The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons took effect yesterday — but the milestone is marred by a lack of signatures from the world’s major nuclear powers.
Despite the missing participants, the occasion was marked by praise from the UN and Pope Francis.
“The treaty is an important step toward the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and a strong demonstration of support for multilateral approaches to nuclear disarmament,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement.
Photo: AFP
He praised the “first multilateral nuclear disarmament treaty in more than two decades,” and called on “all states to work together to realize this ambition to advance common security and collective safety.”
The treaty seeks to prohibit the use, development, production, testing, stationing, stockpiling and threat of nuclear weapons.
The pope heralded the treaty’s enactment during his general audience on Wednesday.
“I strongly encourage all states and all people to work decisively toward promoting conditions necessary for a world without nuclear weapons, contributing to the advancement of peace and multilateral cooperation, which humanity greatly needs today,” Francis said.
By late October last year, 50 countries had ratified the treaty — originally adopted by 122 countries in the UN General Assembly in 2017 — allowing it to take effect yesterday, or 90 days from the 50th signature.
Anti-nuclear advocates still hope that the treaty would become more than symbolic, even without the buy-in of the world’s greatest nuclear powers, by stigmatizing nuclear programs and challenging the mentality of the status quo.
There are nine nuclear-armed nations, with the US and Russia holding 90 percent of such weapons. The others are China, France, Britain, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.
Most nuclear powers insist that their arms exist merely as deterrents and those that have refused to sign this treaty say that they remain committed to the earlier nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which seeks to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
The Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons was drafted through an initiative by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a non-governmental organization that won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.
Japan, the only country to have ever been struck in a nuclear attack, has for the moment also refused to sign the treaty, saying that its effectiveness is dubious without the participation of the world’s nuclear powers.
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