Opinion: June 5, 2010, Tilman Ruff

The future of humanity and our world can only be free of nuclear weapons. There is no other way. It must be completed urgently, before our luck runs out. The bargain at the heart of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is sound.

Those with nuclear weapons must eliminate them; those without nuclear weapons must not acquire them. One standard for all: zero nuclear weapons. The materials and means to produce these worst weapons of terror must be controlled or removed, everywhere.

The NPT review conference concluded last week in New York bore some edible fruit. Its final document for the first time mentions a comprehensive legal framework to eradicate nuclear weapons. It affirms the salience of international humanitarian law to nuclear weapons. It specifies actions needed to progress disarmament, and that the review conference in 2015 will consider next steps for full implementation of nuclear disarmament. Steps were agreed towards a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.

But the conference made it painfully clear that, after 40 years, the NPT alone and the current piecemeal, step-by-small-step approach cannot deliver us to a world free of nuclear weapons, and that those who possess nuclear weapons and their hangers-on suffer an addiction that they are not yet willing to give up. By what right do they violate every standard of ethics, humanity, law, justice and evidence to jeopardise the future of all of us and the earth that sustains all? The rest of us must help them overcome this terrible addiction.

Unfortunately, the NPT does not have the process, organisation, detailed plan, timelines or sanctions for getting the job of nuclear abolition done. The most important outcome of the NPT review conference was probably not the final document, but the unprecedented level of recognition and support by the majority of the world’s governments — underpinned by the strong and coordinated voices of worldwide civil society — that a comprehensive, binding, phased, verified legal framework is needed to abolish nuclear weapons, and that preparations for negotiation of such a treaty should begin, not at the next NPT review conference in five years, but now.

We must not let positive recent developments and talk of the review conference’s success in not going backwards falsely lull us into acting as if nuclear disarmament was in hand and on track. People of goodwill the world over must work together to add their diverse and unique voices to build an overwhelming tide that will help their leaders to work together to start negotiations on a global treaty to eliminate and outlaw nuclear weapons. Much work has already been done on how such a treaty will best be negotiated, and what its essential elements will be. More work and dialogue are needed. But to be clear, most of the work required is not technical, it is in changing policies of nuclear addiction.

Like smallpox, polio, pandemic influenza, HIV and other pathogens, nuclear weapons are common enemies. They seal our shared fate. The first global Nuclear Abolition Day — 5 June 2010 — coincides appropriately with World Environment Day. Nuclear weapons pose the greatest immediate threat to global survival and health. Abolishing nuclear weapons will stop adding to the vast toxic and radioactive legacy from nuclear weapons production and testing. It will also free enormous resources urgently needed to address climate change and other humanitarian needs.

One humanity, one world, one justice, one law: zero nuclear weapons. A nuclear weapons convention: now we can.

Tilman Ruff is Chair of the Board of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Australia) and the ICAN Working Group for International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.