THE UK Government is flouting the international laws it has subscribed to by refusing to discuss banning nuclear weaponry, leading experts have said.
It comes after the Labour Government dismissed a UN summit on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) out of hand, saying they would not attend even as an observer.
However, the majority of the world’s countries are present at the TPNW meeting in New York, where a total ban on nuclear weapon testing, development, or use is being discussed.
The UK Government is not a signatory to the TPNW – but like the US, France, Russia, and China it is signed up to the earlier Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This obliges states to prevent new countries from acquiring nuclear weapons – but also obliges signatories to work towards complete disarmament.
Article Six of the NPT states: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
At the TPNW summit in New York, a new authoritative report detailing the current state of nuclear nations’ weapons stockpiles – the 2024 Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor – was published.
Speaking to media afterwards, the report’s editor Grethe Ostern, of Norwegian People's Aid, and contributor Hans Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, both said that the UK Government was failing to live up to its obligations under the NPT.
“Today, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is the only forum where this is seriously discussed, there’s no other place.”
Kristensen, whose Federation of American Scientists was instrumental in creating the report, said: “One key argument that [nuclear states] argue against the TPNW is that they say ‘we already have a system, it's called Article 6 in the Non-Proliferation Treaty’.
“We prefer, they say, this step by step approach.
“If you take what step by step means, you assume they are taking another step to reduce the role and numbers of nuclear weapons, and they're taking another step to reduce the role and numbers of nuclear weapons – but they're not taking those steps.
“They haven't been taking those steps for years, so the whole argument is preposterous.”
The new nuclear weapons report further found that, last year, the UK joined the list of nations acting in a way which was “not compatible with the TPNW’s prohibition on allowing stationing, installation, or deployment of foreign nuclear weapons”.
The UK Government did not respond to the remarks.
Elsewhere, Kristensen warned that the world was entering a new nuclear era.
“You open the newspapers today, there is deep, deep concern about whether Europe can trust the United States, that it will come to its defence if something goes wrong. This translates directly into the nuclear question,” he said.
“Right now we have a debate in Europe, the continent as a whole is beginning to talk about if it needs to have its own nuclear determinant. We can no longer just rely on the United States … everybody's nervous and so worst-case planning is starting.
“In the worst case, we would see countries in Europe that have pledged not to develop nuclear weapons change their mind and begin to say ‘things have changed, we need to do this’.
“We see this on the other side of the planet as well. South Korea, there's a huge portion of the population and a growing number of prominent politicians who say that South Korea should develop its own nuclear weapons.
“I know of individual human beings that are now in the Trump administration, top administration of the Department of Defence, that have been in South Korea to say to the South Koreans, ‘OK, if you do that, we will accept it’.
“This is unacceptable, and if that starts to happen, the Non-Proliferation Treaty that is the underpinning of the international nuclear architecture, will definitely begin to crumble.”
He added: “The most important bottom line of what's happening right now is that the trends in all nuclear matters that we have gotten used to after the end of the Cold War are changing.
“When the Cold War ended, we had very dramatic changes, reductions, nuclear systems being scrapped left and right, weapons withdrawn from overseas positions, etc.
“But over the last seven to eight years that trend has ended. The era of nuclear reductions is now over.”
