The tail wagged the dog! Who cares?
The Review conference of the Non-proliferation Treaty ended Friday, May 22, without a final document being accepted. Up until the very end it seemed that the conference would end with a non-committal document. The outcome that a majority of the states desired—a plan for a total ban on nuclear weapons, as there is for chemical and bacteriological weapons—was unacceptable to the nuclear-weapon states. Read more…
Outcome? What outcome?
After the NPT Review Conference was over, we couldn’t get out of the building. The place was deserted. All those grim security men who had barred any shortcuts had gone home. Eventually we found a last door open at the other side of the building. It was Friday evening of Memorial Weekend in New York. The subway was full of young faces, singing along to a boombox, on their way to parties. Life goes on and nothing had changed just because a few hundred people had spent the last four weeks in air-conditioned rooms, talking about nuclear weapons till they were blue in the face.
In the end there was no agreement. Read more…
[Guest editorial reprinted with permission from Reaching Critical Will’s NPT News in Review]
Ray Acheson, Reaching Critical Will of WILPF
The final document of the NPT Review Conference was prevented from being adopted by Israel—a non-state party. The US, UK, and Canada issued statements refusing to accept the proposal on convening a meeting about potentially developing a Middle East weapon of mass destruction free zone, thus preventing the adoption of what would have been the weakest disarmament outcome in the Treaty’s recent history. Instead, the outcome from this Conference is the Humanitarian Pledge, representing a commitment of more than 100 states to work for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons. Read more…
[ICAN released the following the following statement at the conclusion of the 2015 NPT Review Conference, where an already weak outcome document was blocked by the US, the UK, and Canada.]
As the 2015 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference ended, over 100 governments have committed to work for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons by endorsing the “Humanitarian Pledge.” [Editor’s note: Alexander Kmentt of Austria confirmed that 107 States had joined the Pledge in his closing remarks Friday.]
While the United States and the United Kingdom declared failure over the Middle East, the draft outcome document was deeply flawed on disarmament. Read more…
¡Ya Basta! It’s all about the ban
[Guest editorial reprinted with permission from Reaching Critical Will’s NPT News in Review]
Ray Acheson, Reaching Critical Will of WILPF
The [NPT] President’s new draft text for Main Committee I issued Thursday morning is a nuclear-armed state text. It sells out nuclear disarmament and serves those who seek to preserve and embolden the false perception of legitimacy of nuclear weapons asserted by nuclear-armed and their nuclear allied states. It is a text that reflects the view of a radical, recalcitrant minority and it should not be accepted by the majority. Refusing to accept this text would not be an act of obstruction. It would be an act of courageous leadership by governments that believe that nuclear weapons are unjust, indefensible, horrific, catastrophic, unacceptable weapons of terror. It would signal to those militarily powerful, often violent countries that want to impose their vision of the world on the rest of us, that enough is enough. Read more…
All that’s gold doesn’t glitter
The 2015 NPT Review Conference limps to a conclusion on Friday. What started as a welcome opportunity to bring the evidence from the three HINW conferences and the renamed Humanitarian Pledge into the NPT as a clear path to the fulfillment of the treaty’s nuclear disarmament goals is ending with a cynical rejection of this game-changing initiative by the nuclear-armed member states. Read more…
IPPNW calls for end to conflict in Ukraine
The IPPNW Executive Committee discussed the conflict in Ukraine during a conference call on May 19, and has issued the following statement:
The ongoing crisis in Ukraine has raised grave concerns about the potential for escalation among the nuclear-armed states engaged in this tragic armed conflict. Nuclear weapons cannot have any role—even rhetorically—in the difficult and dangerous conflict in Ukraine. Rather, what is needed is humanitarian aid for all civilians who are suffering so terribly from this violent conflict. We therefore call on all parties, including Russia, the US, the European Union, and NATO to change course, to ensure that the conflict does not escalate any further and is brought to an end, and to begin what will have to be a long and difficult process of reconciliation. Europe must be the area of peace, culture, and collaboration that its entire population deserves, rather than a field of armed conflicts. IPPNW-Germany has published a statement on the Ukraine conflict that we highly recommend to the entire IPPNW federation and to all others concerned with bringing peace to this region. We also encourage all IPPNW members to participate in the “We refuse to be enemies” project organized by IPPNW-Germany.
All that glitters is not gold
Reductions in nuclear weapons are not the same as nuclear disarmament
On the plane over here, I read an essay in the Financial Times in which the author asks whether there is such a thing as an Obama Doctrine in foreign policy. The criticism of the US President is that he has mistaken declaratory speeches – like the one in Prague in 2009 – for a strategy. Actually, his main goal in the area of foreign policy was to reduce military costs to pay for sorely needed reforms in domestic policies, such as the health care plan. At least with the nuclear weapons budget, he has failed spectacularly. Read more…
Time to look beyond the NPT
When this NPT Review Conference began, I wrote that the outcome would depend on how seriously the humanitarian impacts initiative and the Austrian Pledge were taken up by the member states as a basis for new and effective action on disarmament. Halfway through the month-long conference, the disappointing answer is taking shape. Read more…
An NPT pop quiz
Can you name the “official” NPT nuclear-weapons states?
If you said the US, Russia, the UK, France, and China…you’re wrong. Read more…
Bimal Khadka
Bjorn Hilt
Charles K. Johnson
Gunnar Westberg
IPPNW
John Loretz
Lawrence Wittner
Maria Valenti
mollymcgint
Sue Wareham
Tilman Ruff
Tim Wright
Xanthe Hall
IPPNW peace and health blog 