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Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons Passes Important Threshold

Fifty countries have now ratified the treaty, so it will become international law. The United States and the eight other nuclear-armed powers reject it but have failed to stop its advance.

António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, with papers second from right, at the signing of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017.Credit...Don Emmert/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A treaty aimed at destroying all nuclear weapons and forever prohibiting their use has hit an important benchmark, with Honduras becoming the 50th country to ratify the accord — the minimum needed for it to enter into force as international law.

The United Nations announced late Saturday that the ratification threshold had been achieved, a little more than three years after the treaty was completed in negotiations at the organization’s New York headquarters. Secretary General António Guterres said the 50th ratification was “the culmination of a worldwide movement to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons.”

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is not binding on those nations that refuse to sign on to it. The United States and the world’s eight other nuclear-armed countries — Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel — boycotted the negotiations that created the treaty and have shown no inclination to accept it.

American officials have called the accord a dangerous and naïve diplomatic endeavor that could even increase the possibility that nuclear weapons will be used.

Nonetheless, the nuclear-armed countries have been unable to reverse the growing acceptance of the treaty, which takes effect 90 days from the 50th ratification: next Jan. 22. Advocates of the accord have called it the most far-reaching effort undertaken to permanently avert the possibility of nuclear war, a shadow hanging over the world since the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan 75 years ago, in the final days of World War II.

“This is the proof that we are in a completely different era,” Elayne Whyte Gómez, the Costa Rican diplomat who led the 2017 negotiations for the treaty, said Sunday. “This is a strong message.”


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