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General Assembly President calls for halt to nuclear tests
General Assembly President calls for halt to nuclear tests
Despite recent developments in advancing nuclear disarmament, more remains to be done, said Mr. Bozkir, urging countries which have yet to sign or ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) to do so without delay.
“More than 2,000 nuclear tests have been conducted since the advent of nuclear weapons. While the rate of testing has declined, they have not stopped,” he said.
“These tests have long lasting health and environmental consequences. They devastate the communities they impact. They displace families from their homelands.”
Progress on disarmament
Underlining the General Assembly’s commitment to nuclear disarmament, Mr. Bozkir welcomed progress achieved over the past year amid the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, adopted in 2017, entered into force this past January after securing the required 50 ratifications.
The United States and Russia also extended their nuclear arms reduction agreement, known as the New START Treaty, for an additional five years through February 2026.
Work lies ahead
However, he stressed that more needs to be done, including arranging meetings to review the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which must be held no later than February 2022, and convening the Fourth Conference of Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones and Mongolia, postponed since April 2020.
Mr. Bozkir also called for action to advance the CTBT, adopted in 1996, which bans all explosive nuclear weapons tests anywhere and by any nation.
The treaty has been signed by 185 countries, and ratified by 170, including three nuclear weapon States. However, it must be signed and ratified by 44 specific nuclear technology holder countries before it can enter into force.
"As my term as the President of the General Assembly comes to an end in a few days, I would like to take this opportunity to call on States that have yet to sign or ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, to do so as soon as possible,” said Mr. Bozkir.
End of an era
The International Day against Nuclear Tests commemorates the 29 August 1991 closure of the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan, where more than 450 nuclear devices were exploded over four decades during the Soviet era.
The closure signalled “the end of the era of unrestrained nuclear testing”, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in his message to the event, which was delivered by UN High Representative for Disarmament, Izumi Nakamitsu.
The Secretary-General also called for the CTBT to be ratified, and for renewed global commitment to end nuclear tests.
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All comments [ 20 ]
The risk of nuclear escalation continues to increase rather than decrease, with heightened tensions and proliferation among countries including the US, North Korea, Pakistan, India, Russia, China, Iran and Israel.
The result has been the adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons at the United Nations on 20 September 2017, the first time that any multilateral agreement on nuclear weapons had been adopted since the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Act 1998.
The significance of this treaty is to stigmatise nuclear weapons in order to compel nuclear weapons-states and nuclear allied states to pursue disarmament.
There has been a tangible effect with billions of dollars divested from nuclear weapons-producing companies as a result of the successful treaty.
Even as it disappears, the “bomb spike” is revealing the ways humans have reshaped the planet.
More than 60 years have passed since the peak of the bomb spike, and yet bomb radiocarbon is telling us new stories about the world.
Today, for the first time since the beginning of the nuclear age, none of the world’s nuclear-armed states is conducting nuclear test explosions.
After more than 2,000 detonations, the world’s nuclear test sites are dormant. The journey that brought us to this point has been long, and there have been some key turning points and some particularly important decision-makers who have steered us away from nuclear testing and the arms racing and environmental contamination it produces.
Negotiations have been conducted in Geneva for a treaty that would bring about a permanent and comprehensive ban on all nuclear test explosions.
The present stock of nuclear arms would remain, but the development of new weapons would become considerably more difficult.
Nuclear weapons can also be tested without explosions, for instance, by means of simulation and laboratory tests. The test ban treaty would still strengthen the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, because the development of new weapon types is very difficult without test explosions.
The ban on nuclear tests must be controlled by means of an efficient system, which is currently under development.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration and Congress have begun debating whether to restart active testing of nuclear weapons on U.S. soil.
When the Cold War ended, the U.S. pledged to stop doing such tests and a group within the United Nations began putting together the CTBT. The goal of the test ban treaty was to hinder new nations from developing nuclear arsenals and limit the capabilities of nations that already had them.
Nuclear weapons are intricately tied to the world of geopolitics. So if there isn’t a scientific need to resume testing, is there some political or economic reason?
Currently, nuclear powers around the world are all improving the missiles that carry nuclear warheads, but not yet the warheads themselves.
During World War II, the Soviets began spying on U.S. nuclear efforts and, after the war, a nuclear arms race took shape.
The competition to develop stronger nuclear devices took a human toll.
No country has conducted more nuclear tests than the United States, which set off its first atomic bomb, in a test code-named Trinity, in New Mexico several weeks before Hiroshima. The barrage of tests that followed wrought a trail of destruction that stretched across continents and decades.
Nuclear testing “has always been disproportionately felt by already marginalized communities,”
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