Toward banning nuclear weapons

TWO MAJOR international conferences on nuclear abolition happened this summer: one was the Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), held in Vienna in June. The other was the tenth Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference (NPT RevCon) held in New York in August.

Elizabeth Ingrams discusses the nuclear threat at the May Branch meeting

Screengrab arguably © Matt Salusbury

To recap: The NPT is the world's most established disarmament regime. It emerged from the Cuba Missile Crisis in 1962 - when for nine days the world, despite years of deterrence and MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) thinking, was on the brink of nuclear war. The USSR backed down from its threat to the US but the suddenly the world woke up and even the nuclear-armed states agreed that disarmament was a better option than proliferation. So 191 states finally signed the NPT in 1970. Back then there were five nuclear-armed states (France, Britain, the USSR [now Russia], the US and China); but now, despite the NPT process, the number of nuclear-armed states has grown to nine.

That's still a good look for the NPT disarmament regime, right? Not really, because recently all nuclear-armed states have been renewing and updating their nuclear arsenals: this year Russia even threatened to use a Sarmat missile against the UK. This missile can carry a warhead with a yield of up to 100 megatons and can cause a tidal wave up to 500m high). Sad to say also, this year's NPT Review Conference ended in failure. The headline-grabbing reason for its failure was that the Russian delegation walked out over a reference to Ukraine's internationally agreed borders. The truth is a bit more complicated and a good analysis can be read on armscontrol.org.

But there is hope. Non-nuclear states, which are also signatories of the NPT, have held the nine nuclear-armed states to account. Sixty-six of them have thus far signed the first treaty to set targets and deadlines for a total ban on nuclear weapons - the 2017 Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

The first Meeting of States Parties to the TPNW, which I attended in Vienna on 21-23 June, ended in consensus, agreeing a 50-point action plan within just three days! This action plan raises the bar on nuclear disarmament and its success is driven by its following on from already-agreed international treaties banning chemical weapons, cluster munitions and biological weapons. It has changed the nuclear policy discourse from one of deterrence thinking to thinking driven by humanitarian concerns - highlighting the devastating intergenerational socioeconomic and ecological consequences of any nuclear exchange - and that that use of nuclear weapons could also, given current capabilities, threaten the survival of the human race.

In the year when we lost great voices for nuclear abolition such as UK author Raymond Briggs, author of Where the Wind Blows, and the last leader of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, it's worth recalling that a nuclear war could be triggered, as Gorbachev told us, like a "rolling stone from the top of a mountain, assuming it would not on its own cause the mountain to collapse. Then, triggered by that single stone, stones all over the mountain start rolling, causing complete collapse. The launch of a single missile can set everything in motion."

The problem for us today is that the command and control systems of strategic nuclear arms are almost completely computerised. The more nuclear weapons, the greater the possibility of accidental nuclear war. In response London Freelance Branch members are organising a special event soon to discuss nuclear risks and what can be done about them. Watch this space...

© Elizabeth Ingrams

Notes

• Gorbachev's words are quoted from Fumihiko Yoshida The United States and Nuclear Weapons from Truman to Obama, 2009
• London Freelance Branch heard from Elizabeth about the issues at our May meeting and successfully presented a motion to the last National Union of Journalists Delegate Meeting instructing the National Executive to campaign within the trade union movement on the issues.