Report: Hope for a Better Tomorrow: Reflections on the Twin Existential Threats
NPT RevCon Side Event Report (Wednesday, 8/10)
By Megan Lunny and Audrey Kelly
On Wednesday, August 10, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Reverse the Trend: Save Our People, Save Our Planet; Marshallese Educational Initiative; and The Prospect Hill Foundation co-hosted a panel discussion at the tenth Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference. The event featured a litany of compelling speakers: H.E. Ambassador Teburoro Tito, Permanent Representative of Kiribati; H.E. Ambassador Magzhan Ilyassov, Permanent Representative of Kazakhstan; Benetick Kabua Maddison, Director of the Marshallese Education Initiative and Advisor to Reverse The Trend: Save Our People, Save Our Planet; and Alicia Sanders-Zakre, Policy and Research Coordinator for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Christian N. Ciobanu, the Policy and Advocacy Coordinator of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation; and Project Coordinator of Reverse The Trend, moderated the event.
The conversation explored the intersections of “twin existential threats” nuclear weapons and climate change, with panelists offering their insights into nuclear and climate justice and urging immediate collective action to provide repair for impacted communities and environments.
Our discussion began with remarks by Ambassador Tito, who celebrated the peace-loving character of many Pacific cultures and the potential Pacific states impacted by nuclear testing, to steer the rest of the world toward peaceful solutions. After all, His Excellency noted, the UN Charter devotes an entire chapter to the “Pacific Settlement of Disputes”—invoking the special role of the Pacific region in pointing the way toward a world free of nuclear weapons. At the tenth NPT Review Conference and beyond, Kiribati and Kazakhstan have partnered to advance a humanitarian disarmament agenda that centers victim assistance and environmental remediation for states and communities impacted by nuclear weapons. As states that have suffered from the decades-long and ongoing impacts of nuclear weapons testing—the UK and US carried out 33 thermonuclear tests on Kiribati’s Christmas Island between 1957 and 1962, while the USSR conducted 456 tests at Semipalatinsk, in northeastern Kazakhstan, between 1949 and 1989—Kiribati and Kazakhstan understand better than most the role that the nuclear legacy has played in exacerbating the climate emergency, and vice versa.
Ambassador Ilyassov joined Ambassador Tito in condemning the “unethical, inhumane” nuclear tests that caused “irreparable damage to human health” from cancer and high rates of morbidity to genetic mutations and birth defects in the populations of Kazakhstan, Kiribati, and other former testing sites such as the Marshall Islands. His Excellency also celebrated Kazakhstan’s world-historical choice to renounce the nuclear weapons left there by the USSR in the aftermath of the Soviet empire’s 1991 collapse. This choice, together with the efforts of a civil society movement, paved the way to the end of nuclear testing, and set the stage for Kazakhstan’s role on the world stage as an activist for victim assistance and environmental remediation. Kazakhstan has called for the total global elimination of nuclear weapons by a 2045 deadline, the year that will mark the UN centennial. And while other states may dismiss this deadline as unrealistic, the ambassador reminded us that these weapons were first developed and tested in a span of just ten years; twenty-three years is more than enough time for their destruction.
There is a myriad of ways in which the nuclear and climate threats are “twins,” Ambassador Ilyassov said: perhaps most obviously, both nuclear war and climate change could end life on earth. Both the nuclear legacy and climate change have issued an “imperative for humanitarianism,” requiring compensation, remediation, and greater security for impacted and frontline communities. And both threats enjoin us to the “urgent task” of mobilizing legislation, human capacity-building, and global response mechanisms.
But—despite these overlaps—public awareness of the nuclear threat continually falls short compared to the climate threat, Ambassador Ilyassov said. Anti-nuclear activism can take a cue from environmentalism; fifty years ago, the ambassador said, no one was talking about climate change—but today the issue is everywhere in the media, and almost every celebrity wants to be a climate advocate. It will be important for anti-nuclear activists to generate that same kind of “hype” and even attract celebrity allies.
Benetick Kabua Maddison powerfully recounted his experience of having to leave his homeland, the Marshall Islands, at a young age due to unremediated radioactive fallout from US nuclear testing in the islands from 1946 to 1958. He decried US inaction in its ongoing refusal to apologize for or take steps to remediate environmental contamination or even to address the widespread cases of cancer and other radiogenic illnesses in the islands. The US nuclear legacy has placed the Marshall Islands on the frontlines of the climate crisis, including through the dangerous storage of toxic waste in Runit Dome, which is currently leaking into the Pacific and which would break open if submerged under rising seas. Meanwhile, even though the Marshallese value sustainable practices and are responsible for only a tiny fraction of global emissions, the Marshall Islands suffer from the climate footprint of other countries, including coral bleaching, damage from foreign ships, and rising sea levels that eat up precious land. In the face of these threats, the Marshall Islands are losing not only land but their population as well, as Marshallese continue to migrate in droves to the US, where pre-existing medical conditions caused by US nuclear testing have made them more vulnerable than other groups to COVID-19.
Due to this confluence of nuclear and climate crises, the Marshallese lifestyle is under threat,” Kabua Maddison said—but he was optimistic about the opportunity before us to pursue intersectional solutions. The Marshallese educator and activist highlighted the long legacy of Marshallese climate and anti-nuclear activism, and drew attention to the need for the next US-Marshall Islands Compact of Free Association, whose negotiation is currently underway, to address the nexus of climate-nuclear problems facing the Marshallese. He also underscored the importance of the TPNW’s humanitarian language for communities affected by nuclear testing.
Alica Sanders-Zakre further stressed the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons and welcomed the ray of hope represented by the TPNW, the first international treaty to comprehensively ban nuclear weapons, to which Kiribati, Kazakhstan, and the Marshall Islands are all states parties. The TPNW is uniquely suited to address this crucial intersection by imposing positive obligations on states to assist victims of nuclear weapons use and testing and provide environmental remediation. The treaty not only builds on humanitarian law and the NPT’s Article VI disarmament obligation, Sanders-Zakre said, but also draws heavily on “the input of all relevant stakeholders,” facilitates their ongoing participation, and gives consideration to the diverse needs of impacted groups.
Closing the conversation, Ambassador Tito raised the importance of fostering a spirit of unity and togetherness within the international community. Despite past and present conflicts, the ambassador said, “we are all a part of the same big family”—and we all have a responsibility to help those most deeply impacted by the “twin existential threats.”