Alicia Sanders-ZakreandSusi Snyder

Opinion | Russia and other nuclear-armed parties must be held to account for violations of non-proliferation treaty

The increase in the obscene amount of money spent on nuclear weapons flies in the face of a commitment to non-proliferation

When parties meet in August, they must call out nuclear-armed states for violating the historic treaty and international law more broadly

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A Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile is test-launched by the Russian military at the Plesetsk cosmodrome in Russia’s Arkhangelsk region in this still from a video released on April 20. The nuclear-capable missile has been dubbed “Satan 2” by analysts. Photo: Russian Defence Ministry/Reuters

Alicia Sanders-ZakreandSusi Snyder

Published: 3:30am, 9 Jul 2022Updated: 4:11am, 9 Jul 2022

Every minute of 2021, the nine nuclear-armed countries spent US$156,000, almost twice the median US family income, on nuclear weapons designed to destroy cities in a flash of light.

This month, five of these countries – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States – will join over 100 others at the United Nations in New York to discuss progress, or lack thereof, on a more-than-50-year-old treaty that commits countries party to the treaty with nuclear weapons to work towards disarmament and all others not to acquire nuclear weapons.

The 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) has 191 state parties, including five of the nine nuclear-armed states. Countries that have joined the treaty meet nearly every year to review its implementation, including month-long conferences every five years where they try to agree on a common plan of action to take it forward.

The 10th NPT Review Conference will be held in August. The last agreed plan of action was adopted over a decade ago, at the 2010 review, and remains largely unimplemented.

The countries getting together in New York should talk about how nuclear-weapon states have violated their commitments to the NPT and under international law more broadly.

The most egregious breach of international law, the threats to use nuclear weapons by Russia – a depositary of the NPT – and its invasion of a non-nuclear-armed state, should be universally and unequivocally condemned by all states parties and in a final outcome document.

As a model, NPT states can look to the Vienna Declaration – adopted by state parties to another nuclear weapons treaty, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons – on June 23 where states condemned “unequivocally any and all nuclear threats, whether they be explicit or implicit and irrespective of the circumstances”.