It's time to rid the world of nuclear weapons
Sceptics may say a nuclear-free world is an impossible dream, but they said that about slavery and apartheid too.
By Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace and a patron of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
May 22, 2010
This year the nuclear bomb turns 65 – an appropriate age, by international standards, for compulsory retirement. But do our leaders have the courage and wisdom to rid the planet of this ultimate menace? The five-yearly review of the ailing nuclear non-proliferation treaty, currently under way at the United Nations in New York, will test the strength of governments' commitment to a nuclear-weapon-free world.
If they are serious about realising this vision, they will work now to shift the focus from the failed policy of nuclear arms control, which assumes that a select few states can be trusted with these weapons, to nuclear abolition. Just as we have outlawed other categories of particularly inhuman and indiscriminate weapons – from biological and chemical agents to anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions – we must now turn our attention to outlawing the most iniquitous weapons of all.
Gains in nuclear disarmament to date have come much too slowly. More than 23,000 nuclear arms remain in global stockpiles, breeding enmity and mistrust among nations, and casting a shadow over us all. None of the nuclear-armed countries appears to be preparing for a future without these terrifying devices. Their failure to disarm has spurred nuclear proliferation, and will continue to destabilise the planet unless we radically alter our trajectory now. Forty years after the NPT entered into force, we should seriously question whether we are on track to abolition.
Disarmament is not an option for governments to take up or ignore. It is a moral duty owed by them to their own citizens, and to humanity as a whole. We must not await another Hiroshima or Nagasaki before finally mustering the political will to banish these weapons from global arsenals. Governments should agree at this NPT review conference to toss their nuclear arms into the dustbin of history, along with those other monstrous evils of our time – slavery and apartheid.
Read the full article at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/22/nuclear-weapons-non-proliferation-treaty-------------------------------------------
Tossing the nuclear bomb into the dustbin of history
NPT RevCon: May 24, 2010
On Saturday Desmond Tutu, a patron of ICAN, wrote an article for Britain’s Guardian newspaper in which he called on the NPT Review Conference to shift the focus from the failed policy of arms control to abolition.
“Just as we have outlawed other categories of particularly inhuman and indiscriminate weapons … we must now turn our attention to outlawing the most iniquitous weapons of all,” he wrote.
He criticized the lack of progress made by the nuclear-weapon states towards the goal of complete nuclear disarmament, noting that none of them appears to be preparing for a future without these terrifying devices. “Forty years after the NPT entered into force, we should seriously question whether we are on track to abolition.” He called on all nations to “radically alter our trajectory now”, and warned that we “must not await another Hiroshima or Nagasaki before finally mustering the political will to banish these weapons from global arsenals”.
According to Tutu, the most obvious and realistic path to a nuclear-weapon-free world is for nations to negotiate a legally binding ban, which would include a timeline for elimination and establish an institutional framework to ensure compliance. “Governments should agree at this NPT Review Conference to toss their nuclear arms into the dustbin of history, along with those other monstrous evils of our time — slavery and apartheid,” he wrote.
http://www.icanw.org/node/5232