A Promising Milestone - The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and Youth Education
A Promising Milestone - The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and Youth Education
By Kenneth Chiu
On January 22, 2021, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) entered into force, with the backing of 51 states parties and 86 signatories. Unlike the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) ratified in 1968, which contained a grand bargain between the nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states and contains a vague provision that the NWS will disarm their weapons. The TPNW closes the missing legal gap by comprehensively prohibiting nuclear weapons now.
Although the TPNW has yet to be ratified by any NATO member and is staunchly opposed by the NWS and their NATO friends, it remains an important milestone in the nuclear ban movement, a beginning of much more to come.
Only a couple years ago, before I knew about nuclear activism within the global community, much less the TPNW, I never imagined the prospect of a nuclear-free world. I wasn’t purposefully ignorant, nor was I by traditional meaning, uneducated. As a high school student in the United States, my knowledge of nuclear activity was inherently limited by state and national curriculums. Surely, I learned about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, and the secretive projects behind their development; such American school curriculums usually culminate in one question: should the US have dropped the nukes or not? This narrow window of discussion is unfortunately shared by much of the larger population, and poses a major obstacle to highlighting the true dangers to humanity posed by nuclear weapons development and deployment.
Upon learning of the TPNW a few months before it entered into force, I began to understand the bigger context from which it was constructed. The humanitarian price of nuclear deployment is, admittingly, much larger than the immediate casualties inflicted on the target area and the resulting long-term, inhabitable space. In fact, nuclear testing results in equally harmful radiation effects, oftentimes found in marginalized communities, for example the First Nations and Marshallese communities. The development of nuclear weapons poses both health and economic consequences for these peoples, and with any widespread media coverage would be righteously viewed as a crime against humanity, as nuclear weapons violate existing international humanitarian law.
The lack of public information about the dangers of nuclear weapons indicates a need for expanded education that is ever-absent from local curriculums. Non-profit organizations have an important role to play in the stigmatization of nuclear weapons, to inform the public. Reverse the Trend (RTT) is an example of a promising initiative developed by a coalition of NGOs that seeks to educate the youth community on such topics, and offers an extensive curriculum and community forum in which informed discussion can occur.
Ultimately, the question of nuclear weapons is much more about use or non-use, but should also consider the humanitarian costs during development and aftermath. Although I recognize the frequent realpolitiks justification for nuclear weapons, championed by nuclear-armed countries, these arguments understate the voices of their constituents, the people, and most importantly of the youth. The status quo of a nuclear world exists only as long as the world is unknowing, and with educational initiatives, the eventual stigmatization of nuclear development will increase the validity of nuclear-free agreements such as the TPNW.