The Second Meeting of States Parties established an intersessional consultative process, between the second and third Meetings of States Parties to consult and submit a report to the third Meeting of States Parties containing a comprehensive set of arguments and recommendations:

• To better promote and articulate the legitimate security concerns, threat and risk perceptions enshrined in the Treaty that result from the existence of nuclear weapons and the concept of nuclear deterrence;
• To challenge the security paradigm based on nuclear deterrence by highlighting and promoting new scientific evidence about the humanitarian consequences and risks of nuclear weapons and juxtaposing this with the risks and assumptions that are inherent in nuclear deterrence.

This is established initially as an internal discussion for the TPNW community, including States Parties and Signatories, the Scientific Advisory Group, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and other stakeholders and experts.

The TPNW references a number of security concerns related to the humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons (PP2, PP4); nuclear risk (PP3), and threat perceptions (PP6). At the First and Second Meetings of States Parties, the agreed political declarations reaffirmed these concerns, and elaborated that the “continued existence of nuclear weapons and lack of meaningful progress on disarmament [...] heighten the risk of nuclear catastrophe and pose an existential threat to humanity as a whole” (2MSP, Para 13) and “that attempts to justify nuclear deterrence as a legitimate security doctrine gives false credence to the value of nuclear weapons for national security and dangerously increases the risk of horizontal and vertical nuclear proliferation.” [2MSP, Para 17]

At 2MSP, Austria was appointed (Decision 5) as the coordinator for the consultative process on security concerns of States under the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Focal Point:

Austria (2023- Present)

Meetings:

3 September 2024

3 July 2024

6 June 2024

5 April 2024

29 February 2024

Resources:

For resources about the security concerns themes, click here.