The UK is in denial about the legacy of its Cold War nuclear weapons testing programmes as well as about the potential impact of a future nuclear war. Sean Howard sees bad faith in the new UK government’s voting record at the UN’s disarmament committee and some unsavoury partners in its campaign to maintain nuclear secrecy.
The United Nations First Committee on Disarmament and International Security recently concluded its annual session in New York (07 October – 08 November 2024), adopting 77 resolutions for consideration in the full General Assembly in December. The First Committee is so called not because it was the first of the UN’s six principal committees to be established, but because its mandate concerns the first order of business, the prime directive, of the whole Organization: working to build a system of international security based on nothing less than the ‘general and complete disarmament’, in the official UN term, of world affairs, a demilitarization sufficiently deep to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”
Although the work of the First Committee rarely makes the news, its resolutions can make major differences. In 2016, for example, it authorized UN negotiations on what became, just one year later, the paradigm-shifting Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), adopted by 122 states. Each First Committee session also provides a crucial annual gauge of where states stand on issues of war and peace ranging from thermonuclear weapons to small arms, which is why the general media silence is such an abdication of journalistic duty, allowing governments to act in sometimes shameful ways with political impunity. How many Britons, for example, know that at this year’s First Committee, their government stood in distinctly shady company to oppose two resolutions which I suggest a healthy majority of them would have been prompt and proud to support?
Assessing nuclear war
On 01 November – in a dark day for British diplomacy that only The Guardian ( to its credit) reported on – the UK stood with France and Russia as the only states to oppose a resolution entitled ‘Nuclear War Effects and Scientific Research’. The resolution, supported by 144 states (including China) with 30 abstentions (including the US, 21 other NATO states, and the remaining nuclear-armed states), directed the UN Secretary-General to appoint an independent panel of 21 experts tasked with “examining the physical effects and societal consequences of a nuclear war on a local, regional and planetary scale, including the climatic, environmental and radiological effects, and their impacts on public health, global socioeconomic systems, agriculture and ecosystems, in the days, weeks and decades following a nuclear war”. The panel will have until 2027 to complete its report, the first UN study of its kind for nearly 40 years. Given the pace of scientific advance since then, in tragic combination with fast-rising risks of nuclear use by accident or design in multiple theatres of hot and cold war, what message does a No vote send?
Introducing the resolution, Egypt, Ireland, and Aotearoa New Zealand argued that “while studies of standalone aspects of nuclear war exist, we lack an updated, encompassing report – accessible to all states and their publics – that ties together the interconnected impacts that would result from a nuclear war.” They added that “scientific bodies, including the G7 National Academies, are calling for this work to be undertaken as a matter of urgency,” and that “in our consultations in Geneva and in New York we also heard many delegations in this room reiterate that call.”
The British delegation, however, in its ‘explanation of vote’, claimed (without explanation) that the proposed panel would “not produce ‘new’ evidence,” and that its “objectives” were “ill-defined and ambiguous.” The statement also expressed concern at the “budgetary implications” of the study at a time of “constrained resources’: this from a country whose government, according to a report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), in 2023 spent US$8.1 billion on its nuclear weapons programme, or $15,551 each minute, a 17.1% increase on 2022, sums certain to soar through the Starmer era as the nightmarish ‘modernization’ of Trident proceeds.
Addressing nuclear legacies
On 08 November, the UK stood again with France and Russia, and this time North Korea, as the only states to oppose a resolution entitled “Addressing the legacy of nuclear weapons: providing victim assistance and environmental remediation to Member States affected by the use or testing of nuclear weapons”. The resolution, supported by 169 states with 6 abstentions (including all the five other nuclear-armed states plus Poland), encourages “international cooperation and discussions to assist victims, and assess and remediate environments contaminated by the use and testing of nuclear weapons”, recognizing that “responsibilities to address the harms resulting from a detonation of using or testing a nuclear weapon lie with the Member States that have done so”. Introducing the resolution, Kiribati and Kazakhstan recalled that they had been directly impacted by the testing of nuclear weapons – by the UK and US, and by the Soviet Union, respectively.
Between 1952 and 1991 the UK conducted 45 nuclear tests, on the traditional territory of indigenous peoples in Australia (1952-1963), Kiribati (1956-1964), and the United States (1958-1991), inflicting vast physical, psychological, cultural, and environmental harm on residents and participating personnel. Yet according to its First Committee delegation – if none of the affected communities – the UK has done a good and thorough job of cleaning up the mess, and sees no need for the UN to get involved or request it to do more. And the delegation again objected to the “budgetary implications” of exploring ways to assist nuclear-affected victims and remediating environments ravaged by British and other Bombs.
The new government’s First Committee debut bodes ill for coming sessions and more generally for its time on the UN stage. But so what if it’s acting so badly, if there’s no audience watching the play?
The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.
Image Credit: Ambassador Maritza Chan Valverde of Costa Rica becomes the first woman ever to chair the UN First Committee on Disarmament and International Security, October 2024.
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