Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Chemical and biological weapons have been banned under international law for many decades:
the treaties prohibiting them serve as a powerful deterrent against their use.
Why, then, is there no such treaty
banning nuclear weapons – the most inhumane of all weapons of mass destruction?
In recent years, landmines and cluster bombs
– weapons that kill and maim indiscriminately
– have also been banned by international treaties.
For both landmines and cluster bombs, it was civil society,
not governments, that took the lead in campaigning for these bans.
Indeed, the convention banning cluster munitions was adopted in an exceptionally short period of time
thanks to the strength of international public opinion.
It is time for civil society to demand action against nuclear weapons
and the threat they pose to every one of us, our families and communities, and the entire world.
Establishing a Nuclear Weapons Convention is a means to eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons.
This is the challenge to which humanity must rise.
The Nuclear Weapons Convention is an international treaty
that would prohibit the development, testing, manufacture,
possession, transfer, use and threat of use of nuclear weapons.
Experts and some governments have produced a draft treaty,
which they believe, if ratified,
would be the most effective way to permanently rid the world of nuclear weapons.
A Model Nuclear Weapons Convention was submitted to the United Nations in 1997,
and in 2009 UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon added his voice.
The theory of nuclear deterrence is dangerous and unstable.
The fact that some states have nuclear weapons has served as justification for other states to seek to acquire them.
This is why it is vital to establish international norms
that prohibit nuclear arms without any exception for any state.
To make the Nuclear Weapons Convention a reality,
we need to take action and speak out, to our friends and family,
within our communities, and to the media and those who hold power.
We must express the desire to ban these most inhumane of weapons
that threaten our fundamental right to exist.
This will establish an international norm that nuclear weapons must be abolished.
Now is the time to take action.
When the voices of ordinary citizens of the world join together
we can build overwhelming support for the prohibition of nuclear weapons.
We must ensure that calls for the adoption of a Nuclear Weapons Convention become impossible to ignore.