The NPT and the Prohibition Negotiation: Scope for Bridge-building

Note The designations employed and the presentation of the material in this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area, or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. [...] The same General Groves who early on had supported the elimination of atomic bombs under international control had also stated “if there are to be atomic bombs in the world we must have the best, the biggest and the most”.1 Origins of deterrence Notably, once the Soviet Union had broken the United States monopoly of the atomic bomb in 1949 the concept of “deterrence” emerged as the dominant approa. [...] Perhaps the most salient manifestation of this has been the growing strength of the “humanitarian imperative” movement over the last few years, culminating in the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly of the “Humanitarian Pledge” resolution in 2015 and the launch this spring of a multilateral negotiation on a treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons. [...] The intention is to increase the costs and challenges of trying to legitimize nuclear weapons in global politics in order to induce change in the policies and practices of the nuclear armed to “cascade” the prohibitionary norm through the community of states that continue to value nuclear weapons.3 Two overlapping groups are central to this: the five nuclear-weapon states4 party to the NPT; and th. [...] The Russian delegation to the United Nations General Assembly explicitly stated in October 2016 that “under the NPT the nuclear weapons of the five nuclear powers are considered to be legitimate weapons”.10 As a result, the NPT is unable to unequivocally delegitimize nuclear weapons and the practice of nuclear deterrence, given the discrimination between nuclear and non-nuclear states parties.