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 international journey towards the abolition of nuclear weapons is well underway. With more than half the world’s countries having already joined the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons(TPNW), a major milestone has been passed.
There are still more than 12,000 nuclear weapons in the world with a third of those deployed on submarines, missiles and at airbases ready to be used. Nuclear threats are on the rise, and increasing scientific evidence shows there is no safe place if these weapons are used. So, building further support for the treaty is more urgent than ever. Thankfully, countries in the Asia Pacific region are providing leadership the world needs to finish the job.
Five of the world’s nine nuclear-armed nations are in Asia: China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. Most nations in Asia and the Pacific, however, are strongly opposed to nuclear weapons, having joined the TPNW and treaties that establish nuclear-weapon-free zones in Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the South Pacific.
Recently twenty governments, among them Nepal, plus representatives of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat and the United Nations Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament in Asia and the Pacific, as well as the ICRC and my own organisation ICAN gathered for the Asia-Pacific Regional Conference on the TPNW in Jakarta, Indonesia, to discuss why these weapons must be eliminated as soon as possible, how the treaty can do this, and how to get more countries in the region to join. The meeting was funded by Austria as co-chair of the TPNW’s working group on universalisation of the treaty.
They decided to meet because of the worsening geopolitical climate, characterised as it is by increased rivalries between nuclear-armed countries, including India and Pakistan, that make it more likely nuclear weapons could be used again.
The knowledge that if nuclear weapons were used it would have catastrophic, far-reaching consequences for everyone around the world is creating greater momentum for all of us to push harder for all countries to join the treaty. A war involving the use of nuclear weapons would have devastating, widespread results, including for nations with no direct involvement. Nuclear winter – a period of prolonged darkness, resulting in global agricultural collapse and famine – would follow the use of a large number of nuclear weapons.
In the words of Ambassador Tri Tharyat of Indonesia and co-host of the Jakarta conference: “The reality we face is clear. Nuclear risks are rising, driven by heightened geopolitical tensions and the continued reliance on nuclear deterrence. For the Asia-Pacific, this is not a distant concern. It is a direct and growing security challenge. The TPNW offers a principled response.”
It is the scientific knowledge, now well established, that nuclear weapons have a devastating impact on all lifeforms and the environment that led the ICRC to call for nuclear abolition after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed by the US in 1945. This understanding also inspired countries to come together at the UN to adopt the TPNW in 2017. It came into force just over five years ago and 99 countries have now signed or ratified the treaty. Nepal has signed it and we look forward to progress on its ratification.
As more and more countries join the treaty, the diplomatic pressure on nuclear-armed states and their allies that support the use of nuclear weapons increases. As they become more and more isolated, they will realise there is more to gain from getting rid of these weapons than from hanging on to them. This is the lesson from other international agreements banning weapons that cause mass, lingering harm to civilians such as the land mines and cluster munitions ban treaties and the conventions outlawing biological and conventional weapons.
This week in New York, members of another major global agreement on nuclear weapons, the 1968 Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) will be wrapping up its eleventh Review Conference that is meant to agree further measures to strengthen that treaty. While the governments there can agree no more countries should get nuclear weapons, progress on the disarmament side of the NPT has been stymied by the failure of the five original nuclear-armed states who are parties to it – China. France, Russia, the UK and US – to actually honour the commitment they made to disarm when they joined.
The TPNW was brought into being to complement the NPT by providing a timebound, fair and verifiable path to eliminating nuclear weapons. The continued strengthening of the TPNW, which holds its first Review Conference later this year, demonstrates that multilateral diplomacy can deliver and that we can make real progress towards a world without nuclear weapons through cross-regional cooperation.
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