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, their efforts now came to be the creation of a new legal standard, a nuclear weapons prohibition treaty. Their decision to work outside the NPT’s strictures reflected a ‘global impatience’ (Meyer and Sauer 2018 ) with the status quo. Towards the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons As noted in Chapter 3 , non
When the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was adopted by 122 states at the United Nations on 7 July 2017, there was celebration among the states and organizations which had campaigned for such an outcome. Yet in the five years since then, we have seen not a respect for its provisions, but instead, a continued reliance on nuclear weapons in
For decades, nuclear weapons have been portrayed as essential to the security of the few states that possess them, and as a very ‘normal’ part of national and international security. These states have engaged in enormous programmes of acquisition and development, have disregarded the humanitarian implications of these weapons, and sought to persuade their publics that national security was dependent on the promise of killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilians. The term ‘nuclearism’ has been used to describe this era, and several elements of nuclearism are explored here to identify how these states have been able to sustain their possession of nuclear arsenals. By perpetuating a discourse of ‘security’ which avoided international humanitarian law, by limiting decisions on nuclear policy to small groups of elites, by investing vast amounts of resources in their nuclear programs, and by using the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to perpetuate their privileged status as nuclear states, despite their promises to disarm, the great powers have been able to sustain a highly unequal – and dangerous – global nuclear order. This order is now under challenge, as the Humanitarian Initiative explored the implications of nuclear weapons’ use. Its sobering findings led non-nuclear states, supported by civil society actors, to create the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, making these weapons illegal, for all states. The Humanitarian Initiative has posed a challenge to all the elements of nuclearism, and has resulted in a significant rejection of the existing nuclear order. The treaty will not result in quick disarmament, and it faces several hurdles. It is, however, a notable achievement, delegitimizing nuclear weapons, and contributing to the goal of a nuclear-free world.
be known as ‘humanitarian disarmament’ was evolving, and was being applied, to certain weapons. There were some notable aspects of these disarmament processes which would, in time, come to have an important bearing on the way in which non-nuclear states worked to achieve the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. As the previous chapter
the United Nations in New York to adopt the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) (UN 2017 ), making these weapons unambiguously illegitimate, on the basis of international humanitarian law. This book considers why this has come about, and why it came about when it did. What were the factors that allowed for this new recasting of nuclear debates? How were various key
will remain the most illogical, use-less, expensive, undemocratic, and destructive project that humans have undertaken. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is no small achievement: it provides the explicit outlawing of a weapon which previously had not been unambiguously banned, a legal clarity which was lacking in the international system. And at the very least, it can
the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, have rejected the global order which favoured the P5. And it is precisely this which cuts most deeply against the dominance of the nuclear weapon states: their established order, enabled by the structures of the NPT, is likely to be challenged by several interrelated developments, discussed below
2019 Norway announced that it would not sign or ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. 74 Tracing nuclear weapons cooperation Threat assessment and prioritisation Throughout the Cold War, Norwegian and US assessments of Soviet capabilities that could threaten Norway broadly coincided, not least because both countries maintained
that the elements of nuclearism that I explore in this chapter have all been intrinsic components and reinforcements of what I call broadly the global nuclear order. 1 Later chapters will show how each of these elements has come to be challenged by the processes involved in creating the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as well as by the actual contents of this
states to move to eliminate these weapons. That is, well before the achievement of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in March 2017, numerous formal efforts had been made to change the dynamics of nuclearism and to implement a process of disarmament via a series of mutual, balanced, phased, and verified steps. These have been put forward by various states and state groupings and have been