NUR-SULTAN – The desert sands are quiet now, in Semipalatinsk. And they are also quiet, in Alomogordo and Frenchman Flat, in Maralinga, the seas of Mururoa and other places that have noticed the “flash of a thousand suns”. But the ghosts of all those flashes and their roars can never stand still. And those who bear their scars are still with us, to remind us of the astonishing strength of the atom and the colossal and gruesome forces of weapons of war.
The United Nations has sought to inspire the cessation of nuclear tests and has organized an annual commemoration to highlight the problem. On 2 December 2009, the United Nations General Assembly followed Resolution 64/35, which established 29 August as the International Day against Nuclear Tests. And so, on that date (or on some other date of the same week) a commemoration is held every year, to mark the occasion.
This year’s commemoration took place on Wednesday, August 26, at the United Nations General Assembly Hall in New York. At this meeting, Kazakhstan’s eminent participation and the clash of First President S.E. Nursultan Nazarbayev was at the climax and was one of the highlights of the occasion. This special consultation was attended by the President of the General Assembly, the High Representative for Disarmament Affairs and UN officials and others with a special connection to the item.
The first speaker, the outgoing African President of the 75th General Assembly consultation, S.E. Tijjani Muhammad-Bande of Nigeria. President Muhammad-Bande noted that the assembly is held under the “cloud” of the Covid-19 pandemic. He noted that just two weeks ago we marked the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Since these attacks, the only use of nuclear weapons in wartime, some 2,000 subsequent nuclear tests have been conducted, with “devastating consequences.”
However, the President stated that “nuclear disarmament is, and should remain, a precedent for the United Nations.” He highlighted with specific praise the signing of the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty in 2017 and discussed its participation in an assembly to bring into force the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). But he advocated moving from his existing prestige to a “legally binding obligation.” He called on all states to ratify this treaty, which binds all states.
The United Nations High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, Izumi Nakamitsu of Japan, then expressed his fear about the nuclear test factor, stressing its importance despite the Covid-19 pandemic. The 2,000 tests conducted to date, he said, were a “relic of another era.”
Tarja Halonen, Finland’s former president, said that “never again” nuclear weapons will be used or even tested, especially “atmospheric detonations.” The ultimate goal, as she said, was “a world free of nuclear weapons.”
Lassina Zerbo, originally from Burkina Faso in West Africa, is Executive Secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (COT) Organization. He holds a PhD in geophysics from the University of Paris XI in France. Zerbo said the nuclear control factor was “unresolved” and that the CTBT came into force. The year 2020, he said, was a “wake-up call” and that led to no effort toward a ban on checks.
The first president of Kazakhstan, S.E. Nursultan Nazarbayev (in a speech read by Foreign Minister Mukhtar Tileuberdi), one of the top prominent and persistent supporters of the abolition of nuclear controls, noted that he had spent most of his career protecting a world free of nuclear weapons. He noted that Kazakhstan had closed its control in Semipalatinsk and had been described as the “champion of the IED (Full Trial Ban Treaty)”. He also abandoned the fourth largest arsenal of weapons of his kind. He noted that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had banned enriched uranium. And he proposed the concept of a global nuclear summit.
Karina Lester is a “second generation survivor” of a British nuclear control in Australia. The United Kingdom had carried out two checks in the deserts of Western Australia in October 1953, in which his father, Yami Lester, blinded him through the nuclear beam. These controls, Lester noted, disproportionately affected First Nations (i.e. Australia’s indigenous peoples). And he advocated the rehabilitation of the land affected by these explosions.
Selina Neirok Leem is a young woman from Majuro, Marshall Islands, near where some of the post-war American nuclear tests were conducted. In a World Bank newsletter he described it as “a small island with big dreams.” He noted that prior to the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Pacific Islands – and their peoples – were well “sacrificed” in the pursuit of nuclear tests.
Weapons whose abolition is being defended lately are the product of an incredibly abstrusible theoretical nuclear physicist. They came here from the spirit of Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller and others. But they were also much more. Their tests have produced genuine benefits for the world, nuclear pollutants and other atmospheric effects, some of which may not even be known yet. And they’ve affected other genuine people. It cannot be entirely guaranteed that these other people have a genuine long term.