The following speech was delivered to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Preparatory Committee on July 23, 2024 at the United Nations in Geneva.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) state parties are meeting for a third year in a row in the shadow of the devastating war in Ukraine, which has taken hundreds of thousands of lives, destroyed key infrastructure in Ukraine and elsewhere, and turned friends and family members into enemies. In the past 10 months, the attack on Israel and the war in Gaza have shattered all who have dared to confront the enormous civilian toll, the ongoing justifications of violations of international humanitarian law, and the divisiveness that the conflict has brought to environs from university campuses around the world to the halls of the United Nations.

The human suffering we witness on repeat is unfathomable, and yet, the fact that both of these conflicts involve—directly and indirectly—states that possess nuclear weapons is a stark reminder that things could be far worse. Whether deliberately, as has been threatened by Russian and Israeli politicians, or by accident, and especially if the current conflicts widen to regional wars, the use of nuclear weapons is a possibility that cannot be ruled out. This is so as long as nuclear weapons exist, and most especially as long as current policies not only allow but call for their instantaneous use to defend interests of states.

The NPT state parties can no longer pretend that the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a necessary evil and sweep the nuclear testing era under a pile of rugs.

Taking nuclear disarmament seriously is not only an existential imperative at this very moment, but an obligation of all state parties to the NPT. The Nuclear-Weapon States—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—have a special responsibility. According to Article Six of this treaty, they are mandated to negotiate in good faith toward nuclear disarmament, something that they have ostensibly not been doing. This must change.

All other NPT state parties must move away from threats of nuclear annihilation as a strategy for conducting international affairs. The stationing of U.S. and Russian weapons in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Türkiye in the case of the U.S. and Belarus in the case of Russia must end imminently. So must the so-called nuclear umbrella promise. Nuclear weapons don’t make anyone safer—they put all of us, all of humanity, and all of life on the planet at risk of extinction. To state that this is unacceptable is to state the obvious.

What should be done?

Next year will mark the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, and the 80th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. The Nuclear-Weapon States should use this and next year’s Preparatory Committee to chart a path that includes signing and ratifying the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in conjunction with the other four........

© Common Dreams