Impacts of the nuclear ban: how outlawing nuclear weapons is changing the world

ABSTRACT

The process to negotiate and adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has already had significant impacts on nuclear weapon law, politics, economics, and social and academic discourse. While the full range of effects of the nuclear ban is not yet known, economic divestment and changes to nuclear weapon discourse are well underway. This article examines how some of the expectations and hopes of the Treaty’s advocates are being fulfilled, and what else might be possible.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• human security
• international law
• international relations
• international relations theory
• militarism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ray Acheson is the Director of Reaching Critical Will, the disarmament programme of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). She represents WILPF on the International Steering Group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).

Notes

1 See for example Ray Acheson et al., A Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons: Developing a Legal Framework for the Prohibition and Elimination of Nuclear Weapons (New York: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and Article 36, April 2014), http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Publications/a-treaty-banning-nuclear-weapons.pdf.

2 See http://www.icanw.org/projects/pledge for current signatories.

3 See for example Alexander Kmentt, ‘The Development of the International Initiative on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons and Its Effect on the Nuclear Weapons Debate’, International Review of the Red Cross 97, no. 899 (2015): 681–709; Nick Ritchie, ‘Valuing and Devaluing Nuclear Weapons’, Contemporary Security Policy 34, no. 1 (2013): 146–73; and Matthew Bolton and Elizabeth Minor, ‘The Discursive Turn Arrives in Turtle Bay: The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons’ Operationalization of Critical IR Theories’, Global Policy 7, no. 3 (2016): 385–95.

4 Transcript from NRK Dagsrevyen interview with Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg, December 19, 2017, https://tv.nrk.no/serie/dagsrevyen.

5 Thomas Gibbons-Neff, ‘Why the Last U.S. Company Making Cluster Bombs Won’t Produce them Anymore’, The Washington Post, September 2, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/09/02/why-the-last-u-s-company-making-cluster-bombs-wont-produce-them-anymore.

6 Alan Tovey, ‘BAE Ditched by Norway’s $1 Trillion Investment Fund over Nuclear Weapon Concerns’, The Telegraph, January 16, 2018, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2018/01/16/bae-ditched-norways-1-trillion-investment-fund-nuclear-weapon.

7 Maaike Beenes, ‘Largest Dutch Pension Fund to Divest from Nuclear Weapons’, Don’t Bank on the Bomb, January 11, 2018, https://www.dontbankonthebomb.com/largest-dutch-pension-fund-to-divest-from-nuclear-weapons.

8 See the latest figures from Don’t Bank on the Bomb, https://www.dontbankonthebomb.com/who-invests.

9 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

10 Ibid., 77.

11 See for example Vincent J. Intondi, African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapon, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015); and Kjølv Egeland, ‘UK Nukes: Why the World Is Asking Britain to Disarm’, New Internationalist, October 26, 2016, https://newint.org/contributors/kjolv-egeland.