Seventy-five years ago, on 16 July 1945, the first nuclear weapon was detonated over a remote desert in New Mexico, United States. They called the atomic device ‘Trinity’ and had packed it with 13 pounds of plutonium, which exploded with a power equivalent to 21,000 tons of TNT.
The mushroom cloud was seen – and heard – by the thousands of people living in that area, and fallout from the more than 2,000 nuclear bomb tests that were conducted over the following decades still affect the lives and livelihoods of people today. Nuclear test sites remain radioactive and are off limits to everyone.
The largest nuclear testing area was Kazakhstan’s Semipalatinsk, a territory as large as France where the Soviet Union conducted its tests. Inhabitants suffered from cancer and genetic mutations, and no one lives there any longer. Tests were also conducted in the Pacific, in the Arctic, and in Australia, as the risks were originally poorly understood, but testing was gradually outlawed. In this century, only North Korea has detonated nuclear bombs on its territory.
While stopping nuclear tests can be called a success story – though the instrument to outlaw them once and for all, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, is still not legally in force - nuclear weapons remain very much with us. From a peak of over 70,000 during the Cold War, some 12,000 of them remain, the overwhelming majority in the possession of the United States and Russia, while three recognized nuclear-weapon states (China, France, and the United Kingdom) as well as four nuclear possessors (India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan) share the rest.
The Non-Proliferation Treaty, which came into force fifty years ago, was concluded with three aims: to ensure (i) non-proliferation, (ii) disarmament, and (iii) peaceful uses of nuclear energy. This was the “grand bargain” that induced states to sign it, especially the non-nuclear power states. And while the first pillar (non-proliferation) has largely endured and the peaceful uses pillar is considered a success, the third aim of disarmament has been left unfulfilled.
Treaties to curb the number of nuclear weapons have always been bilateral, between the United States and the Soviet Union/Russian Federation. No multilateral nuclear-weapons treaty has ever been negotiated or entered into. With the current sorry state of arms control between the US and Russia, there is only one treaty remaining – New START – the “grand bargain” doesn’t hold. This lack of action and non-implementation of agreements reached by consensus in several NPT Review Conferences resulted in the negotiation of a new legal instrument to outlaw nuclear weapons once and for all: the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). It was adopted in 2017 by two-thirds of the entire membership of the United Nations and now has 81 signatures and 40 states parties, needing fifty to enter into force.
The entry into force of the TPNW will not mean that nuclear weapons will be dismantled by those who possess them. In fact, the Treaty has been downplayed – even dismissed – by several of the nuclear-weapon possessors, yet they cannot deny the normative power of a legal instrument. Even if no nuclear bomb has not been used against a population in 75 years, this does not mean that they will never be used again. Nor will it mean that all nuclear weapons are safe and that an accidental explosion or a rogue attack will not happen.
The famous Reagan-Gorbachev statement of 1985 in the midst of the Cold War that “ a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” was a powerful reminder of the lethality of nuclear weapons – yet attempts by civil society to get the two current leaders to sign up to the same or a similar statement was met with silence.
The bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945 are part of history. For us that is, they are history – but the people of those two cities live with the painful memories of the devastation and human suffering that the bombs caused – suffering that has been documented, suffering that is being evoked by the “hibakusha” (the survivors of the bombing), suffering that lives on in the minds of those who survived and who pass the collective memory to future generations.
I witnessed the annual commemoration of the bombing in both cities. It is a humbling experience to see the hibakusha being honored, to hear their elderly yet powerful voices raised in song, to remember the unspeakable day when the world around them collapsed. It is moving and empowering at the same time.
One of the hibakusha, Setsuko Thurlow, who is now 88 years old, has been a tireless crusader abroad for the TPNW and in 2017 accepted the Nobel Peace Price together with Beatrice Fihn, the Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons for their efforts to achieve nuclear disarmament.
Seventy-five years after unleashing this terrible weapon, it is time to consign it to the trash heap of history. Nuclear weapons have no role in our world. Their only purpose is lethal destruction, and they waste precious resources that should be put to better use. The current pandemic reminds us of the fragility of life on our planet: we don’t need a better argument to help preserve it for future generations.
For an account which chronicles the lives of several of the hibakusha after the bombing, see “Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War” by Susan Southard, Penguin, 2015
For testimonies of the hibakusha and links to films and videos, consult: https://www.un.org/disarmament/education/slideshow/hibakusha
Dr.h.c. Angela Kane assumed the position of Vice President of the IIP in 2016, after serving on the IIP International Advisory Board. She holds a number of other functions: Visiting Professor and Member of the Strategic Committee at the Paris School of International Affairs (SciencesPo), Visiting Professor at the Tsinghua University Schwarzman Scholars in Beijing, and Chair of the United Nations University Council. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation. Kane has served in many positions during her career at the United Nations. Until mid-2015, she served as the United Nations High Representative for Disarmament Affairs. Between May 2008 and 2012, she was Under-Secretary-General for Management. She served twice in the Department for Political Affairs, as Assistant Secretary-General and previously as Director. She supported several special political missions in Iraq, Nepal and the Middle East, and established the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala. Her field experience includes Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General for the United Nations Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE), a special assignment to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and multi-year postings in Indonesia and Thailand.