Will the world ever be free of the menace of nuclear annihilation?
There was a promising start along these lines during the late twentieth century, when – pressed by a popular upsurge against nuclear weapons – the nations of the world adopted a succession of nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements. Starting with the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, these agreements helped curb the nuclear arms race and prevent nuclear war.
But the tide gradually turned during the final years of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. As international conflict heightened and the nuclear disarmament movement waned, additional nations became nuclear powers, the U.S. and Russian governments abandoned most of their nuclear disarmament agreements, and all nine nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea) revived the nuclear arms race. Some of their leaders – Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un, and Vladimir Putin – even issued public threats of nuclear war. Recently, the hands of the famous “Doomsday Clock” of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists were moved forward to 90 seconds to midnight – the most dangerous setting in its history.
Deeply disturbed by the slide toward disaster, the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), comprised of hundreds of organizations, teamed up with the governments of many of the world’s non-nuclear nations to foster a series of UN conferences focused on the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear war. Eventually, a UN conference drawing representatives from some 130 governments and dozens of civil society organizations met in March 2017 and began negotiations for a treaty outlawing nuclear weapons. In July, the delegates adopted a Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) by a vote of 122 in favor, 1 opposed, and 1 abstention. The treaty banned the use, threatened use, development, manufacture, acquisition, possession, stockpiling, stationing, and installation of nuclear weapons.
Hellbound and Down 