What is the issue?
- ICAN being awarded the Nobel peace prize is a laudable sign for nuclear disarmament efforts. (Click here to know on ICAN and its treaty).
- However civil society and governments are required to focus on practical steps to reduce the risks of nuclear weapons to make the above meaningful.
Is ICAN's treaty effective?
- The U.S. President Barack Obama was awarded in 2009 the Nobel Peace Prize for offering a vision of a world without nuclear weapons.
- This has hardly contributed to any reduction in nuclear dangers and in fact nuclear arsenals have only increased in several states.
- Similarly, the Nobel Committee’s choice of ICAN is more an awarding of ambition.
- ICAN's Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons creates a legal basis for banning nuclear weapons among adhering states.
- It only seeks to delegitimise nuclear weapons as tools of statecraft on the grounds of indiscriminate humanitarian effects and has actually not banned them.
What makes nukes indispensible?
- Without nuclear weapons, States believe that there would be more violence, not less.
- And regional wars would increase in frequency and lethality with catastrophic consequences.
- States opposed to the prohibition treaty are located in Europe and East Asia which are shaped by the trauma of World War II.
- States facing nuclear threats are particularly driven by potential existential threats.
- E.g. South Korea supports the idea of acquiring nuclear weapons to counter the growing nuclear threat from North Korea.
- It is such international security problems that the current nuclear prohibition treaty have trouble addressing.
- Nuclear weapons and alliances backed by them are seen as guarantee to security.
- Resultantly, none of the weapons possessors seems particularly concerned with the stigma created by the prohibition treaty.
- The efforts that US, Pak, India, China and North Korea, etc are engaging in, to modernise their nuclear arsenals proves this.
What is the way forward?
- Instead of increasing the number of states that join the prohibition treaty, efforts could be made globally to reduce the sources of nuclear danger.
- This could aim at mitigating security threats that drive demand for nuclear weapons, and could legitimise nuclear deterrence.
- Countries could be encouraged to route their investments to economic or international political power rather than towards weapons.
- This could possibly work as an alternative means of international leverage or suasion.
- Stakeholders should thus find the right balance between nuclear disarmament (complete elimination of weapons) and nuclear deterrence (discouraging or inhibiting the use).
- Without these the prohibition treaty of ICAN risks becoming merely a moral victory, rather than contributing to concrete steps.
Source: The Hindu
