V.J. Prashad
Time for a world free of nuclear weapons 122 states sign latest international treaty ban, but belligerent US leads boycott by countries with nuclear arsenals
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n January 22, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) became international law for the 122 states who signed the agreement in July 2017. The TPNW, as with most treaties, is summed up in one sentence (article 1a): “Each State Party undertakes never under any circumstances to… Develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.” There is no complexity here. This is a treaty to ban nuclear weapons. Wilfred Burchett was the first non-Japanese journalist to visit Hiroshima. His first dispatch for London’s the Daily Express (September 5, 1945) was entitled “The Atomic Plague”. “In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world”. Burchett wrote, “people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly… Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that
they will act as a warning to the world… The damage is far greater than photographs can show… It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation”. In 1952, Sakamoto Hatsumi – a primary school student who had experienced the terror of the bombing – wrote a short poem: “When the atomic bomb drops/day turns into night/people turn into ghosts”. It is simple and elegant, a plea from the darkness to abolish nuclear weapons. This is what the hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic nightmare of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have been demanding since 1945. Their pleas have been heard around the world, but not in the capitals that have developed these hideous weapons.
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ine of the 193 member states of the United Nations possess nuclear weapons. Two of them – the US and Russia – have more than 90 percent of all the 13,410 warheads. Four countries – the US, Russia, the UK and France – have at least 1,800 warheads on high alert, which means that they can
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be fired at very short notice. To compare the warheads currently deployed with the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima is enough to make the heart stop: the yield from the “Little Boy” used on Hiroshima is estimated at 15 kilotons, whereas the yield from one W88 warhead that is deployed on a Trident II submarine is estimated at 475 kilotons. It is not just the number of nuclear weapons that are available; the current nuclear weapons, many of them deployed on submarines and ships, are far more lethal. None of the nine nuclear weapons states have joined the TPNW; they boycotted the negotiations and the vote in the United Nations General Assembly. In October 2020, the US government circulated a letter asking those governments who signed the treaty to withdraw from it. The US ambassador to the United Nations in 2017 – Nikki Haley – said that the TPNW threatens the security of the United States; she condescended to the 122 governments that joined the TPNW, saying, “do they really understand the threats that we have?” Iran, incidentally,
