Nuclear weapons: yes or no?
This article courtesy of our friends at Wildfire>_.
Everyone wants nuclear disarmament, right? All countries support the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons – at least, that’s what they keep telling us at the First Committee and elsewhere. But, as the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words.
Let’s have a look at the voting on L.40, the South Africa-sponsored resolution on “ethical imperatives for a nuclear-weapon-free world”. This resolution neither requires anyone to do anything, nor says how things should be done: it is purely declaratory. Among other things, it declares that “given their indiscriminate nature and potential to annihilate humanity, nuclear weapons are inherently immoral”, and that “all States share an ethical responsibility to act with urgency and determination … to take the effective measures, including legally binding measures, necessary to eliminate and prohibit all nuclear weapons”.
It is difficult to see why any state that is “committed” to nuclear disarmament (i.e. all of them) would vote against this, but an astonishing 35 did, including Australia, Canada, Germany, Netherlands and Norway (yes, Norway!). A further 15 states – including Japan, Sweden and Switzerland (“sweasels”) – abstained, apparently confused by being asked to endorse the ethical basis for a goal they support.
Perhaps these states were put off by the parts of the resolution that said things like “nuclear weapons serve to undermine collective security, heighten the risk of nuclear catastrophe, aggravate international tension and make conflict more dangerous”. Both nuclear-armed states and weasels have been known to imply, or even baldly assert, that nuclear weapons have security benefits. But even if security concerns and humanitarian principles “co-exist”, as the weasels have taken to saying, nuclear weapons can’t simultaneously be worth keeping and worth eliminating. Once you have made your security, humanitarian and moral reckoning, either nuclear weapons are worth keeping, or they are not.
If you have concluded they are worth keeping, why do you say you are committed to eliminating them? Why did you join the NPT? Why?
Conversely, if you have concluded that they should be eliminated, you might debate how best to go about it, but why do you object in principle to delegitimising, stigmatising and prohibiting them?
Weasels often talk about “building bridges” between the nuclear-armed states and the states without nuclear weapons. But you can’t build a bridge between true and false, between yes and no, between retain and eliminate. There is no middle ground here: it’s one or the other. In a refreshing moment of candour, Japan has just admitted this.
It seems self-evident, but apparently we need to say it again: you can’t eliminate nuclear weapons by keeping them. While we are disappointed that South Africa is not leading the way towards a treaty banning nuclear weapons, we are grateful for this resolution which has so clearly revealed the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the global failure on nuclear disarmament.
