Melissa Parke is Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. She formerly worked for the United Nations in Gaza, Kosovo, New York and Lebanon and served as Australia’s Minister for International Development.
We must eliminate nuclear weapons before they eliminate us.
That is the clear message we heard from the Japanese survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when their organisation, Nihon Hidankyo, was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize last December.
Just three weeks ago, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists added to the urgency by moving the Doomsday Clock the closest it has ever been to midnight – the moment signifying the destruction of humanity – warning that wars in Ukraine and the Middle East “could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation”.
Any actual use of nuclear weapons would have catastrophic and wide-ranging consequences, especially in densely populated regions like Europe, South Asia and the Korean peninsula.
A single nuclear detonation would likely kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and injure many more; radioactive fallout would contaminate large areas, including in the country that used the weapon. Widespread panic would trigger mass movements of people and severe economic disruption. Yet, it would be unlikely to stop there. Simulations of nuclear conflict always end in rapid escalation and global catastrophe, something that Annie Jacobsen’s recent bestselling book Nuclear War: a scenario underlined.
Research published in Nature Food in 2022, found that a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan – which have much smaller arsenals than Russia and the United States- would not just devastate the region, but the soot and debris from the blast and fires would cause a nuclear winter disrupting food production and starving more than 2 billion people to death.
The doctrine of nuclear deterrence that India, Pakistan and the other seven nuclear-armed states follow is a threat to people everywhere, not just in these countries.
Deterrence is based on the willingness and readiness to use nuclear weapons which kill and maim indiscriminately.
When Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed more than 215,000 people were killed and many more harmed in cruel, lingering and inhumane ways by relatively small weapons by today’s standards. The vast majority of them were civilians, and an estimated 38,ooo, were children who are particularly vulnerable to the effects of ionising radiation and the blast and burn injuries inflicted by nuclear weapons, as a recent report from my organisation, ICAN, demonstrates.
Sumiteru Taniguchi, who died in 2017, was 16 years old when Nagasaki was attacked. At the time of the explosion he was riding his bicycle. “In the flash of the explosion,” he recounted, “I was blown off the bicycle from behind and slapped down against the ground.” When he lifted his head, he saw that the children who had been playing all around him just moments before were dead. He suffered severe burns and spent almost four years in hospital recovering from his injuries. He had to have 10 surgeries later in life to remove growths from the scarred areas of his body. The pain and discomfort never went away.
Since 1945, nearly all countries have committed to protect the human rights of civilians, including children, in conflict under international humanitarian law. India and Pakistan are also among the states that have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which commits them to “take all feasible measures to ensure protection and care of children who are affected by an armed conflict” which they would not be able to do if they were to use their nuclear weapons.
The growing understanding of the massive and indiscriminate harm nuclear weapons do to people and the environment led to 122 countries voting to adopt the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017. The TPNW is the only bright spot in a grim security landscape with half of all countries already having signed or ratified it and more indicating they will join soon.
The majority of countries support the treaty with 140 out of 193 voting in the UN General Assembly to support it. However, so far, the nuclear-armed states and their pro-nuclear allies have opposed the treaty.
This state of play is reflected in South Asia where Bangladesh, Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka have either signed, ratified or acceded to the TPNW, and Afghanistan and Bhutan have supported it at the UN. On the other side are India and Pakistan which have enough nuclear fire power to lay waste to the entire region.
There are no practical obstacles to a country getting rid of its nuclear weapons. We have the knowledge and experience of how to dismantle these weapons. All it takes is political will.
Supporters of nuclear weapons often argue they cannot be uninvented, but this ignores how we have outlawed other weapons of mass destruction, as as well as useful industrial chemicals that have been shown to be harmful to health and the environment, such as the 1987 Montreal Protocol that phased out the chemicals that were destroying the ozone layer.
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the invention of nuclear weapons and their use against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 80 years living under the shadow of this sword of Damocles is enough.
All countries should heed the call for the elimination of nuclear weapons they heard at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony from the hibakusha – as the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known in Japanese. Nuclear abolition, not nuclear deterrence, is what the world needs.
Deterrence is a flawed theory based on naïve assumptions that leaders behave rationally 100% of the time that fly in the face of what we know about human behaviour. If – or more likely when- it fails, we will not get a second chance.
Joining the TPNW is the way to eliminate this grave risk. It is the only treaty that bans nuclear weapons and it provides a pathway under international law to fair and verifiable disarmament. It is time for the leaders of all the nuclear-armed states to stop their reckless gambling with all our futures, get on the right side of history, and join the global majority that supports the treaty.
Melissa Parke is Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. She formerly worked for the United Nations in Gaza, Kosovo, New York and Lebanon and served as Australia’s Minister for International Development.
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