A Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons took effect last Friday. It was originally adopted by 122 countries in the United Nations General Assembly in 2017. It took effect Friday, 90 days after it was signed by the 50th state.
There are today about 150 states in the world – this means some 100 countries have yet to formally accept the treaty. More important, it does not have the signatures of the states that today have nuclear weapons – the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.
Nuclear weapons were developed in the closing days of World War II in 1946. The US under President Harry Truman used its first nuclear bombs on Japan to stop World War II, but its real intent , it is said, was to stop Soviet Russia, led by Joseph Stalin, from moving into Europe with hundreds of divisions of troops. The two atomic bombs dropped on Japan demonstrated to Stalin that the US, despite its lack of manpower, could very well stop Stalin’s divisions.
In the Cold War that followed, the US and Soviet Russia developed thousands of nuclear bombs and positioned them in constantly roving submarines and planes, each weapon aimed at an enemy city. This was the Cold War when the entire world lived in constant fear of devastation in a nuclear war.
The seven other nations with nuclear weapons today developed them in the course of their own rivalries. But nuclear arms pose a threat to the entire world as any explosion anywhere is bound to spread deadly nuclear radiation everywhere.
In a nuclear war, no one is safe, but the nine nations with nuclear arms today are reluctant to let go of their powerful advantage, so deep is their distrust of other nations.
The treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that took effect last Friday is thus less an assurance of peace as an expression of hope. It is ”an important step towards the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons,” said UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. Pope Francis added, ”It strongly encourages all states and all peoples to work decisively toward promoting conditions necessary for a world without nuclear weapons.”
The threat of world destruction remains very much alive today because thousands of nuclear weapons remain in the US and Russia. But there is now an official declaration by most of the world’s nations that the world should be free of such weapons and the hope that some day it will be done.