appeasement”, talking to North Korea may be the least-worst option forward.
The Kim regime may agree to a nuclear weapons development and production freeze, or a missile testing moratorium to buy time.
But given the importance of nuclear weapons to Kim Jong-un’s Byungjin development model (simultaneous nuclear weapons proliferation and economic development) to his domestic legitimacy, and North Korea’s long history of coercive bargaining tactics in which it engineers crises to obtain concessions in exchange for de-escalation, this could only be a postponement of North Korea’s inevitable proliferation success.
The problem with the negotiation gambit is that there is no mutually agreeable starting point. There is no outcome in which the regime willingly relinquishes its nuclear weapons program because the Kim regime is so heavily invested in nuclear weapons as the foundation of its security strategy, economic development pathway. and domestic political legitimacy.
A peace agreement
If the US sits down to negotiate a peace treaty with North Korea, its regional prestige will be forever damaged – and the raison d’être of its military presence in South Korea will evaporate.
Another avenue for negotiations to progress may arise once North Korea has perfected and deployed its nuclear weapons capability.
At this time, North Korea may call on the US to negotiate a security guarantee and a formal conclusion to the Korean War, which remains technically alive since the 1953 Armistice Agreement.
But why would North Korea want to engage in such negotiations? It will have greater leverage in these negotiations when backed by a nuclear deterrent.
Yet such an agreement might be the least worrying option available to the Trump administration, given the unpalatability of other options. It seems likely that regional countries will ultimately have to find a way to manage a nuclear North Korea.
A marker of US decline
There are no avenues for the Trump administration to demonstrate strength and resolve that do not ultimately expose the limitations of that strength.
Could current events on the Korean Peninsula represent America’s “Suez Crisis” moment? In 1956, Britain over-reached in its attempt to maintain a post-war imperial toehold in Egypt, exposing the chasm between its imperial pretensions of a bygone era and its actual power in the aftermath of the second world war.
The North Korea crisis is the most obvious face of hegemonic transition. Trump’s US is facing a set of outcomes to the current crisis that are lose-lose. They are exposing the reality of US decline and the growing limitations of its ability to shape the strategic environment in northeast Asia.
For more on this topic, you can listen to Benjamin Habib and Nick Bisley discuss North Korea on this recent La Trobe Asia podcast.
North Korea’s apparent nuclear detonation on September 3 has drawn our attention to a remarkable international organisation that helps detect and identify nuclear tests.
For the Vienna-based Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), the latest North Korean explosion was easy to detect and locate. With a seismic magnitude of 6.1 and a blast yield of 160 kilotons (Hiroshima was around 15), the purported hydrogen bomb test mimicked a major earthquake. It was quickly sourced to North Korea’s nuclear test site.
Confirming that the event was definitely a nuclear test, as opposed to another type of explosion or an earthquake, is trickier.
For that we rely on detection of short-lived radioactive isotopes that may leak from the test site, notably the noble gas xenon. The CTBTO has not yet announced such a finding, although South Korean monitors have reportedly detected xenon-133.
Other potential sources of the gas must be eliminated before a definitive conclusion can be reached.
Global network of seismic and radionuclide monitoring stations. CTBTO / The Conversation, CC BY-ND
In the past, such fallout has usually been discerned after a North Korean test, but not always. Much depends on whether the cavity created by the test leaks or collapses.
Nuclear test ban treaty
The CTBTO’s International Monitoring System, which detected the North Korean test, is designed to verify compliance with the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which bans all nuclear tests in all environments for all time.
Network of infrasound monitoring stations. CTBTO / The Conversation, CC BY-ND
The International Monitoring System comprises 321 monitoring systems worldwide, using four technologies:
seismic – to detect tests under ground
radionuclide detection – to detect breakdown products
hydroacoustic – to detect tests under water, and
infrasound – for atmospheric tests.
The CTBTO’s international monitoring system is sensitive enough to detect underground nuclear tests below one kiloton.
Construction of the system began in 1996 and is now 90% complete.
Network of hydroacoustic monitoring stations. CTBTO / The Conversation, CC BY-ND
Australia hosts six seismic, two infrasound and one hydroacoustic station, including a large seismic array and infrasound station at Warramunga in the Northern Territory.
Data from the International Monitoring System is transmitted to Vienna via a global communications satellite network, mostly in real time, where it is compiled, analysed and distributed to member states. Sixteen laboratories are available for analysing radioactive fallout.
The treaty also provides for on-site inspections to confirm that a nuclear test has been conducted. The system is funded by member states according to the usual United Nations formula based on national GDP.
A difficult, important achievement
As a member of the Australian delegation, I observed the complex preparatory scientific talks on the system at the Committee on Disarmament in Geneva in the early 1980s. It is a miracle of statecraft and science that this collaborative international infrastructure has actually come into being.
The scientists did not get everything they wanted due to political and financial constraints. Some errors were made in the rush to complete the technical specifications. Installation of some of the stations in remote and inaccessible areas has proved daunting.
The hydroacoustic system, for instance, passed a significant milestone in June when the final station was completed, on France’s Crozet Islands in the southern Indian Ocean.
After 20 years of planning and construction and the investment of millions of dollars, not only is the International Monitoring System almost complete, but it is functioning far better than its designers anticipated.
It also has unexpected side benefits, such as providing early warning of tsunamis and detecting nuclear disasters. The network successfully detected the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and tracked radioactive plumes from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.
Nuclear test ban treaty
The test ban treaty itself is not in such good shape. More than two decades after it was opened for signature it is still not in force, rendering the CTBTO only “provisional”. This is due to the requirement that all 44 states with a significant nuclear capacity must ratify it.
Currently 183 states have signed, and 162 have ratified. But 8 of the 44 with a nuclear capacity have still not ratified: China, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea and the United States. China, Egypt, Iran, Israel and the US have at least signed. China says it is awaiting US ratification before it moves.
After a flawed lobbying effort, President Bill Clinton’s administration failed to secure Senate approval for US ratification in 1999. The treaty has not been resubmitted since, despite President Barack Obama’s undertaking that he would try.
Given President Donald Trump’s apparent focus on emphasising American military prowess, it seems unlikely that he will favour ratification of the treaty.
More immediately threatening is the return of periodic Republican attempts to defund the CTBTO. These are usually beaten back on the grounds that the US benefits greatly from the worldwide monitoring that only a global system can provide, notwithstanding impressive US national capabilities.
As it has in the past, the Australian government should make representations in Washington in support of CTBT ratification and preservation of funding for the system.
Paradoxically though, even if the other seven holdouts ratify, the one country that continues to conduct nuclear tests into the 21st century, North Korea, can stymie entry into force forever. Its accession to the CTBT should be part of any negotiation with North Korea on its nuclear program.
The good news is that the global monitoring system continues to go from strength to strength, providing reassurance that all nuclear tests, including those less brazen than North Korea’s, will be caught.
The CTBTO’s verification system provides hope that science can quietly triumph while political solutions elude us.
The treaty will enter into force 90 days after 50 countries have ratified it. More than 40 are expected to sign today, and more will sign over the coming weeks and months. As it was adopted by a vote of 122 to one, it can be expected that close to 100 countries will sign before year’s end and it will enter into force in 2018.
The agreements is long overdue. It is 72 years since the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 71 years since the first resolution of the newly formed UN General Assembly called for “the elimination from national armaments of the atomic weapons”.
It comes at a time of deeply disturbing resurgent nuclear threats and risks of nuclear war, which are considered by most experts – such as the 15 Nobel laureates among the custodians of the Doomsday Clock – to be as high as they have ever been.
It will provide the first comprehensive and categorical prohibition of the world’s most destructive weapons. The treaty makes clear that the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of these weapons means they can never be used again, and consequently should be eliminated. It affirms that as the risks concern the security of all humanity, all countries share this responsibility.
Countries that join the treaty must not develop, test, produce, possess, transfer, receive, station, deploy, use or threaten to use nuclear weapons. There are provisions outlining a pathway for those that have nuclear weapons now, had them in the past, or host nuclear weapons, if they can verify they are rid of their nuclear weapons, related programs and facilities.
The treaty is carefully crafted to complement other disarmament treaties, in particular the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Not only is the content of the nuclear weapons treaty historic, but the process of its genesis has also transformed the moribund nuclear disarmament landscape. For the first time, a nuclear disarmament treaty has been led by the countries without the weapons, and has an unequivocal humanitarian basis.
The level of involvement of civil society was unprecedented, particularly Japanese hibakusha (those who survived the atomic bombs) and nuclear test survivors, including from Australia.
The UN was used for the first time in 21 years to negotiate a nuclear disarmament treaty, because it’s most inclusive and democratic forum, the General Assembly, is able to adopt substantive measures by vote.
This is in stark contrast to the NPT conferences and the Conference on Disarmament, which are paralysed by a requirement for consensus.
The treaty was able to be completed from negotiating mandate to adoption in eight months, with only four weeks of actual negotiations. This was because of a widespread determination to seize this landmark opportunity on the part of many states, who were more willing to put aside parochial agendas than I have ever witnessed in a nuclear forum over the past 35 years.
Fierce opposition came from nuclear-armed and nuclear-dependent countries (including Australia), as a US document to its NATO allies demonstrates. Strong political and economic pressure exerted on many countries by the US, UK, France and Russia, despite peeling off some smaller and weaker countries, proved ineffective.
Pressure on countries not to sign, most publicly US Secretary of Defence James Mattis’ admonition to Sweden, will likely ramp up. However, the treaty is a triumph of the interests of common humanity, and is not going away.
The dangerous brinkmanship and extreme threats traded between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un are only the latest explicit threats to use nuclear weapons by a succession of leaders, including Theresa May, Vladimir Putin, and leaders in India and Pakistan.
Relations between the US and Russia are at their worst in 30 years, with a resurgent Cold War escalating. Relations between the US and China are at their lowest point in decades. Pakistan and India are expanding their nuclear arsenals faster than anywhere else. Both sides are implementing deployments and policies for early use of nuclear weapons if war erupts.
North Korea’s escalating development and testing of both nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles demonstrate that any determined nation can develop both.
The fundamental problem is what South African ambassador Abdul Minty described as “nuclear apartheid”, with the countries possessing nuclear weapons busy modernising and determined to retain them, rather than fulfil their obligation to disarm. This is an inevitable driver of nuclear proliferation.
No human should have the power to end the world in an afternoon. If nuclear weapons are retained they will eventually be used. The crisis relating to North Korea, for which there is no military solution, highlights again that our luck could run out any day.
The countries that have foresworn biological and chemical weapons now need to do the same for nuclear weapons. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons provides a credible pathway to the verified, time-bound elimination of weapons posing the most acute existential threat to people everywhere.
All countries – including North Korea, the US and Australia – should join the treaty.
Tilman Ruff, Associate Professor, International Education and Learning Unit, Nossal Institute for Global Health, School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne
