Banning Nuclear Weapons, A Primer on Nuclear Ban Treaty Negotiations 2017

“The world in its present state of moral advancement compared with its technical development would be eventually at the mercy of such a [nuclear] weapon. In other words, modern civilization might be completely destroyed … Also our leadership in the war and in the development of this weapon has placed a certain moral responsibility upon us which we cannot shirk without very serious responsibility for any disaster to civilization which it would further.”
— US Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s Memo to President Truman

Nuclear weapons are the most destructive, inhumane and indiscriminate weapons ever created. Both in the scale of the devastation they cause, and in their uniquely persistent, spreading, genetically damaging radioactive fallout, they are unlike any other weapons. A single nuclear bomb detonated over a large city could kill millions of people. The use of tens or hundreds of nuclear bombs would disrupt the global climate, causing widespread famine. Nuclear weapons also pose a great threat to the environment and human survival. They release vast amounts of energy in the form of blast, heat and radiation but no adequate humanitarian response mechanism has been put in place yet. Moreover, history shows that the prohibition of certain weapon systems facilitates progress towards their elimination. This makes a strong case for banning the nuclear weapons.

Background

In one of its final acts of 2016, the United Nations General Assembly, through a landmark resolution with the support of more than 120 countries, approved the negotiation of a treaty banning nuclear weapons. Through the resolution, the General Assembly decided to “negotiate a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination” urging all member states to participate.

It was in this backdrop that on March 27, historic negotiations on a treaty to ban nuclear weapons in international law were started at the United Nations headquarters  in New York.

Why ban nuclear weapons?

The driving force for the demand for a nuclear weapons-free world is a simple humanitarian impulse; the loves and compassion for other human beings. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate means of mass destruction and history has shown that their use brings immeasurable death and suffering. It was this realisation that led to the November 1961 UN General Assembly resolution that declared: “Any state using nuclear and thermonuclear weapons is to be considered as violating the Charter of the United Nations, as acting contrary to the laws of humanity, and as committing a crime against mankind and civilisation.”

Even those who set the world on the path to nuclear weapons understood the mortal danger and moral challenge confronting humanity. Henry Stimson’s above-quoted memo is a pertinent example in this regard. The United Nations, which was created to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” soon after its creation, took the nuclear threat as its first priority. In January 1946, in its very first resolution, the UN called for a plan “for the elimination of national armaments of atomic weapons”.

Significance of 2017 event

Diplomats from about 130 countries — none from the nine nuclear weapons states — attended the negotiations which are based on the recognition that weapons represent a significant risk to human security. The negotiations have one simple goal: declare it illegal for any country to produce, possess, stockpile, deploy, threaten to use or use nuclear weapons. The final treaty, which is expected to be approved and ready for signature by the end of this year, will finally ban weapons designed to indiscriminately kill civilians, completing the prohibition of weapons of mass destruction.

During the session, there was wide convergence of views on the core prohibitions, such as stockpiling, use, deployment, acquisition, development and production of nuclear weapons. Broad support for prohibiting the hosting and transfer of such weapons was also noted.

Questions remain on provisions related to verification of compliance, clauses for accession by nuclear-armed and other states, timelines for elimination of stockpiles and the relationship of the new instrument with existing treaties such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), among others. Delegations will return to New York in June to start discussing the draft treaty.

Nuclear weapons states boycott

While 130 states participated in the negotiations, not a single nuclear weapons state was part of it. The boycott was hardly surprising; no nuclear weapons state is ready now to negotiate elimination of its nuclear arsenal. They believe that any progress must be made on an incremental basis. For its part, the US actively opposed the resolution to begin the negotiation and pressured its allies to do the same. The growing polarization between nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states is one of the many challenges facing the nuclear non-proliferation regime.

What will the treaty ban?

If the negotiations produce a treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons, it will strengthen the global norms against using and possessing these weapons. And it will spur long-overdue progress towards disarmament. Experience shows that the prohibition of a particular type of weapon provides a solid legal and political foundation for advancing its progressive elimination.
The treaty will also complement existing bans on other indiscriminate and inhumane weapons, and reinforce existing legal instruments on nuclear weapons, such as the NPT, regional nuclear-weapon-free zones, and the treaty banning nuclear test explosions.

What will be its impact?

Candidly, it would have little practical effect without the participation of nuclear weapons states. Such a treaty, however, could increase the political and diplomatic pressure on nuclear weapons states to pursue nuclear disarmament more actively. Such pressure likely will fall more on democracies, including the United States and European states in which US nuclear weapons are based, than on autocratic states such as Russia and China.

New Treaty vs the NPT

The NPT does not ban nuclear weapons as such. However, it does prohibit nations from acquiring nuclear weapons if they did not already have them at the time the NPT was negotiated, and it requires all of its parties to pursue negotiations in good faith for nuclear disarmament.

The NPT specifically envisages the creation of new legal instruments to advance the objective of nuclear disarmament. The nuclear weapons ban treaty will complement and reinforce the NPT rather than replace or undermine it. The NPT will remain in force after the ban treaty has been concluded.

Pakistan’s stance

During a press conference at the Foreign Office in Islamabad, the Spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr Nafees Zakaria, elaborated on the Pakistan’s stance on the issue of banning nuclear weapons. The crux of his press briefing was that Pakistan had consistently supported a comprehensive convention on nuclear disarmament through negotiations at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva in accordance with the principle of equal and undiminished security of all states. In our view, piecemeal solutions such as the nuclear ban treaty, which ignore the security dimension of the issue and do not have all the relevant stakeholders — nuclear weapon states — on board, are not likely to yield the desired results. “While Pakistan fully sympathises with the motivation behind this initiative, we would like to stress the need for a realistic and pragmatic approach which tries to address the underlying genuine security concerns of states that force them to seek deterrence in the first place,” he said.

It is important to note that simply arguing that nuclear weapons are dangerous does not help us solve fundamental problems of geopolitics and strategy. Moreover, whilst morality has its place in strategy, moral absolutes do not. Many proponents of nuclear disarmament have the “luxury” of sitting in a strategic vacuum and argue that states should simply learn to get on with one another.

Nuclear Forces in 2017

Nine nations together possess an estimated 14,900 nuclear weapons, of which more than 90 per cent are in the arsenals of the United States and Russia. Several hundred US and Russian warheads are kept on high alert – ready to be launched within minutes of a warning.

Most nuclear weapons today are many times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The failure of the nuclear-armed nations to disarm has heightened the risk that other nations will one day acquire nuclear weapons. The only guarantee against the spread and use of nuclear weapons is to prohibit and eliminate them without delay.

Although the leaders of some nuclear-armed nations have expressed their vision for a nuclear-weaponfree world, all are actively upgrading and modernizing their nuclear arsenals. They have made no plans as yet to dismantle them completely.
Five European nations host US nuclear weapons on their soil as part of a NATO nuclear-sharing arrangement (Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey), and roughly two dozen other nations claim to rely on US nuclear weapons in their military doctrines.