The world’s first nuclear test, “Trinity”, took place on 16 July 1945, in a torrid desert in New Mexico which the Spanish Conquistadores had named Jornada del Muerto (Journey of the Dead Man). In the decades that followed, over 2,000 such tests occurred in eight countries, some in the atmosphere, some underground and others underwater. Today, the world is poised to turn a new page in the history of nuclear testing. With some enlightened leadership from key States that possess such weapons, as well as sustained diplomatic encouragement from other countries and persistent efforts from civil society, there is a good chance that the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) will finally enter into force sometime in the foreseeable future, thereby outlawing all such tests in any environment.
Why would readers of the UN Chronicle, who are interested in many other issues, care about the outcome of the CTBT treaty? How is it relevant to their concerns? What are some possible consequences if the treaty never enters into force? These are all legitimate questions and all have good answers—but before we can respond and look forward, we must look back.
The United Nations Charter, signed one month before the “Trinity” test in June 1945, is a pre-atomic document. Yet, in January 1946, the General Assembly’s first resolution called specifically for the elimination of all nuclear weapons and other such weapons “adaptable to mass destruction”, including biological and chemical arms. The term “mass destruction” is tricky, since the many thousands of conventional bombs dropped in the Second World War—not to mention the havoc wreaked centuries earlier by the Mongol conquerors in Central Asia—established rather conclusively that many types of weapons can cause mass destruction. Yet, what is unique about nuclear weapons, and to a lesser extent other weapons of mass destruction (WMD), is their ability to produce large-scale, indiscriminate deaths with a single detonation. While the UN Charter addressed both “disarmament” and “regulation of armaments”, the General Assembly clarified that disarmament applied to WMD, while the parallel goal was the control or limitation of conventional arms.
This distinction is significant. The United Nations does not seek merely to “regulate” nuclear weapons, but rather to prohibit and eliminate such weapons, along with all other WMD, while limiting conventional arms. This is what “general and complete disarmament” means. It has been on the General Assembly’s agenda for 50 years and has been the “ultimate goal” of the United Nations since the Assembly’s first special session on disarmament in 1978.
Nuclear weapons, of course, do not spring out of nothing. They are enormously complex artefacts of human ingenuity. The production of the fissile materials that fuel such weaponry—plutonium and highly enriched uranium—is in itself a tremendously difficult process, which only a few countries have mastered, even today. Designing such a weapon that is light yet durable enough to be delivered to its intended target is another difficult task, and here is where explosive tests play such an important role. Of course, one can design a workable nuclear weapon without having tested it, as illustrated conclusively by the development and use of the “Little Boy” bomb that devastated Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Even using 1945-vintage technology, the designers of that uranium bomb had so much confidence that it would work, they were comfortable putting it to use even without a test.
However, all the States that have declared possession of such weapons—namely, the five permanent members of the Security Council, namely China, France, Russian Federation, United Kingdom and United States, plus the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), India and Pakistan—have also tested such devices. Testing is a way for a State to signal unambiguously to the international community possession of such a weapon. But symbolism alone does not explain the testing of over 2,000 nuclear weapons over the past several decades.
Testing is essentially an experimental tool used by scientists and engineers to improve these weapons or, as occurred rarely in the past, confirm their reliability. Sometimes these “improvements” are intended to enhance the safety or security of a weapon, for example, to ensure that it will not go off prematurely, explode as a result of an accident or be subject to theft or use by a terrorist group. Yet, these improvements are also intended to enhance the performance of a weapon, give it a new role or make it better able to survive the hazards of their delivery—the intense pressures, temperatures and defensive measures that such weapons encounter on their way to their targets—and the effects of their aging process. Some tests, of course, can serve to develop entire new generations of weapons—this is how the hydrogen bomb was developed in the early 1950s.
Historically, efforts to prohibit nuclear tests have focused on three possible benefits: environmental, non-proliferation and disarmament. The impetus that led to the conclusion of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 (PTBT)—which outlawed nuclear tests in the atmosphere, underwater or in outer space—was influenced by the outpouring of demands from civil society, as well as at the United Nations, for efforts to put a halt to the environmental contamination from nuclear tests.
