Despite an obligation in the landmark 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), and an "unequivocal undertaking" in a 2000 declaration from its five nuclear weapon states – the US, China, France, Britain, and Russia – " to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals", the treaty's disarmament dimension remains little more than aspirational, an inconvenient moral imperative.
While 185 other state signatories honour their undertaking not to develop, stockpile or use nuclear weapons, the five, veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council, and the other nuclear-armed non-treaty states, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea, show no inclination to reduce further global nuclear stockpiles
Yet the idea of states relinquishing nukes and committing to a non-nuclear policy is no dream: Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine returned to Russia nukes inherited from the Soviet Union; South Africa dismantled its nukes; Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, and Taiwan shelved their development programmes, as did Iraq and Libya.
Brazil and South Africa last week joined Ireland, Mexico, Austria and Nigeria to back a motion that required the UN to convene a special conference to negotiate a treaty on the complete prohibition of nuclear weapons – 123 nations voted in favour, 38 against, with 16 abstentions. The conference, the first multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations in over 20 years, is to begin its work in New York next March .
The move is a timely and welcome assertion by Ireland of its independent, neutral defence policy and of both its long-standing opposition to nuclear weapons and support for the NPT.
A ban treaty, whether or not endorsed by the nuclear weapon states, would contribute significantly to political pressure on those states to sign up. It would move the international consensus beyond the NPT’s grudging acceptance of the legitimacy of such weapons and help kickstart the sclerotic non-proliferation process. It would not undermine the NPT, but reinforce its ambition.
The humanitarian case against nukes is overwhelming. But unlike chemical and biological weapons they are not explicitly prohibited by international humanitarian law.
It circumscribes their use, setting conditions that would prohibit their use in almost all conceivable scenarios – of their nature nuclear weapons can not discriminate between civilian and military targets, they can not be used in a limited or proportionate way, and of their nature they violate the prohibition on means of warfare that cause superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering.
It is also prohibited to deploy means of warfare that cause widespread, long-term, and severe damage to the environment. The time has come to turn such worthy constraints on the use of nuclear weapons into their logical corollary, a complete ban.