It’s Time to Ban the Bomb

Jul 29, 2015 Hans Blix

Seventy years ago next month, the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki opened the darkest chapter in the long history of humanity’s wartime horrors. The international agreement to curtail Iran's nuclear program, while welcome, also serves as a reminder that the chapter remains open – and that it must be closed for good.

STOCKHOLM – The nuclear agreement between Iran, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany, and the EU, comes at a historically propitious moment. Seventy years ago next month, the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki opened the darkest chapter in the long history of humanity’s wartime horrors. Fire, bullets, and bayonets were now joined by nuclear radiation – a silent, invisible killer like gas and biological agents.

After World War I, the international community adopted the so-called Gas Protocol, to prohibit the use of chemical and bacteriological weapons. Likewise, the demand to ban any use of nuclear weapons has been strong and persistent since the end of World War II.

But the states possessing nuclear weapons have always opposed such a ban, arguing that it would not be credible. Instead, they have recommended a step-by-step approach, eventually leading to a ban on the possession and production of nuclear weapons. After all, the same approach brought about today’s strict limits on biological and chemical weapons.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 3 Comments on this article

Allan Bleiken Aug 4, 2015

GOOD LUCK WITH THIS ONE!
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j. von Hettlingen Aug 2, 2015

Hans Blix says "it's time to ban the bomb"! Indeed, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the French use of grenades containing tear gas, a military breakthrough in World War One. Later German forces fired cylinders filled with chlorine on French troops at the Battle of Ypres. With no protection, many died from the agonies of suffocation. It was the significant number of casualties inflicted by these poisonous substances, that the use of all gas was outlawed by the Geneva Protocol of 1925.
Thirty years later in August 1945 atomic bombs were used in war for the first time. Dropped by the Americans, they devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An estimated 250.000 people died in the blasts or from the effects of radiation. Japan surrendered within a month. No doubt the bombings hastened the end of World War Two.
The Soviet Union conducted its nuclear test in 1949 triggering an arms race. Im 1953 Dwight Eisenhower made his "Atoms for Peace" speech to the UN, which gave birth to the Interational Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA worked as an autonomous, inter-governmental body to promote safe and peaceful nuclear technologies, and to prevent the spread of atomic weapons.
Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, launched by the USSR in 1957, marked the start of the space race. But it was the 1962 Cuban missile crisis that urged the US and the Soviet Union to agree on signing the first - limited - nuclear test ban treaty in 1963. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treay (NPT) agreed in 1968 between nuclear-armed and non-nuclear-armed states, guarantees the latter the right to civilian nuclear technology subject to IAEA safeguards, but prohibits them from acquiring nuclear weapons capabilities. As the IAEA has no authority to act on its own, but relies on the willingness of nations to cooperate, or on a UN mandate, it has a hard time to deal with India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan, which are nuclear armed non signatories.
The US and Russia still see each other as rivals, even after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Many bilateral treaties like the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) I & II and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) led to a détente in the 1970s. When the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the US withdrew the SALT II from the Senate. In 1982 Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which was signed in 1991, as the USSR was on the brink of collapse. The new START, signed by Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev in 2010, should provide for new, lower limits on the size of each country's nuclear arsenal, and update the verification mechanism. Even though the relationship between Moscow and Washington has frayed in recent years, Russia and the US seek to cooperate on various issues to resolve global crises, knowing that both will benefit from world stability.
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Michael Public Jul 29, 2015

The real question is whether there is a 100% foolproof method to know a country has a bomb hidden somewhere? Until such a thing exists the temptation of first strike is too great.
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