By John LaForge
All this week, dedicated nuclear weapons abolitionists have been meeting at the United Nations in New York. The up-beat gathering is the 3rd “Meeting of States Parties” (MSP) to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
The TPNW is extraordinary because — in the words of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons which helped shepherd the treaty through the UN negotiating process and won a Nobel Prize for it — it’s “the first globally applicable treaty that categorically prohibits the most destructive, inhumane instruments of war ever created.”
This prohibition applies to states that ratify, which means the U.S. and the eight other nuclear powers can continue the 80-year-long legacy of cancer-causing radioactive pollution and global bomb threats — known quaintly as “deterrence” — a rationalization of terror and globalized risk-taking that most of the rest of the world has renounced.
Along with the TPNW’s 73 states parties at this week’s meetings are over a dozen treaty “signatory states” from the Americas — putting the USA’s absence to shame — including Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, El Salvador, Chile, Bolivia, Cuba, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
Combined, the TPNW’s parties and signers total 94, or half of the United Nations’ 193 members, a colossal accomplishment of common sense, defogging, and popular good will that triumphed over public and private pressure, threats, and intimidation by nuclear armed states that pretend their doomsday devices still serve a needed function.
Enthusiasm for the TPNW is most pronounced in the global south where economies, environments, and health statistics could improve dramatically if the increasingly isolated nuclear-armed states would renounce their civilization-ending weapons and redirect the resources, scientific expertise and patriotic zeal to human needs.
The treaty’s appeal continues to grow in part because of today’s shooting wars involving nuclear-armed states.
This year, Nukewatch co-director Kelly Lundeen is in New York leading a small delegation of colleagues. Their particular focus among NGO activities is the treaty’s Article 6, requiring states parties to provide medical care, rehabilitation and psychological support for individuals affected by the use or testing of nuclear weapons. Widespread radioactive fallout from bomb testing has harmed millions in the Marshall Islands and Nevada (bombed by the U.S.), Australia (UK), Algeria (France), Kazakhstan (USSR), and at Lop Nor in China’s Gobi Desert.
Do you still believe “nuclear deterrence” policy retains validity? Consider the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The West’s nuclear weapons were always justified as the “deterrent” that kept Russia from taking military action in Europe. Perhaps the unmasking of this charade, which holds us all in such terrible danger, can help see it be renounced and abandoned.
There is another grim and indeed mortifying reason nuclear weapons can be eliminated: they are unnecessary for war-makers bent on mass destruction. Today’s photos of a rubblized Gaza, 2003 footage of the Shock-and-Awe rubblized streets of Baghdad, and the horrific destruction of Ukraine’s electrical power stations by Putin’s invasion of the sovereign state, show devastation caused by non-nuclear Israeli and U.S. explosives. Modern “conventional” weapons are so devastating, so powerful, that nuclear attacks are redundant, only make the rubble bounce, and can be disavowed and revoked.
The world’s economies, its peoples’ nervous systems, its natural ecosystems, and the status of international relations would all improve.
John LaForge, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Co-director of Nukewatch. He’s testified before British and Dutch parliamentarians on the outlaw status of depleted uranium weapons — armor-piercing shells made of uranium-238 — which have been used widely by the United States.
