The first-ever treaty to ban nuclear weapons entered into force on January 22, 2021. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) is now part of international law.
- The TPNW secured the 50 ratifications it needed to then enter into force, at the end of October 2020.
- The treaty declares that the countries ratifying it must “never under any circumstance develop, test, produce, manufacture or otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.
- The accord was approved initially by 122 nations at the UN General Assembly in 2017, but it was civil society groups led by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) which had put in the “decades of activism” to secure the number of countries required to make it a reality.
- But none of the nine countries known or believed to possess nuclear weapons — the United States, Russia, Britain, China, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel — supported it and neither did the 30-nation NATO alliance.
- Even Japan, the world’s only country to suffer nuclear attacks, also does not support the treaty.
