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The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), negotiated by quite 130 states, may be a straightness effort to satisfy their responsibility as signatories of the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to pursue effective measures on disarmament. The treaty further strengthened the commitments of the states against the use, threat of use, development, production, manufacture, acquisition, possession, stockpiling, transfer, stationing, or installation of nuclear weapons. It reinforces states' commitments to the Non Proliferation Treaty and therefore the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Once the 50th state ratifies the treaty, it'll enter into force 90 days later. As of March 2020, there are 81 signatories and 35 states-parties.
The initiative to barter a "legally binding instrument" to ban nuclear weapons is that the results of a years-long process that was gradually recognised after the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons use, the rising risk of accidental or intentional nuclear use, and a growing sense of frustration that key nuclear disarmament commitments made by the nuclear-weapon states weren’t being fulfilled.
These concerns motivated a gaggle of states—including Norway, Mexico, and Austria—to organize a series of three conferences in 2013 and 2014 on the humanitarian consequences of weapon of mass destruction use. Following the conclusion of the 2015 Non Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, these and other states agreed to line up an open-ended working group in 2016 on advancing multilateral disarmament negotiations. The working party led to the formulation of a resolution within the United Nations General Assembly to start out negotiations in 2017 on a treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons. The resolution passed the United Nations General Assembly First Committee by a vote of 123-38 with 16 abstentions in October 2016 and was subsequently adopted by the overall Assembly as a whole.
There are nine states in the world that possess nuclear weapons—China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, the UK, and the US—none of which participated in the negotiations. They are not alone in their opposition. They are joined by all the NATO allies as well as Australia, South Korea, and Japan, which are also in security relationships with the United States.
These possessor states and their allies make two core legal arguments opposing the treaty. First, it risks undermining the NPT, because the “cornerstone” of the nuclear weapons legal architecture, they assert, must be protected. Second, the treaty cannot have any normative impact in any event because it has been negotiated without input from the nuclear possessor states and will not be ratified by any of them.
Reactions from the Nuclear-Armed States:- Nuclear-weapon states and lots of NATO members have opposed the initiative from the start . Although the US and therefore the UK participated within the 2014 Conference on the Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons in Vienna, leaders from Washington and therefore the other nuclear-weapon states boycotted the working group sessions and the 2017 treaty negotiations.
These states contend that the treaty will distract attention from other disarmament and nonproliferation initiatives, such as negotiating a fissile material cutoff treaty or ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
