Letter to the Editor, Salisbury Journal
Posted: 22nd January 2021
To the Editor, Salisbury Journal,
On January 22nd, a new United Nations law came into force:
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
The British government has stated that it will NEVER sign this treaty, in spite of insisting that it is in favour of nuclear weapon reductions.
John Glen, MP, states that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is the means to achieving multilateral disarmament. That looks good on the face of it, but as no nuclear weapon reductions have occurred under the NPT in 50 years of its existence, and the NPT covers only five of the nine states that possess nuclear weapons (UK, USA, Russia, China, and France), Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea who have not signed will not even be included.
The USA and UK have been opposed to this new Ban Treaty, describing it as toothless. Actually, there are some significant consequences to it becoming law.
Pension funds that have invested in nuclear weapons research and development will now find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Their investment criteria insist that they must not put their money into anything illegal, so there will be divestment in the military nuclear sector.
The status quo in the NPT is also going to shift. In 1995 non-nuclear states which signed the agreement not to develop their own weapons of mass destruction, lost a legal right to pressure the nuclear states to disarm their arsenals through a quirk of the NPT extension rules. The new Ban Treaty resurrects that power, and they can now call on those five nuclear states to start reducing towards disarmament originally written into the NPT, and required of the signatories.
Additionally, they can make disarmament demands of the other four states within this legal framework, bringing nuclear disarmament into all diplomatic negotiations from now on.
The USA has tried hard to drown this Ban Treaty in statements claiming it is ineffective, but it has also made considerable effort to pressure countries that signed into withdrawing from the Ban, or not sign it at all, and risk sanctions if they disobey. Clearly, this Ban Treaty represents a threat, mainly in that it outlaws the possession of nuclear weapons, making them the same status as other illegal weapons such as chemical and biological weapons, land mines, and cluster bombs. The banning of all of these weapons by the UN has been respected and effective.
While the UK government boycotts the Ban Treaty, there is a very active movement all around the country for city and town councils to sign up to the treaty conditions. Where our government obstructs the riddance of these weapons of mass destruction, public opinion is consistently opposed to them and the unacceptable risks they pose, whether by intent, or more likely by accidents, and the obscene waste of money squandered on this obsolete military apparatus.
Let us begin the process of reducing and eliminating the equivalent of 1.47 million Hiroshima bombs that exist in the world, to preserve us and all life on this planet.
Yours sincerely,
Caroline Lanyon,
Salisbury Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament