Japan and the Nuclear Weapons Prohibition Treaty: the wrong side of history, geography, legality, morality, and humanity

As of 2017, two of three classes of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) had been banned by the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. But despite – or perhaps because of – the existence of the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) for a considerably longer period, there is still no equivalent nuclear weapons convention (NWC) to complete the legal prohibition on all WMD. Nuclear weapons were invented to pre-empt Germany, used to defeat Japan, and deployed most extensively against the former Soviet Union. The near-universal NPT is the mother-lode of all nuclear treaties and informal arrangements that has kept the nuclear nightmare at bay for five decades while underpinning and facilitating the global trade in nuclear material for peaceful purposes. It permitted five countries (China, France, Russia, UK, and USA: the N5) to keep nuclear weapons but obliged them to work to eliminate them through negotiations and prohibited their acquisition by anyone else.

Meeting in New York under the auspices of the United Nations, in a historic vote on July 7, 2017, 122 NPT states parties adopted the Nuclear Weapons Prohibition Treaty (NWPT). The most significant multilateral development on nuclear arms control since the adoption of the NPT, the NWPT bans the acquisition, development, production, manufacture, possession, transfer, receipt, testing, extra-territorial stationing, and use and threat of use of nuclear weapons (UNGA 2017 UNGA. 2017. A/CONF.229/2017/L.3/Rev.1. http://www.undocs.org/en/a/conf.229/2017/L.3/Rev.1 [Google Scholar]). Opened for signature in the UN General Assembly (GA) on September 20, it was signed by 50 states the same day and will enter into force 90 days after 50 states have ratified it.

Increasingly disenchanted with the recalcitrance of the nuclear weapon states (NWS) on disarmament, two-thirds of NPT parties have proven that serious negotiations can produce an acceptable nuclear disarmament text in less than four weeks of multilateral negotiations conducted in good faith and with goodwill. But the one-third of absentees from the conference included all countries that possess nuclear weapons, plus the approximately 30 US NATO and Pacific allies.¹¹ The Netherlands attended the conference on directions from its parliament but voted against the treaty.View all notes In their view, the NWPT risks jeopardizing international security by damaging the NPT and undermining nuclear deterrence. As well as constituting a strong and significant minority, these include some of the best UN citizen states. Their boycott of the conference and rejection of the NWPT points to the considerable potential for tension and conflict between the two treaties. This is the first time that the NPT and the UN have diverged on global nuclear policy. The already fraying normative consensus around the NPT as the embodiment of the global nuclear order and the framework for setting global nuclear policy directions has been broken.

After the treaty’s adoption, in a joint press statement, the ambassadors of the three Western NPT-licit NWS – USA, UK, and France – said they had neither taken part in the negotiation of the treaty, nor did they “intend to sign, ratify or ever become party to it.” For the treaty “is incompatible with the policy of nuclear deterrence, which has been essential to keeping the peace in Europe and North Asia for over 70 years.”²² https://usun.state.gov/remarks/7892.View all notes In an unclassified NATO document on 17 October 17 2016, Washington had urged allies to vote against holding the negotiations and not to take part in any negotiations that were convened because “efforts to negotiate an immediate ban on nuclear weapons or to delegitimize nuclear deterrence are fundamentally at odds with NATO’s basic policies on deterrence and our shared security interests.” Yet the document conceded that “The effects of a nuclear weapons ban treaty could be wide-ranging.”³³ http://www.icanw.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/NATO_OCT2016.pdf.View all notes

US allies dutifully joined the nuclear-armed countries to boycott the UN conference, describing it as impractical, ineffective, and unrealistic. Japan walked out after delivering a sharply critical opening statement. Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida said the negotiations “could further deepen the rift between nuclear and nonnuclear-weapon states and cause an adverse effect.”⁴⁴ Kyodo News Service, “Japan abstains as nuclear arms ban treaty talks start at UN,” Japan Times, March 28, 2017, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/03/28/national/japan-abstains-talks-start-u-n-nuclear-arms-ban-treaty/#.WNsCzCN97q0.View all notes This left Japan’s atomic bomb survivors, the hibakusha, “heartbroken.”⁵⁵ “Hibakusha ‘heartbroken’ over Japan’s opposition to nuke ban treaty,” Mainichi, March 28, 2017, https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20170328/p2a/00m/0na/020000c.View all notes The argument of this article is that in rejecting the ban treaty, Japan put itself on the wrong side of history, geography, legality, morality, and humanity. Japan is the emotional touchstone of nuclear weapons policy. Its stance on the UN ban treaty is not just a deeply flawed misreading of international sentiment; it is also a deep betrayal of Japan’s own history, legacy, and people. Although I focus on Japan, most arguments apply equally to all nuclear-weapon-possessing countries and allies who shelter under their nuclear umbrella.

Context: five paradoxes

Former US Defence Secretary William Perry has warned that “the danger of a nuclear catastrophe today is greater than during the Cold War” (quoted in McManus 2016 McManus, D. 2016. “The New Nuclear Arms Race.” Los Angeles Times, April 3. [Google Scholar]). The nuclear peace has held so far owing as much to good luck as sound stewardship (Lewis et al. 2013 Lewis, P. H. Williams, B. Pelopidas, and S. Aghlani. 2013. “Too Close for Comfort.” London: Chatham House. http://www.sre.gob.mx/en/images/stories/cih/chathamhouse.pdf [Google Scholar]; Schlosser 2013 Schlosser, E. 2013. Command and Control. London: Allen Lane. [Google Scholar]). Nuclear weapons endanger international security more than they provide national security, but possessor states are trapped in the prism of basing nuclear policies on national calculations only.

Five paradoxes set the context for the global nuclear arms control agenda and are at the heart of the NPT–NWPT divide. First, nuclear weapons are useful for deterrence only if the threat to use them is credible, but they must never be used if deterrence fails, because any use will only worsen the devastation for everyone. Second, they are useful for some (those who have them) but, illogically, must be stopped from spreading to anyone else. Third, the most substantial progress on dismantlement and destruction of nuclear weapons has occurred as a result of bilateral US and Soviet/Russian treaties, agreements, and measures. But a nuclear-weapon-free world will have to rest on a multilateral international instrument such as a universal, non-discriminatory NWC. Fourth, the existing treaty-based regimes have collectively anchored international security and can be credited with many major successes and significant accomplishments. But their accumulating anomalies, shortcomings, and flaws suggest that some of them may have reached the limits of their success. Finally, there are far fewer nuclear weapons today than during the Cold War; they play a lesser role in shaping relations between Moscow and Washington and the risk of a nuclear war between them is low.⁶⁶ However, the flare-up of geopolitical tensions over Ukraine in 2014 heightened the danger of an unintended nuclear war (Berls and Ratz, 2015 Berls, R. E. and L. Ratz. 2015. “Rising Nuclear Dangers: Assessing the Risk of Nuclear Use in the Euro–Atlantic Region.” NTI Paper. Washington: Nuclear Threat Initiative. http://www.nti.org/media/pdfs/NTI_Rising_Nuclear_Dangers_Paper_FINAL.pdf?_=1443443566 [Google Scholar]).View all notes Yet the overall risks of nuclear war have grown – as more countries in more unstable regions have acquired these deadly weapons, terrorists continue to seek them, and command and control systems remain vulnerable to human error, system malfunction, and cyberattack.

The first nuclear age was conditioned by the bipolar Cold War rivalry, the competitive nuclear arms buildup and doctrines of the two superpowers, and the development of relatively robust mechanisms for maintaining strategic stability. The second nuclear age (Bracken 2012 Bracken, P. 2012. The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics. New York: Henry Holt. [Google Scholar]; Yoshihara and Holmes 2012 Yoshihara, T. and J. R. Holmes, eds. 2012. Strategy in the Second Nuclear Age: Power, Ambition, and the Ultimate Weapon. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. [Google Scholar]) is characterized by a multiplicity of nuclear powers with criss-crossing ties of cooperation and conflict, the fragility of command and control systems, threat perceptions between three or more nuclear-armed states simultaneously, and the resulting greater complexity of deterrence relations between the nine nuclear-armed states. Changes in the nuclear posture of one can generate a cascading effect on several others. For example, the nuclear relationship between India and Pakistan is historically, conceptually, politically, strategically, and operationally deeply intertwined with China as a nuclear power. The boundaries between nuclear and conventional weapons, tactical and strategic warheads, and nuclear, cyber and space domains are also eroding.

While the NPT served the international community very well during the first nuclear age, it has proven to be less fit for purpose for the second nuclear age. Its normative potential to contain and eliminate the nuclear threat has been exhausted. All countries that have them betray the intention to retain them indefinitely. Alexei Arbatov wonders if nuclear arms control has reached its own end of history. Almost all negotiations on nuclear arms reductions and non-proliferation have stalled and non-proliferation norms are softening, “existing treaty regimes are eroding and…may collapse in the near future.” With “the total disintegration of the existing framework of treaties and regimes,” he warns, the risks of and plans for the use of nuclear weapons in combat will return to prominence (Arbatov 2015 Arbatov, A. 2015. An Unnoticed Crisis: The End of History for Nuclear Arms Control? Moscow: Carnegie Moscow Center. [Google Scholar], 3, 22).

History

Along with an interest in the normative framework for going to war and regulating the conduct of belligerents engaged in hostilities, analysts and policymakers have long been interested in regulating the weapons of warfare. Article 8 of the League of Nations Covenant required “the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations.” The UN Charter made the Security Council responsible for formulating “plans…for the establishment of a system for the regulation of armaments” (Article 26). The Charter was signed two months before the first use of atomic weapons, and the first GA session was held two months after. The sheer destructiveness of the new type of weaponry had a profound conditioning impact on the world. Every government and all peoples became stakeholders in the nuclear peace and demanded a voice in the governance of the nuclear order, in effect insisting that there be no annihilation without representation. The UN provided a global platform for articulating this demand. In addition, several governments of non-nuclear states decided to draw “red lines” by creating nuclear exclusion zones on their own.

The very first GA resolution on 24 January 1946 called for the newly established UN Atomic Energy Commission to make proposals for the elimination of all WMD (Rydell 2009 Rydell, R. 2009. “The Secretary-General and the Secretariat.” In The United Nations and Nuclear Orders, edited by J. Boulden, R. Thakur, T. G. Weiss, 73–107. Tokyo: United Nations University Press. [Google Scholar]). Ever since, activists, NGOs, governments, and the UN have been relentless in putting in place planks of an increasingly rigorous normative architecture to limit the spread of nuclear weapon technology, materials, and arsenals. The Antarctic Treaty (1959) demilitarized and denuclearized the uninhabited continent, followed by the Treaty of Tlatelolco (1967) that established the world’s first nuclear-weapon-free zone (NWFZ) in an inhabited region in Latin America, and the NPT in 1968. The 1978 first Special Session on Disarmament was a historic landmark that registered international consensus on the priority to be given to the goal of nuclear weapons elimination.⁷⁷ https://www.un.org/disarmament/topics/ssod/.View all notes Additional planks include the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) following earlier successes in proscribing atmospheric and underground testing; the Nuclear Suppliers Group set up after India’s testing breakout in 1974; regional NWFZs (Thakur 1998 Thakur, R. ed. 1998. Nuclear Weapons-Free Zones. London: Macmillan. [Google Scholar]) that cover the southern hemisphere and extend to a limited extent into the northern hemisphere in Central Asia and Mongolia; the Proliferation Security Initiative; so on. In addition, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) acts as the UN’s nuclear watchdog to ensure compliance with non-proliferation obligations, along with establishing safety and security standards.

Moscow and Washington as the two superpowers led the way both in advances and setbacks. The USA presented the Baruch Plan for the international control of atomic energy in 1946, which led eventually to the establishment of the IAEA. The first proposal for a “standstill agreement” on nuclear testing came from India in 1954. The western allies submitted a working paper to the UN in 1957 for a halt to nuclear testing and the initiation of a reduction in nuclear weapons stockpiles. Of greater import were a series of bilateral nuclear arms control agreements following the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks begun in Helsinki in 1969: the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty (1972), the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (1987), the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START, 1991 and 1993), and New START (2010). Meanwhile, the US Congress passed the Nunn–Lugar Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act to help Moscow destroy nuclear, chemical, and other weapons.

The Partial Test-Ban Treaty (1963) outlawed atmospheric, space, and underwater nuclear testing. The Threshold Test-Ban Treaty (1974) outlawed underground tests of more than a 150-kt yield. The 1996 CTBT banned all but subcritical nuclear tests. The CWC banned chemical weapons, the NPT was extended indefinitely and unconditionally in 1995, and the 2000 NPT Review Conference contained an ambitious forward-looking agenda. In 2009 President Barack Obama outlined his vision of a nuclear-weapon-free world in a landmark speech in Prague.⁸⁸ White House, “Remarks by President Barack Obama in Prague as Delivered,” April 5, 2009, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-barack-obama-prague-delivered.View all notes

In other words history has moved in one direction only, albeit in a jagged rather than linear progression, to limit and seek to end the existence of nuclear weapons and their use. The NWPT is part of that historically progressive trend.

Geography

Four of the world’s nine nuclear weapons possessor countries are in Asia which contains states with the full spectrum of nuclear weapon status in relation to the NPT: one NPT-licit NWS (China), two non-NPT nuclear-armed states (India, Pakistan), the world’s only NPT defector state (North Korea), three umbrella states (Australia, Japan, South Korea), and a vast majority of non-NWS. Russia and the USA also have massive geographical footprints in the Pacific. Asia is the only continent where nuclear warhead stockpiles are growing. North Korea’s unchecked nuclear ambitions could in turn trigger a cascade of proliferation right through the sub-region with the sole exception of Mongolia which has enshrined its nuclear-free status in national legislation (Enkhsaikhan 2017 Enkhsaikhan, J. 2017. “Promoting Mongolia’s Nuclear-Weapon-Free Status: Lessons Learned and Relevance for Northeast Asia,” APLN/CNND Policy Brief. No. 43. Canberra/Seoul: Asia–Pacific Leadership Network. http://www.a-pln.org/briefings/briefings/ [Google Scholar]). Asian states hold asymmetric perceptions of the military and political utility of nuclear weapons, with China and India having declared no-first-use (NFU) policies because they foresee political more than military utility in nuclear weapons. Asia is the scene of simultaneous, long-running, and major territorial disputes between nuclear powers, for example, China, India, and Pakistan. Simultaneous threat perceptions between three or more nuclear-armed states have produced a transformation of the Cold War nuclear dyads into interlinked nuclear chains today (Einhorn and Sidhu 2017 Einhorn, R. and W. P. S. Sidhu, eds. 2017. The Strategic Chain: Linking Pakistan, India, China, and the United States. Washington DC: Brookings Institution. [Google Scholar]).

Legality

The NPT was a three-way bargain in which states agreed to facilitate transfer of nuclear technology and materials; non-NWS gave up the right to develop or acquire nuclear weapons; and the five NWS were permitted to keep their weapons pending such time as they negotiated elimination. In Article VI: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.”¹¹¹¹ http://www.un.org/en/conf/npt/2005/npttreaty.html.View all notes

The GA sought an Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the legality of nuclear weapons. Published on 8 July 1996, the Opinion contained three significant elements for present purposes (ICJ 1996 ICJ. 1996. Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons: Advisory Opinion. http://www.un.org/law/icjsum/9623.htm [Google Scholar]).¹²¹² The normative status of the Court’s Advisory Opinion is strengthened by the frequency of its recitation in GA resolutions.View all notes First, a majority of the Court held that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law, and in particular humanitarian law. Second, the Court could not confirm the legality of nuclear weapon use even in the extreme circumstance of the very survival of a state being at stake. And third, it significantly strengthened the nature of NPT obligations by affirming unanimously that states have an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament.

Yet, 21 years later, there are still around 15,000 nuclear weapons in the arsenals of nine countries, all of whom are modernizing, upgrading, or expanding nuclear weapon delivery platforms, and some are increasing stockpiles (Kile and Kristensen 2017 Kile, S. N. and H. M. Kristensen. 2017. “Trends in World Nuclear Forces, 2017.” SIPRI Fact Sheet. Stockholm: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2017-06/fs_1707_wnf.pdf [Google Scholar]). The NWS insist they have acted in good faith consistent with the Article VI obligation through unilateral decisions and bilateral agreements to reduce the numbers of nuclear warheads by 75–80 per cent since the Cold War. France and Russia also point to the Article VI linkage to general and complete disarmament, although the normative force of this linkage has arguably been broken over the successive review conferences (Meyer 2016 Meyer, P. 2016. “Hard and Soft Linkages Between Nuclear and Conventional Disarmament.” Rethinking General and Complete Disarmament in the Twenty-First Century, UNODA Occasional Paper, no. 28. New York. [Google Scholar]).¹³¹³ Ford (2007 Ford, C. A. 2007. “Debating Disarmament: Interpreting Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.” Nonproliferation Review 14(3): 401–428.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]), however, argues that the vague and weak disarmament obligations of the NPT compared to the stringent, immediate, legally binding, verifiable, and enforceable non-proliferation clauses confirm the treaty’s real purpose was the latter and disarmament was merely a political sop. In 2017 Ford was appointed to a senior position in the Trump administration.View all notes In other words, the NPT granted temporary legal exemption to the NWS from prohibition that was applied to all other parties. Over the years the NWS have converted this temporary and conditional permission into the language of entitlement and enduring legitimacy. With their refusal to abolish nuclear arsenals, the NPT was subverted from a prohibition into a non-proliferation regime. The NPT has failed to function as the primary normative framework for reducing nuclear warheads and delegitimizing the possession and deployment of nuclear weapons. In 50 years since its adoption, not a single nuclear warhead has been eliminated through a multilateral agreement. In addition, the bilateral US–Russian process has also stalled and is at risk of being reversed.

A major evaluation of the implementation record of the agreed agenda from the 2010 NPT Review Conference documented that with respect to peaceful uses of nuclear energy and non-proliferation, where 50 and 33 per cent of recommendations had shown significant or maximum progress, respectively, with nuclear disarmament, the figure was a more miserly 17 per cent. Conversely, 0, 17, and 62 per cent, respectively, of the three sub-categories of recommendations had a record of minimal or nil progress (Evans, Ogilvie-White, and Thakur 2015 Evans, G. T. Ogilvie-White, and R. Thakur. 2015. “Nuclear Weapons: The State of Play 2015.” Canberra: Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. https://cnnd.crawford.anu.edu.au/publication/cnnd/5328/nuclear-weapons-state-play-2015 [Google Scholar], 251–61). In other words nuclear disarmament – which, as the NWS and umbrella states repeatedly reminded the world in 2016–2017 can only be implemented by those who possess nuclear weapons – has been the very poor cousin of non-proliferation and peaceful uses of nuclear energy in the promise-performance record of agreed NPT outcomes. The study’s overall conclusion on the NWS record was damning: “Based on current arsenals, deployments and force postures, and on planned expansions, upgrades and modernization, every one of them is committed to the indefinite retention of significant nuclear-weapon capability” (Evans, Ogilvie-White, and Thakur 2015 Evans, G. T. Ogilvie-White, and R. Thakur. 2015. “Nuclear Weapons: The State of Play 2015.” Canberra: Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. https://cnnd.crawford.anu.edu.au/publication/cnnd/5328/nuclear-weapons-state-play-2015 [Google Scholar], paragraph 1.33). A lack of progress on disarmament makes it more challenging to hold the line on non-proliferation, even as any additional or suspected instance of proliferation makes progress on disarmament more difficult.

The UN conference on March 27–32 and June 15–July 7 was the only nuclear disarmament negotiation being held. All those boycotting the UN conference disrespected a duly constituted multilateral process driven by a two-thirds majority of NPT members. Article VI calls on “Each of the Parties” to NPT to undertake negotiations towards “effective” nuclear disarmament. The ICJ strengthened this to demand a conclusion to the negotiations. On the face of it, non-participation put Japan in non-compliance with this obligation.

The NWPT conforms to the NPT legal obligation and seeks to implement the letter and spirit of the 1996 Opinion delivered by the world’s most authoritative independent international judicial authority. The preamble notes the treaty is based on the:

India’s foreign ministry spokesman Gopal Baglay said on July 18 that the treaty “in no way constitutes or contributes to the development of any customary international law.” India, he emphasized, is not party “and so shall not be bound by any of the obligations that may arise from it.”¹⁴¹⁴ “Nuclear Ban Treaty Doesn’t Contribute to Customary International Law: India,” The Wire July 18, 2017, https://thewire.in/159057/nuclear-ban-treaty-customary-law/?mkt_tok=.View all notes While this is absolutely correct with regard to India which is not party to the NPT, the position is more ambiguous for Japan and Australia as NPT parties. When India conducted nuclear tests in 1998, Australia, Japan, and others imposed sanctions even though India was not party to the NPT or the CTBT. One could thus argue that Australia, Japan, and the USA have been hoist by their own petard.

The NWPT may not impose binding legal obligations but does have legal implications for non-parties. Repeated vague “promises” to the contrary over the decades notwithstanding, the NWS have institutionalized nuclear deterrence as a permanent national security doctrine. They deploy their interpretation of the NPT as the main legitimizing normative framework for their own possession and the principal management tool to enforce non-proliferation on others. By contrast the alternative NWPT normative framework begins with the unambiguous and unconditional stigmatization of the possession, use, and threat of use of nuclear weapons by anyone and outlines pathways to negotiated nuclear disarmament. As a UN treaty resulting from a mandated multilateral conference, it gives authoritative legal underpinning to the civil society-led stigmatization of nuclear weapons.

According to Brazil’s Foreign Minister Aloysio Nunes Ferreira, “The agreement was a victory for the United Nations and multilateralism” that “reflects the historical aspiration from the large majority of the international community to ban the existence of such weapons” (Ferreira 2017 Ferreira, A. N. 2017. “Towards a World Free of Nuclear Weapons.” Folha de S. Paulo, July 17. [Google Scholar]). In turn this means that anti-nuclear advocates in all the possessor and umbrella countries can draw on the legitimacy of the NWPT to alter the prevailing domestic normative milieu. The states opposing the NWPT recognized the threat and that is why they resisted and tried to discredit the process and the outcome so fiercely.

Morality

Somewhat counter-intuitively, power and principles intersect in nuclear politics. Most countries have chosen nuclear abstinence because people overwhelmingly abhor the bomb as immoral. It is the most indiscriminately inhumane weapon ever invented. Its primary intended deterrent effect relies on the threat to kill millions of innocent civilians. Accurately called the balance of terror, deterrence is a euphemism for state-sanctioned nuclear terrorism.

Humanity

The combination of growing awareness of nuclear threats and rising frustration with the perceived obstructionism of the nuclear-armed states generated a powerful alliance of civil society activists and like-minded states rooted in humanitarian principles.¹⁶¹⁶ The 2017 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear weapons (ICAN) in recognition of its decade-long “groundbreaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition” of nuclear weapons by drawing “attention to the catastrophic consequences of any use” of these weapons. AFP, “Anti-Nuclear Campaign ICAN Awarded Nobel Peace Prize,” Japan Times, October 6, 2017, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/10/06/world/anti-nuclear-campaign-ican-wins-nobel-peace-prize/.View all notes The humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons have been a recurring theme in nuclear disarmament advocacy since the 1950s. It was the primary motivation for the challenge to the legality of nuclear weapons in the 1990s. The NWPT affirms the collective revulsion of the international community at a morally unacceptable weapon of catastrophic destruction and delegitimizes the very possibility of nuclear war as an unacceptable risk to human civilization.

The new movement’s factual premise is the lack of individual or collective capacity to cope with the humanitarian impacts of a nuclear war. On 22 October 2012, a 34-country joint statement at the GA argued that the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons concern the community of states as a whole. They must never be used again under any circumstances. “The only way to guarantee this is the total, irreversible and verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons, under effective international control.”¹⁷¹⁷ http://www.psr.org/resources/joint-statement-on-the.html.View all notes This was repeated in 2013 and again in 2014, with supporting countries increasing to 155.

Three conferences were held on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons in Norway, Mexico, and Austria in 2013–2014. At the conclusion of the last one in Vienna on 9 December 2014, the host country unilaterally issued the “Austrian Pledge” that committed it to work with like-minded states to “fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons.”¹⁸¹⁸ http://www.icanw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/AustrianPledge-ICAN.pdf.View all notes In addition, 127 countries signed a humanitarian pledge “to stigmatize, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons.”¹⁹¹⁹ http://www.icanw.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/HINW14vienna_Pledge_Document.pdf.View all notes The NWPT gives effect to that pledge.

On 7 December 2015 the GA called for work “to fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons” (A/RES/70/48). This was reinforced with a humanitarian pledge resolution adopted on the same day which established an open-ended working group to meet in three sessions and report to the following GA session (A/RES/70/33). Crucially, the open-ended working group decided to operate under GA rules that permit decisions by vote, instead of the decision-blocking consensus rule of the CD. The group presented its findings in August 2016, with the core conclusion being a call for the GA to authorize the commencement of negotiations on a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading to their eventual elimination. This was duly done on 23 December 2016 (A/RES/71/258).

The NWPT is explicitly rooted in powerful humanitarian principles. The Preamble expresses deep concern “about the catastrophic humanitarian consequences that would result from any use of nuclear weapons” that pose “grave implications for human survival, the environment, socioeconomic development, the global economy, food security and the health of current and future generations, and have a disproportionate impact on women and girls.” Further, it recognizes the “disproportionate impact of nuclear-weapon activities on indigenous peoples.” And it reaffirms “that any use of nuclear weapons would also be abhorrent to the principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience.”

A practical agenda for action

The international community has so far banned two entire classes of WMD – biological and chemical weapons. It has also negotiated treaties prohibiting some categories of particularly indiscriminate and inhumane conventional weapons – landmines and cluster munitions. By no means every country has signed these conventions: the biggest users and producers of cluster munitions, and those with the largest anti-personnel-mine stockpiles, are not parties. But the conventions nonetheless exercise strong normative force and quite directly influence the behaviour of non-states parties. The CTBT provides a very clear example of this; although its peculiar requirement for universal ratification by Annex 2 states prior to entry-into-force could leave the treaty in a perpetual limbo, the current voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing (with the sole exception of North Korea) has enormous practical effect.

Successive international commissions – the Canberra Commission, Tokyo Forum, Blix Commission, Evans–Kawaguchi Commission – have emphatically reaffirmed three core propositions. As long as any state has nuclear weapons, others will want them. As long as they exist, they will be used again someday, if not by design and intent, then through miscalculation, accident, rogue launch, or system malfunction. Any such use anywhere could spell catastrophe for the planet. The only guarantee of zero nuclear weapons risk is zero nuclear weapons possession.

Where does this leave Japan? One consequence of the global nuclear order being bifurcated between the old NPT and the new ban treaty is that the contradiction underlying Japan’s history of hunting with the nuclear hounds while running with the anti-nuclear hares has been starkly highlighted. Its resulting loss of credibility as a world-leading disarmament advocate was made clear in October. For 24 consecutive years, Japan has presented an almost identical nuclear disarmament resolution at the United Nations. In 2017, when Japan presented a significantly weakened draft resolution (L.35, “United action with renewed determination towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons”), the number of co-sponsors dropped. The resolution was adopted on 27 October by a 144–4–27 vote in the GA First Committee. The number of countries voting in favour fell by 23 from the 167 recorded in the equivalent resolution in 2016 and was the lowest since 136 in 2002, while the abstainers increased from 16 in 2016 to 27 in 2017, including 15 that had voted in favor in 2016 like Austria, Brazil, and New Zealand (Kanari and Matsuo, 2017 Kanari, R. and I. Matsuo. 2017. “Japan Losing Influence in Push for Nuclear Disarmament.” Asahi Shimbun, October 30. http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201710300033.html [Google Scholar]).²⁰²⁰ The four negative votes were from China, North Korea, Russia, and Syria.View all notes Several states explained their abstention by pointing to the weakening of the disarmament commitments and the lack of any reference to the NWPT (Acheson, 2017 Acheson, R. 2017. “Nuclear Weapons.” First Committee Monitor 2017(5). October 30. http://reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/1com/FCM17/FCM-2017-No5.pdf [Google Scholar], 6–8). The dilution of Japan’s traditional position was also noted and criticized in Japan.²¹²¹ “Japan’s Weakened UN Draft Resolution on Nukes Erodes Trust,” editorial, The Mainichi, October 17, 2017, https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20171017/p2a/00m/0na/004000c.View all notes

This points to an urgent need for Japan to launch initiatives to regain lost credibility. The contributions of the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Initiative (NPDI), a 12-state grouping that includes Japan and Australia as co-founders²²²² http://www.nti.org/learn/treaties-and-regimes/non-proliferation-and-disarmament-initiative-npdi/.View all notes has not been very impressive on concrete outcomes. Instead, or at least in addition, based on the foregoing analysis, four courses of action are open to it. The first and most important is to sign the NWPT as soon as possible. There is no existing policy or practice that we know of that is in violation of any of the treaty’s prohibitions, so there is no bar to immediate signature.

As well as putting Japan on the right side of the five domains discussed in this article, this would bring major benefits in countering the widespread perception of its total subservience to Washington and enhancing Japan’s profile. Despite an unblemished record of humane civilian internationalism since 1945, Tokyo’s regional reputation has suffered for three reasons. The textbook controversy sends the unfortunate message that significant sections of Japanese society continue to refuse to face the facts of Japanese aggression and wartime atrocities. The practice of many Japanese prime ministers and cabinet ministers to visit the Yasukuni Shrine where several Class A convicted war criminals are enshrined is similarly damaging. And the highly emotive issue of comfort women puts a brake on strong relations even with fellow-US ally South Korea. The three factors together undo much of the good done by the periodic apologies issued by responsible Japanese leaders. By becoming party to the NWPT Japan would put itself on the right side of geography and help to offset somewhat the negative images caused by the above factors.