The prohibition on use
No state has contravened the TPNW’s prohibition on the use of nuclear weapons. However, the risk of the use of nuclear weapons remained an embedded feature of world politics in 2023. The danger of an escalation of the war in Ukraine to nuclear use continued to be a profound concern, and nuclear tensions remained high on the Korean peninsula. The conflict between Hamas and Israel, the attacks by Iran and Israel on each other’s territory, and hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel also raised concerns about a regional war with attendant risks of escalation to nuclear use.
It is worth reminding that the TPNW’s prohibition on the use of nuclear weapons is incompatible with the logic of nuclear deterrence as a security doctrine. Nuclear-armed states in general justify their possession of nuclear weapons in terms of nuclear deterrence. A credible willingness to wage nuclear war is baked into nuclear deterrence doctrine because there must be some risk of actual nuclear violence if a nuclear deterrent posture is going to have its intended effect.
The purpose of nuclear deterrence is to try and manage a conflict and its escalation by coercing an adversary to act in a particular way by doing or not doing specific things. The difficulty lies in determining how ‘real’ the readiness to use nuclear weapons is – i.e., whether there is a serious intent to follow through and actually use nuclear weapons if the conflict is perceived as getting out of control to the point of radically undermining the core interests of the state concerned. Is the adversary’s intention to reinforce deterrence and the acceptable parameters of a conflict, or are its actions and statements a sign of desperation and indicative of serious planning to use nuclear weapons if the dynamics of a conflict do not change?
This is very hard to determine because it means getting into the head of the leader of a nuclear-armed state who might not know themselves what they might do under what conditions. Dismissing threats that are escalating in frequency and scope as ‘cheap talk’ can be very dangerous. Nevertheless, nuclear-armed states can try to manage or resolve a conflict in their favour by testing the seriousness of their opponent’s nuclear threats whilst demonstrating through words and actions the seriousness of their own preparedness to use nuclear weapons. This can lead nuclear-armed states down a dangerous path of brinkmanship in which crisis-induced misperception, irrationality and chance increase the risk of nuclear use.
The view that nuclear deterrence provides security rests on an assumption that nuclear weapons-related risks can be known and that they can be controlled. However, evidence shows us that these risks are not knowable and not controllable, but subject to chance and luck. Once we accept that luck plays a role in the outcome of nuclear crises, nuclear deterrence as a legitimate and necessary paradigm becomes deeply questionable. What remains is that nuclear weapons are a source of constant insecurity in themselves, to all of us. Nuclear weapons policies that are not based on a holistic and human-centred understanding of risks and consequences therefore increase the risks of miscalculations and endanger national and global security.
Knowledge about the risks and humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons is therefore essential information that decision makers, policy makers and the media have a responsibility to actively seek and understand, but which all too often is ignored or even actively suppressed.
For more information, see the 2023 edition of the Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor.
Each State Party undertakes never under any circumstances to: ‘Use … nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.’
- Preventing use is a fundamental aim of the TPNW – unquestionably central to the Treaty’s object and purpose.
- To use a nuclear weapon or other nuclear explosive device is to launch, release, deliver, or detonate it with hostile intent or for so-called ‘peaceful’ use, such as in civil engineering. Intent can be discerned from the circumstances and does not have to be publicly espoused.
- Possession or deployment of nuclear weapons for the purpose of ‘deterrence’ does not amount to their use under the TPNW but is covered by the prohibition on possession in Article 1(1)(a).
- The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) does not address the use of nuclear weapons in so far as it allows ‘peaceful’ detonation of nuclear explosive devices by nuclear-weapon states. The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which prohibits all such ‘peaceful’ nuclear explosions, has not entered into force.
- Nuclear weapons have not been used since August 1945 when the United States dropped a nuclear weapon first on Hiroshima and then, three days later, on Nagasaki. Other nuclear explosive devices have not been used since some 150 such devices were detonated for ‘peaceful’ use (for civil engineering purposes) between the second half of the 1950s and the end of the 1980s by the erstwhile Soviet Union and the United States.