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.
The United States and Israel – both nuclear-armed countries – have justified their unprovoked, illegal war against Iran as necessary to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons. The rhetoric that Iran should not be allowed to have the bomb is also being echoed by many politicians and media commentators, particularly in the West.
It is true that as a long-standing member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Iran is legally bound never to develop or acquire nuclear weapons and its nuclear programme has rightfully been of concern. However, Iran is not believed by the IAEA or even US intelligence to be developing a bomb, which makes the US-Israeli attack on the country even more unjustifiable.
But then, no country should be allowed to have nuclear weapons.
There are nine nuclear-armed countries in the world. They deploy nuclear weapons with a combined explosive capacity 135,000 times greater than the bomb that incinerated Hiroshima. The latest scientific research has confirmed that even a small nuclear exchange would have cascading, catastrophic consequences – including in countries far removed from the detonations.
The threat is real and is embodied in the doctrine of nuclear deterrence all these countries follow. Deterrence (derived from the word ‘terror’) theory requires nuclear-armed countries to demonstrate a constant willingness and capability to use these weapons of mass destruction with all the devastating consequences that would entail for humanity and the environment. To that effect, more than 4,000 nuclear weapons are continuously deployed and ready to use at short notice.
Under the NPT, the five original nuclear-armed countries have legally committed to disarming, while the other 186 members are committed to not developing or acquiring nuclear weapons.
As the NPT’s recent Review Conference showed so clearly, these five nuclear armed states – China, France, Russia, UK and US – are doing everything they can to avoid honouring their legally binding commitment to disarm. At the conference they opposed the use of language in conference documents that would mention their lack of concrete moves to disarm or even acknowledge the catastrophic humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons.
Instead, they use a particular set of words and phrases about their commitment to the treaty and its objectives and undertake a number of other activities to create the appearance of action, while in fact they are modernising, and in some cases expanding, their arsenals.
Research just published by ICAN shows that last year the nine nuclear-armed states – the five in the NPT, plus India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan – spent almost $119 billion on nuclear weapons.
They justify this spending using the indefensible logic of nuclear deterrence. Given deterrence theory is full of contradictions and naïve, the doctrine is a recipe for disaster. It assumes leaders will act rationally all the time, even under the extreme stress of a nuclear crisis, when we know this is not how human psychology works. Deterrence only needs to fail once for life as we know it on our planet to end.
Nuclear armed states know what would happen if nuclear weapons were to be used again. Millions of people would be killed and injured immediately through blast, burns and radiation, and many would die agonising, lingering deaths while emergency services would not be able to respond. This would be followed by nuclear winter where the soot and debris sent up into the atmosphere by the blast and fires from nuclear explosions would block sunlight causing the collapse of agriculture and widespread famine and death by starvation.
It is for these reasons that no country, not Iran, nor Israel, the US, Russia, nor any other country, should have nuclear weapons.
Of all the global challenges that humanity and the planet face, nuclear weapons are the least complex. Human hands built nuclear weapons and human hands can dismantle them; all that’s required is political will and leadership. That leadership is currently being shown by the global majority of nations that have already signed or ratified the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The TPNW complements the NPT by providing a fair, verifiable and timebound path to disarmament.
It is time the nuclear-armed countries and their allies who support the use of nuclear weapons stop threatening the rest of the world with destruction, and join the majority who know that real security lies not in nuclear weapons but in their urgent abolition.
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