Hiroshima after atomic bombing, Aug. 1945
On January 23rd, in a video address to the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Donald Trump made a surprise announcement: “We’d like to see denuclearization,” he said. He went on to claim that he had been working with Putin during his previous term as President “on the denuclearization of our two countries,” adding that “China would have come along, too.”
Trump described Putin as being in favor of “cutting way back on nuclear.” And he talked about getting the rest of the world to follow. “I want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think it’s very possible… [President Putin] and I wanted to do it… and that would have been an unbelievable thing for the planet… I hope it can be started up again.”
What exactly Trump means by the use of this term is not yet clear, but when he called for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula during his first term as President, he was very clearly referring to the removal of all nuclear weapons from North Korea, as well as keeping US nuclear weapons out of South Korea.
The term was first used back in the 1950s, when the Foreign Minister of Poland put forward a plan for the denuclearization of Central Europe. In that context, denuclearization very clearly meant the removal of all nuclear weapons from the countries that bordered both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain. Since then, denuclearization has been used synonymously with “nuclear-free zones” which have been established by treaty to prohibit the stationing or use of nuclear weapons in any part of Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Antarctica or the Pacific.
Denuclearization, then, is not a term to be dismissed lightly. If Trump is proposing the denuclearization of the US and Russia, followed by China and the rest of the world, we should be taking him at his word and assuming that this is not just about freezing nuclear arsenals at the levels they are right now, or negotiating new reductions on a par with the NewSTART treaty which is set to expire next year. This is about deep cuts, and potentially the complete elimination of nuclear arsenals altogether.
Nuclear weapons pose an existential threat to each and every one of us on this planet. Just one of these weapons, if detonated in a densely populated area, would cause a humanitarian catastrophe of unparalleled proportions. One hundred of them used, for instance, in a war between India and Pakistan, could create conditions for a worldwide famine that could kill up to 2 billion people. And an all-out nuclear war between the US and Russia would be the end of human civilization as we know it.
The longer we can continue to hold onto these weapons, the greater the risk that they will be used, whether on purpose or by accident. There is no greater urgency than to “denuclearize” this planet as soon as possible. We should all be encouraging President Trump to do so now!
Click the Link below to send a letter to the President:
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/encourage-trump-to-denuclearize