Nuclear Abolition is Focus of UN Meetings in New York

Photograph Source: xiquinhosilva – CC BY 2.0

All this week, professional dreamers who insist on the abolition of nuclear weapons have been meeting at the United Nations in New York. The very upbeat gathering was the 3^rd “Meeting of States Parties,” a treaty-speak for the 73 UN member states that ratified the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

What’s so extraordinary about the TPNW, 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, is that “it is the first globally applicable treaty that categorically prohibits the most destructive, inhumane instruments of war ever created.”

The prohibition applies only to states that ratify, so the U.S. can continue its 80-year H-bomb frenzy of radioactive pollution and global bomb threats — known quaintly as “deterrence” — a collapsed charade of terror and unimaginable risk-taking that most of the world has renounced.

Among the 73 “states parties” at this week’s meetings are major players on the world stage including Brazil. There are also over a dozen treaty “signatory states” from the Americas — putting the USA’s absence to shame — including 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, one-half of the United Nations’ 193 members. This treaty is a colossal accomplishment of common sense, defogging and popular good will which has triumphed over relentless public and private pressure, threats and backroom villainy by nuclear weapons states that pretend their doomsday devices still serve a necessary function.

While 122 UN member voted in 2017 to adopt the TPNW, nicknamed the “nuclear ban treaty,” and global enthusiasm for it is most pronounced in the developing world whose economies, environments, and health statistics would improve following the renunciation of their civilization-ending weapons by the increasingly isolated nuclear-armed states.

The treaty’s international appeal can be understood by reading its preamble:

Reaffirming that any use of nuclear weapons would be abhorrent to the principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience…

Cognizant that the catastrophic consequences of nuclear weapons cannot be adequately addressed, transcend national borders, pose grave implications for human survival, the environment, socioeconomic development, the global economy, food security and the health of current and future generations, and have a disproportionate impact on women and girls, including as a result of ionizing radiation.…

This year, Nukewatch co-director Kelly Lundeen is in New York leading a small delegation of colleagues. Their particular focus among NGO side events is Article 6 of the treaty, which requires providing adequate 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 of individuals in the Marshall Islands and Nevada (bombed by the US), Australia (UK), Algeria (France), Kazakhstan (USSR), and Lop Nor in the Gobi desert (China).

Article 6 is partly where the 3^rd MSP’s dreaming comes in, because the governments responsible for the bomb testing’s radioactive poisoning, maiming, and debilitation of individuals even in their own countries, have so far refused to sign on.

This belligerent scofflaw gangsterism on the part of nuclear weapons states grows more odious, fraudulent, and transparently absurd with every new ascension of another TPNW state party.

Today, D. Trump shoots his mouth off about nuclear disarmament, so the craziness of what Rex Tillerson called the “fucking moron” might accidentally result in something with a shred of value.

Does anyone still believe that “nuclear deterrence” policy retains validity? Considering just the Russian invasion of Ukraine, one knows Western nuclear weapons have always been rationalized as the “deterrent” that kept Russia from taking military action in Europe. This fraud can be abandoned.

Another grim and mortifying reason that nuclear weapons can be abandoned is that they are unnecessary for war-making powers bent on mass destruction. Today’s photographs of a rubblized Gaza, and 2003 photos of the rubblized streets of Baghdad, show nuclear bomb-like devastation caused by modern Israeli and U.S. “conventional” explosives. The new chemical bombs are so devastating that nuclear attacks are stupidly redundant, only make the rubble bounce, and can be trashed.

The post Nuclear Abolition is Focus of UN Meetings in New York appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Laforge.

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