Global Zero - A Nuclear Weapon (Test) Free World
Exactly thirty years ago, on August 29, 1991, the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan closed down. Within three decades it had witnessed more than 400 Soviet nuclear tests; almost a quarter of all nuclear tests on the planet. The date marks today the International Day against Nuclear Tests.
On July 16, 1945, the Nevada desert became the scene of the first nuclear explosion. The test was followed a few days later by the dropping of the Little Boy and Fat Man atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The destruction was so immeasurable, that one wondered whether the new type of weapon would bring world peace or apocalypse. Now, 74 years later, the answer is neither, nor.
With the help of nuclear weapons, the USA and the Soviet Union guaranteed each other's mutual destruction during the Cold War - and thus probably prevented an escalation. To demonstrate the credibility of their nuclear capabilities, the nuclear powers USA, Soviet Union, China, Great Britain and France nevertheless tested their weapons more than 2,000 times by 1990. Estimates from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons suggest that more than 2 million people are suffering from cancer as a result of these detonations. The victims of the French tests in the Pacific are still awaiting their recognition.
The international efforts for global zero, a world free of nuclear weapons, are based to this day mainly on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970. According to this treaty, non-nuclear-weapon states must not strive for possession of the bomb. Almost all the Member States of the United Nations are signatories, with the exception of India, Pakistan and Israel, which have instead preferred to develop their own nuclear weapons. North Korea left the treaty in 2003 and has also been considered a nuclear weapons state since 2006 at the latest.
It is to be feared that other states will try to follow this example. The dictatorial regimes of Iraq and Libya were overthrown by military intervention after they ended their own programmes for the development of nuclear weapons. These examples should be a warning to Iran, which has been working on a nuclear weapons programme for some time. However, not only dictatorships but also democracies have found warning examples in recent history. After the end of the Cold War, Ukraine had Soviet nuclear weapons at its disposal, but agreed to surrender them. When it then became a victim of Russian aggression in 2014, it could not effectively deter it.
Even if the number of nuclear warheads worldwide diminished from 70,000, during the Cold War, to around 14,000, they have by no means lost their significance. The end of the East-West conflict did not end the era of nuclear weapons, but merely the era of nuclear weapons testing.