Nuclear weapons are illegal under international law and the only way to prevent the apocalyptic crime of nuclear warfare is to abolish these dangerous and indefensible devices. As writer Jonathan Schell noted, “Abolition is the great threshold. It is the logical and necessary destination because only abolition gets us out of the zone of mass slaughter, both as perpetrators and victims.”[Nuclear abolition, while it will be enormously difficult to achieve, is indeed possible if the organizational pressure that has been generated over the years by the world disarmament movement, and the political will that has been building recently within the international political community, can be more effectively mobilized and focused on the nuclear states to achieve this end. What the disarmament movement and the international political community need to do, according to Schell, “is to turn abolition from a far-off goal into an active organizing principle that gives direction to everything that is done in the nuclear arena—in other words, a strategic goal.” Many international organizations, such as the Nobel Peace Prize-winning ICAN (the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons), are already hard at work on this great challenge.
NUCLEAR WEAPONS ABOLITION
Abolishing nuclear weapons will require the major powers in the geopolitical system to be forced by intense political pressure from the disarmament movement and the international juridical system to take many very difficult but necessary and achievable intermediate steps. These steps down the path to abolition include (but are not limited to): 1) Reducing tensions between the United States and Russia (perhaps through a negotiated settlement over the war in Ukraine and a resolution of issues concerning NATO’s expansion to the east) and restoring some form of international dialogue and cooperation between the great powers; 2) Through that dialogue and cooperation, re-starting and extending the arms control regime to continue to reduce the number of existing weapons through negotiated agreements like the New START accord (which must include China and its growing stockpile of nuclear weapons); 3) As part of this arms control process, enacting a ban on the modernization and expansion of current nuclear arsenals; 4) Reforming the United Nations to make it a more democratic and effective body by weakening the hierarchical geopolitical system of the nuclear powers and empowering the more egalitarian juridical system of the World Court and the UN General Assembly; 5) Making real progress on the implementation of Article VI of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which requires disarmament and finally, 6) the most important step would be to convince the nuclear states to join the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) and then use the “architecture of zero” the treaty has created to rid the world of the existing weapons and build safeguards against their recrudescence.
All these steps are hard and require the United States to take a strong leadership role—a role the U.S. is not currently playing. Only the United States has the power and position in the current hierarchical geopolitical system to take the lead and achieve these steps toward disarmament. The U.S. remains the pivotal nation and the central nuclear power. The United States created the atomic bomb; used it against Japan in 1945; foiled efforts at the international control of nuclear weapons during the early Cold War; created a new, rules-based international order in the postwar era (that it dominated); developed the hydrogen bomb; built a colossal nuclear arsenal; threatened to use these weapons in numerous conflict situations; constructed a culture of nuclearism within its political system; and created an arms control regime that, while reducing the number of warheads, did not eliminate them, and thus, to this day, still maintains thousands of nuclear weapons, some of which are being modernized, with plans to expand the arsenal even more. Given this dreadful history, this political centrality related to nuclear weapons, the United States not only has the greatest ability to act to reduce the nuclear danger, it also has the greatest moral and legal responsibility to lead the way to, as President Obama once promised, a world without nuclear weapons.
U.S. political leaders, operating within the confines of the historical social structure of the American empire, have acted with reckless irresponsibility since the end of the Cold War and seem incapable of taking the steps necessary to reduce the nuclear danger and move toward the ultimate goal of abolition. American political scientist Chalmers Johnson argued in the title of his last book, that “Dismantling the Empire” is “America’s Last Best Hope.”[v] It may be the last best hope for a world free of nuclear weapons as well. For, unless the American empire is challenged by a strong domestic social movement and powerful pressure from the international political community, nuclear weapons will not be abolished, and the apocalyptic threat will remain. KNOW is committed to be a part of that critical social movement challenging empire and working for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
[Written by Ronald C. Kramer, 2024]
Sources:
[i] Ronald C. Kramer. 2025. Apocalyptic Crimes: Why Nuclear Weapons Are Illegal and Must Be Abolished. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
[ii] Jonathan Schell. 1998. The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now. New York: Metropolitan Books: 11.
[iii] Jonathan Schell, “Reaching Zero,” The Nation 290 (April 19, 2010): 17.
[iv] Schell, 2010: 17.
[v] Chalmers Johnson. 2010. Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope. New York: Metropolitan Books.