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A self-destructive trajectory

Dec 12,2017 - Last updated at Dec 12,2017

The leaders of the group that won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize have urged nuclear powers  to adopt the UN  ban-the-bomb treaty and are  still hoping against great odds  that existing nuclear nations and countries will sign the UN treaty banning nuclear weapons to prevent “the end of us”. 

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a coalition of 468 grassroots non-governmental groups that has been campaigning for support of the UN treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, adopted by 122 nations last July, is hoping that nuclear or could be nuclear powers will soon realise the high stakes involved in the treaty. 

The treaty, of course, remains unsigned by existing and recognised nuclear nations and from the look of things they are not about to becoming parties to it despite the high risks that the much feared end of humanity due to the deployment of nuclear bombs is real. 

ICAN’s Executive Director Beatrice Fihn, who received the prize on behalf of the group, cautioned the international community in general and nuclear nations in particular in her speech at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo on Sunday that human survival is at stake. 

She sounded the alarm that “a moment of panic or carelessness, a misconstrued comment or bruised ego, could easily lead us unavoidably to the destruction of entire cities”.  

The confrontation between the US and North Korea is a case in point. Fihn went on to say that the treaty in question “provides a choice, a choice between the two endings: the end of nuclear weapons or the end of us!” 

How right she is! The chances of nuclear states heeding ICAN’s appeals, however, are still slim. Unfortunately even the nuclear bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 is all but forgotten by countries which possess such terrible weapons. The scars and lessons of the first ever deployment of nuclear bombs on even civilian targets are barely remembered.

What is worse is that there are some non-nuclear powers that are trying desperately, whether secretly or out in the open, to become one. Sooner or later many states including the rouge type will develop or acquire nuclear arsenals. 

 

It seems that the human race is determined to remain on a self-destructive trajectory. This is what ICAN is struggling to change. But will it succeed? 

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