A flawed weapons treaty has come unstuck. For years nuclear countries have been asking the nuclear countries to satisfy. The UNs meeting, held between May 22 and April 27, has been the latest in a set of inspections of The 1970 Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. One hundred and eighty six countries have forsworn any ambition to create atomic weapons in exchange for a guarantee made by the armed countries they’ll eliminate their nuclear arsenals. However in attaining this disarmament, the success has been limited. Since the countries seem wedded to holding to their arsenals indefinitely, no matter the non-nuclear countries have kept their end of the bargain this is.
It was against this background that states assembled in the UN in NY between April and May to review progress. Uppermost in the minds of the nuclear states has been the requirement for the P5 to take their own disarmament responsibilities and their frustration towards the states was evident. The nuclear states put together action programs and measure procedures designed to lead the states and had conducted studies and reports. But 45 years after negotiating its NPT and 25 years after its Cold War ended, you may still find almost 16,000 atomic weapons at existence, many of them on hair trigger alert also much stronger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
It’s an arsenal capable of destroying our world hundreds of times over. Given this, it wasn’t surprising that last month’s assembly ended with countries unable to attain a consensus document. As the non-atomic states have pointed out again and again, also as Australia’s Canberra Commission noted back at 1996, so long as any one nation has atomic weapons, other nations will want them as well, so long as there are atomic weapons in existence, there’s a strong risk that eventually they’ll be used, and any use of atomic weapons will be catastrophic. We’ve been fortunate in avoiding an atomic weapons disaster up to now, but there’s no guarantee that this fortune will hold. Recent books also reports show just how close we’ve come to atomic weapons being used either intentionally or by accident and uncover an uncomfortable truth: we can’t remain blas about it situation also continue to run that appalling risk. The impasse in NY – The non-atomic nations had long pinned their own hopes on Article VI of the NPT, and several other pledges made by the P5 through the years reiterated this obligation.