No Nukes!

IN APRIL, THOUSANDS of people from across the United States and the world, joined by activists and A-bomb survivors from Japan, will flock to New York to demand that the nuclear powers fulfill their nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations to negotiate a legally binding agreement to completely eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

The NPT Review Conference, held at the U.N. every five years, presents an important opportunity for the 189 signatory nations and for civil society to ensure that this treaty is implemented. The treaty rests on three pillars: 1) non-nuclear states forswear becoming nuclear powers; 2) all signatory nations have the right to generate nuclear energy for peaceful purposes (a serious flaw); and 3) the P-5 nations (U.S., Russia, Britain, France, and China) are obligated to engage in good-faith negotiations to completely eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

Forty-five years after the treaty went into effect, the P-5 have yet to fulfill their part of the bargain, leading to a loss of faith by a growing number of nations and the danger that some will opt out of the treaty to equalize the imbalance of nuclear terror. With the U.S. and Russia having engaged in nuclear war exercises during the Ukraine crisis, simulated U.S. nuclear attacks against North Korea, the U.S.-Chinese arms race, and India and Pakistan again at loggerheads, April’s review conference provides a critical opportunity to press for nuclear weapons abolition and to build the nuclear disarmament movement.

How great is the danger of nuclear war? Recent studies show that a limited nuclear war—say, between India and Pakistan, which have around 100 weapons each—could kill an estimated 2 billion people from the resulting global famine. The use of significantly more weapons could bring on nuclear winter and the end of life as we know it.

Six years ago, citing calls for nuclear weapons abolition by former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, Sen. Sam Nunn, and countless generals and admirals, presidential candidate Barack Obama promised—and later pledged in Prague—to work for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, the Pentagon is on track to spend $750 billion to “modernize” the U.S. nuclear arsenal and its delivery systems. The other nuclear powers are also modernizing their arsenals. And NATO’s expansion and U.S. conventional and high-tech weapons superiority have increased Russia’s reliance on nuclear weapons.

These developments frighten and anger most of the world’s nations. They rail at the double standard of the nuclear powers insisting that the non-nuclear nations fulfill their NPT obligations while the P-5 countries continue to prepare for nuclear war. At last year’s U.N. High Level Meeting on Nuclear Disarmament, one national leader after another joined the Non-Aligned Movement’s condemnation of the nuclear powers. There was outrage last February when 146 countries gathered in Mexico for a conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons. Drawing on traditional humanitarian law, 155 nations have signed a U.N. statement opposing nuclear weapons.

When the last NPT review was held in 2010, thousands of activists from around the world came to New York and helped to win a meaningful “action plan.” We now face the challenge of moving from that yet-to-be-fulfilled plan to ensuring that the NPT review mandates the commencement of those negotiations.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and many diplomats tell us that without popular pressure, they can’t rid the world of nuclear weapons. The world’s disarmament movements are rising to this challenge. For the April events, an international planning group has been created, involving diverse organizations from the U.S. and around the world. Our call is clear: a time-bound framework for negotiating the total ban and elimination of all nuclear weapons, and the creation of a fair, democratic, ecologically sustainable future.

We look to people of conscience to join our mobilization in New York when we gather in conferences, on the streets, and in the halls of power, together taking a step to rid the world of the threat of nuclear weapons. Join us.