Abstract
Nuclear disarmament has been on the international agenda since the dawn of the nuclear age. Over the years, nuclear-armed States undertook various legal obligations and political commitments to eliminate their nuclear arsenals. The aspiration of attaining a world without nuclear weapons nevertheless remained elusive. The strategic stability provided by nuclear deterrence—both at the regional and global level—has largely been trumping the drive towards global zero. The sense of frustration with the lack of progress towards nuclear disarmament under the traditional security-centric framework, alongside a disproportionate focus on selective non-proliferation, gave rise to an international movement to ban nuclear weapons as a humanitarian imperative. It quickly gained momentum and resulted in the conclusion of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in July 2017. This chapter will trace the genesis of the TPNW and highlight the primary factors that propelled its adoption. The Treaty’s overall impact will be evaluated in light of the strong countervailing view favouring the continued utility of nuclear weapons on account of their security benefits and deterrent effect. It would be argued that the TPNW could contribute to the stigmatization of nuclear weapons by building moral pressure against their retention. However, it would neither be of much value in practical disarmament terms, nor in a normative sense for evolving universal customary law. The TPNW would not prove to be a game changer for nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future.
Usman Iqbal Jadoon is a Pakistani career diplomat who has been working on arms control issues since 2006 during his postings in Islamabad, Vienna and Geneva and as a member of Pakistan’s delegations to the UN General Assembly’s First Committee in New York. Only the personal views of the author are presented here solely for discussion purposes.
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Notes
- 1.
UN General Assembly Resolution A/RES/1(I) (1946), Establishment of a Commission to Deal with the Problem Raised by the Discovery of Atomic Energy, https://undocs.org/en/A/RES/1(I).
- 2.
Pifer et al. 2010, 1.
- 3.
Sauer and Pretorius 2014, 239.
- 4.
Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (1 July 1968), 729 UNTS 161.
- 5.
Futter 2015, 141.
- 6.
Wing 2015, 122.
- 7.
Sokolski 2010, 5.
- 8.
International Law Association 2014, para 3.
- 9.
Tertrais 2010, 128–134.
- 10.
Ford 2007, 403–404.
- 11.
International Law Association 2014, para 5.
- 12.
ICJ, Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, Advisory Opinion (GA Request), 8 July 1996, ICJ Reports 1996, 226, at paras 99–100.
- 13.
Ford 2007, 402–403.
- 14.
Fleck 2019, 412
- 15.
Shaker 1980, vol. 2, 564.
- 16.
Rauf and Jadoon 2016.
- 17.
Wesley 2005, 283.
- 18.
Hibbs 2011, 9.
- 19.
Carlson 2018, 2–3.
- 20.
Robertson and Carlson 2016, 12.
- 21.
Muller 2008, 70.
- 22.
Borrie 2014, 625–626.
- 23.
One such point of view can be found in Sultan 2019, 30–31 which, inter alia, lists certain ‘structural deficiencies’ of the NPT that ‘preclude the possibility of addressing the issues of compliance, implementation, accountability, and withdrawal’.
- 24.
Final Document of the 2010 NPT Review Conference, NPT/CONF.2010/50 (Vol. I): http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=NPT/CONF.2010/50 (VOL.I).
- 25.
The first paragraph of the NPT’s preamble reads: ‘Considering the devastation that would be visited upon all mankind by a nuclear war and the consequent need to make every effort to avert the danger of such a war and to take measures to safeguard the security of peoples’.
- 26.
Kmentt 2015, 689.
- 27.
Ibid., 691–693.
- 28.
Ibid., 702.
- 29.
Minor 2015, 721.
- 30.
See Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, https://www.bmeia.gv.at/en/european-foreign-policy/disarmament/weapons-of-mass-destruction/nuclear-weapons/vienna-conference-on-the-humanitarian-impact-of-nuclear-weapons/.
- 31.
UNIDIR and ILIP 2016, 12.
- 32.
Tannenwald 1999, 433.
- 33.
Ottawa Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production, and Transfer of Anti-personnel Mines and on their Destruction (18 September 1997), 2056 UNTS 211.
- 34.
Convention on Cluster Munitions (30 May 2008), 2688 UNTS 39.
- 35.
Caughley 2013, 26–27.
- 36.
Borrie 2014, 628.
- 37.
Acheson 2016, 405–407.
- 38.
Doyle 2013, 13–14.
- 39.
P-5 (2015), Statement by China, France, Russian Federation, United Kingdom, and the United States to the 2015 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Review Conference, (New York), http://www.un.org/en/conf/npt/2015/statements/pdf/P5_en.pdf.
- 40.
Caughley 2013, 21.
- 41.
Report of the Open-Ended Working Group on taking forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations, A/68/514 (2016), https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N16/276/39/PDF/N1627639.pdf?OpenElement.
- 42.
UNIDIR and ILIP (2016), A Prohibition on Nuclear Weapons: A Guide to the Issues (United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research and International Law and Policy Institute), https://www.unidir.org/files/publications/pdfs/a-prohibition-on-nuclear-weapons-a-guide-to-the-issues-en-647.pdf, 18.
- 43.
UN OEWG Report 2016, https://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/disarmament-fora/oewg/2016/august/reports, 19.
- 44.
The Netherlands was the only NATO member that participated in the TPNW negotiations and eventually called a vote on the Treaty’s adoption and cast the sole negative vote.
- 45.
Mukhatzhanova 2017.
- 46.
Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, UN Doc A/CONF.229/2017/8 (7 July 2017); UNGA Res 72/31 (11 December 2017); https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/tpnw/.
- 47.
TPNW, Preamble paras 2, 3.
- 48.
Fleck 2019, 402
- 49.
Article 36, Reaching Critical Will 2014.
- 50.
Quoted in Gill 2020, 382.
- 51.
Nyusten et al. 2018, 8.
- 52.
Roberts 2018, 1.
- 53.
Carlson 2017, 1–2.
- 54.
Williams 2017.
- 55.
Mount and Nephew 2017.
- 56.
Roberts 2018, 2.
- 57.
Muller 2008, 72.
- 58.
UN General Assembly, Final Document of the Tenth Special Session (1978), https://unoda-web.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Final-document-SSOD-I-1978.pdf.
- 59.
Freedman 2013, 104–105.
- 60.
Boyd and Scouras 2013, 346.
- 61.
Ibid., 99.
- 62.
Mount and Nephew 2017.
- 63.
Freedman 2013, 98.
- 64.
Erästö and Cronberg 2018.
- 65.
- 66.
Harvard Law School 2018.
- 67.
Nyusten et al 2018, 19.
- 68.
Roberts 2018, 3.
- 69.
Schelling 2009, 125.
- 70.
Ibid., 105.
- 71.
Muller 2008, 73.
- 72.
Tertrais 2010, 128.
- 73.
Schelling 2009, 127.
- 74.
Ibid., 129.
- 75.
Freedman 2013, 105.
- 76.
Sinovets 2017.
- 77.
Freedman 2013, 105.
- 78.
Sauer and Reveraert 2018, 19.
- 79.
Federation of American Scientists 2019.
- 80.
Fleck 2019, 402.
- 81.
Ibid., 404.
- 82.
Ritchie 2017, 44
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Jadoon, U.I. (2021). The Security Impact of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. In: Black-Branch, J.L., Fleck, D. (eds) Nuclear Non-Proliferation in International Law - Volume VI. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6265-463-1_14
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