Before this year ends, the United Nations general assembly can take a decisive step toward ending one of the most urgent threats to public health and human survival in the world today. UN member states can and must mandate negotiations on a new treaty that prohibits nuclear weapons.
The dangers posed by these weapons are utterly unacceptable, and the only sure way to prevent an unthinkable catastrophe is to eliminate them completely. That’s not only possible, it’s essential and long overdue.
A single nuclear weapon can destroy a city and kill most of its people, making it impossible to provide meaningful aid to the survivors. A nuclear war could kill many more people in an hour than were killed during the entire second world war.
Nuclear detonations in cities would ignite massive fires with extreme and long-lasting environmental consequences, disrupting the Earth’s climate and agricultural productivity. Less than 1% of the nuclear weapons in the world today could cause a nuclear famine with the potential to put two billion people at risk of starvation.
The thousands of nuclear weapons in the countries with the largest arsenals alone could bring about nuclear winter, with the prospect of destroying the essential ecosystems on which life depends and thereby threatening human extinction.
Nuclear weapons release intense ionising radiation that jeopardises any immediate survivors; causes acute and long-term illnesses, including cancers, that are often deadly; and leaves a legacy of genetic and intergenerational health harm.
A nuclear war has an extremely high likelihood of creating a refugee crisis orders of magnitude larger than the one we seem unable to cope with today. Nuclear weapons eradicate the physical and social infrastructure required for recovery from conflict.
Earlier this year, our federations, the main bodies representing millions of physicians, nurses, and public health professionals around the world, presented these facts to a special UN working group on nuclear disarmament. The International Red Cross/Red Crescent and UN agencies charged with responding to humanitarian disasters warned that health professionals and relief workers would be unable to mount any meaningful response to the consequences of a nuclear conflict.
One hundred and twenty-seven states have said with common voice that their security is directly threatened by the 15,000 nuclear weapons that exist in the arsenals of nine countries, and they are demanding that these weapons be prohibited and abolished. They have lost patience with the refusal of the nuclear-armed states to fulfill their obligation to disarm. Moreover, they rightly see the massive and expensive nuclear re-armament programs underway in these states as confirming their bad faith and recklessly endangering our collective security.
The working group recommended – by a majority of more than three to one – that the general assembly mandate negotiations, to start next year, on a treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons. A ban treaty will create a new and explicit legal, moral and political norm – comparable to the treaty prohibitions that already apply to chemical and biological weapons, antipersonnel landmines, and cluster munitions.
A ban treaty will close a legal gap with regard to nuclear weapons by making it unequivocal that no state has a legitimate claim to possess, build, test, deploy, use, or threaten to use them.
A minority – the nuclear-armed states and those claiming to rely on their nuclear weapons – object to a ban treaty because they believe that nuclear weapons make them more secure. In fact these weapons, whose use has the potential to destroy human civilisation, are the greatest threat to the security of everyone, including the nations that possess them.
An evidence-based understanding of what nuclear weapons actually do invalidates all arguments for continued possession of these weapons by anyone, and requires that they urgently be prohibited and eliminated as the only course of action commensurate with the existential danger they pose. The working group has sent this clear message to the general assembly, where governments must now muster the courage to act on behalf of humanity’s future.
Banning and eliminating nuclear weapons is a high global health priority. The general assembly has the opportunity to move us towards this critical goal. It must not fail to act.
Ira Helfand and Tilman Ruff are co-presidents of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War; Sir Michael Marmot is president of the World Medical Association; Frances Hughes is CEO of the International Council of Nurses; Michael Moore is president of the World Federation of Public Health Associations.