Vision of a Nuclear Weapons-Free World
Dr. Ronald McCoy
International Launch of ICAN
Throughout the ages humanity has survived innumerable wars, pestilence and natural disasters. The
weapons of war have now become more destructive and indiscriminate and ecologically unsustainable
human activity is threatening to transform climate globally. We continue to survive in a precarious
world which has muddled along for centuries, but global trends suggest that we have reached a point
where muddling along is no longer a viable option.
Apart from climate change, nuclear weapons are the most dangerous challenge to human and planetary
survival. Apart from reducing greenhouse gases, the abolition of nuclear weapons is the most
fundamental, overriding objective we must achieve, if humanity is to survive. Because climate change
is now visible and palpable, governments are at last moving belatedly on carbon dioxide emissions.
This raises a critical question. Are we going to wait for a nuclear explosion before moving resolutely to
abolish nuclear weapons? The answer is no because waiting would be reprehensible. While the
international hesistates at the crossroads, new nuclear policies and new nuclear weapons increase the
likelihood of nuclear war.
When we gathered in New York in May 2005 for the NPT Review Conference, we witnessed the
shredding of past agreements on nuclear disarmament and the NPT floundered in a sea of bad faith.
That travesty of diplomacy stimulated IPPNW to re-examine the NPT process and conclude that it was
time to think outside the NPT box and explore other avenues to abolition, parallel to and
complementing the NPT process.
IPPNW has therefore formulated a new International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear weapons – or
ICAN, which was conceptualised more or less along the lines of the ‘Ottawa process’, which showed a
partnership between civil society, like-minded governments, international agencies and the United
Nations could generate the political will to redress the global problem of landmines and secure their
abolition through a Landmines Ban Treaty. ICAN has already been launched in Australia, Noway,
India and Malaysia and will focus on the root causes of the paralysis in disarmament – the continued
possession of nuclear weapons by a small minority of sates, who risk their use by design, accident,
miscalculation or by terrorists and whose weapons stimulate nuclear proliferation.
Slavery was abolished 200 years ago because there was an abolition movement tackling head on the
immorality, illegality and inhumanity of nuclear weapons. In the long erm we must also think of
moving towards the abolition of war and the peaceful resolution of conflict, because who knows what
weapons may come after nuclear weapons.
Both the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear weapons and the WMD Commission
have produced excellent road maps, pointing the way to zero nuclear weapons. We know that the
nuclear weapons states know the way to zero, but they have not summoned up the political will to
embark on the abolition journey. ICAN will work to generate the required political will through
education, research and advocacy, by working with mayors, parliamentarians, lawyers, the public and
decision-makers, to convince them that nuclear abolition, through a Nuclear Weapons Convention, is
feasible, practical, verifiable, enforceable and achievable. ICAN must reinforce the nuclear taboo,
generate public outrage and a global outcry, and create an irresistible people’s movement for abolition.
There is an important distinction between disarmament and abolition. While disarmament is primarily
a technical process of dismantling and destroying nuclear weapons, abolition is a normative process,
which not only embraces disarmament but also prohibits the development, acquisition, transfer, use or
threat of use of nuclear weapons. In other words, nuclear abolition combines the physical destruction of
weapons with the legal obligations of non-proliferation.
A Nuclear weapons Convention would help to break the deadlock in nuclear disarmament negotiations
by bridging the contentious divide between the nuclear weapon states which want non-proliferation
first and the non-nuclear weapons which want disarmament first.
The first requirement is for the nuclear weapon states to commit themselves unequivocally to the
elimination of nuclear weapons and agree to start working immediately on the practical steps and
negotiations required for their elimination.
The abolition of nuclear weapons must be a global endeavour, involving all states, nuclear and non-
nuclear. Whatever process is followed, it must ensure that no state feels, at any stage, that further
nuclear disarmament is a threat to its own security.
In a humanitarian sense, a Nuclear weapons Convention would stand for the universal condemnation of
weapons of mass destruction and the affirmation of international humanitarian law and the universal
code of morality and ethical behaviour. Such a treaty would erase the unconscionable legacy of
nuclear weapons for future generations and the threat of their annihilation in a nuclear war.
I am a retired obstetrician. For 40 years, I nurtured each unique pregnancy so that a healthy baby
would be born at the end of 9 months. It was such a privilege and a life-affirming experience to be
present at the beginning of so many lives. I believe those babies, all babies and their fathers and
mothers, and babies yet unborn, deserve to live in a safer world, without nuclear weapons.