DAY ONE OF THE HISTORIC TREATY TO BAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS

7 JULY 2017: DAY ONE OF THE HISTORIC TREATY TO BAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS

     “For the first time in the seven-decade effort to avert a nuclear war, a global treaty has been negotiated that proponents say would, if successful, lead to the destruction of all nuclear weapons and forever prohibit their use,” Rick Gladstone reported on July 7, 2017 in THE NEW YORK TIMES.

     “Negotiators representing two-thirds of the 192 member United Nations finalized the 10-page treaty this week after months of talks.

     “The document, called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, was formally adopted on Friday (7 July 2017, the 14^th day of the 6^th lunar month in the year of the Fire Rooster) at United Nations headquarters in New York during the final session of the negotiation conference.

    “It will be open for signature by any member state starting on Sept. 20 (2017) during the annual General Assembly and would enter into legal force 90 days after being ratified by 50 countries.

     ““The world has been waiting for this legal norm for 70 years,” said Elayne G. Whyte Gomez, Costa Rica’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva and chairwoman of the conference, which was broadcast live on the United Nations website.

    “Cheers and applause erupted among the delegates after the vote was tallied: 122 in favour and one against – the Netherlands, the only NATO member that participated in the conference. Singapore abstained.

     “The participants did not include any of the world’s nine nuclear-armed countries, which conspicuously boycotted the negotiations...

     “The basic premise, the treaty’s opening passage states, is a recognition of “the catastrophic humanitarian consequences that would result from any use of nuclear weapons,” and an agreement that their complete elimination “remains the only way to guarantee that nuclear weapons are never used again (after the two atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 1945) under any circumstances...”

    “It’s been seven decades since the world knew the power of destruction of nuclear weapons and since day one there was a call to prohibit nuclear weapons,” Elayne Whyte Gomez, president of the UN conference, told Ian Sample, science editor, The Guardian UK Friday 7 July 2017.

     “It’s a prohibition in line with other prohibitions on weapons of mass destruction,” said Beatrice Fihn at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) in Geneva.

     “We banned biological weapons 45 years ago, we banned chemical weapons 25 years ago, and today we are banning nuclear weapons,” Fihn said to Sample.

     “This is taking the first step towards (their) elimination...”

    The historic treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons came slightly over 70 years after the very first UN resolution when at its inaugural meeting on 24 January 1946 in London the General Assembly of 51 founding member nations called for and sought specific proposals “for the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons...”

     At the time, only the US had atomic bombs, and not more than a handful.

     In a remarkably clear, concise and insightful analysis published in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 7 July 2017, Zia Mian, of Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, has written:

     “In framing the obligations of states under the treaty, and by implication the conduct of all states, the preamble makes a case that nuclear weapons are in fundamental conflict with basic humanitarian sensibilities and international law. If the treaty is to ultimately be successful, this view will have to become the common sense of the world.

     “The treaty’s foundational claims are that ”any use of nuclear weapons would be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, in particular the principles and rules of international humanitarian law,” and that “any use of nuclear weapons would also be abhorrent to the principles and the dictates of public conscience.” Put simply, any use of nuclear weapons would by any reasonable measure be illegal and immoral, and so they should have no place in national policies or human affairs.

     “On this foundation are built the core obligations of the treaty – which must now become common knowledge...”

     Under Article 1 of the treaty, Zia Mian lists seven injunctions/obligations/prohibitions against possession of nuclear weapons, and using or threatening to use them.

    To quote Zia Mian:

     “These obligations break new ground. The prohibition on threatening to use nuclear weapons, for example, sets up a fundamental challenge to all policies based on nuclear deterrence. From now on, deterrence advocates are on the wrong side of the law (more particularly so the nuclear-armed deterrence exponents), as understood and accepted by the majority of countries in the world.

    “The treaty also requires that nuclear weapons, weapon programs, and weapon facilities be eliminated, in agreed verifiable, irreversible, time-bound plans...

     “The challenge of nuclear disarmament politics going forward will be getting publics and policy makers in nuclear weapon states (and their allies) to set aside their long held, deeply institutionalized sense of nuclear superiority and more exceptionalism and accept the treaty’s humanitarian imperative, its lawfulness (its logic for human survival and well-being), and the obligations that follow.

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    “The nine countries with nuclear weapons all stayed away from the talks, and some of them will work hard to prevent the treaty gaining ground (probably to the extent of sabotaging it).

     “The key to long-term progress will be the United States (Uncle Sam, Nuclear Adam), which more than any other country has set the global nuclear agenda since it made the first nuclear weapons and remains the only country ever to have used them in war. It is also the only country most responsible for the existing international system...”

     Zia Mian concludes with considerable cogency:

    “Above all, to be taken seriously by the nuclear-weapon states, the growing community of ban treaty states and peace activists worldwide must be willing to continue to be bold and take political risks, as they did in getting the historic) treaty. They must put at the heart of their relationship with the weapon states the treaty’s acknowledgement of “the ethical imperatives for nuclear disarmament and the urgency of achieving and maintaining a nuclear-weapon-free world, which is a global public good of the highest order, serving both national and collective security interests.” Having prohibited nuclear weapons as an ethical imperative, there is now no way back.”

     The way forward is towards total nuclear disarmament!