A crater at the former Soviet Union nuclear test site Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, 2008. CTBTO Preparatory Commission
Ending Nuclear Testing to Advance Global Peace and Security
26 August 2022
The spread of nuclear weapons and the threat of their use is creating well-founded anxiety in all parts of the world. In the face of current circumstances, it can be difficult to discern the hard-fought mechanisms and tools in place to address concerns about the truly global threat posed by these terrible weapons.
In 2009, the United Nations General Assembly brought attention to the investments made in global peace and security with its unanimous adoption of resolution 64/35, by which it declared 29 August the International Day against Nuclear Tests. The resolution recognized that “every effort should be made to end nuclear tests in order to avert devastating and harmful effects on the lives and health of people and the environment,” and that “the end of nuclear tests is one of the key means of achieving the goal of a nuclear-weapon-free world.”
More than 60 years after the devastating use of nuclear weapons on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the General Assembly had acknowledged the need for increased public awareness and education about the dangers of nuclear testing and the need to end such tests.
Between 1945 and 1996, more than 2,000 nuclear tests were conducted at dozens of sites around the world. During that period, the average explosive yield of nuclear tests each year was equivalent to nearly 1,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs. The tests helped create weapons that are orders of magnitude more powerful than those used during the Second World War and have long-lasting health and environmental consequences.
In 1996, while recognizing that a nuclear arms race was one that could not be won, States adopted the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) to ban nuclear tests by anyone, anywhere, for all time. In the 25 years since the Treaty was opened for signature, 186 States have signed it and 174 have ratified it; fewer than a dozen nuclear tests have been conducted, with only one country carrying out tests this millennium. This underscores the meaningful and measurable CTBT contribution to preventing the further spread and use of nuclear weapons.
Due to the success of the Treaty, it is often taken for granted that we live in an age where nuclear testing is recognized as a clear threat to international peace and security. This is understandable because for more than two decades, every nuclear test has been met with near universal condemnation, and nuclear test sites have been shut down or converted for other national security purposes.
The adoption of a total ban on nuclear testing was never a foregone conclusion. More than 40 years passed between the first call for a stand-still agreement on nuclear testing in 1954 and the adoption of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in 1996. Putting in place a comprehensive, universal, verifiable and non-discriminatory prohibition on nuclear testing was a momentous achievement for humanity, and a victory for science and diplomacy in support of peace and security. We can all be inspired by the history of the Treaty and the efforts it took to make it a reality, from the extensive scientific research to the long hours of negotiations.
This Treaty has already accomplished a lot. The signatures and ratifications from countries committing themselves to a global ban on nuclear tests are an essential contribution to our collective efforts to strengthen the powerful international norm against nuclear testing and to achieve a world free of such tests.
The CTBT prohibition on nuclear testing is backed by a proven global verification regime. The lynchpin of this regime—the International Monitoring System (IMS), with over 300 monitoring facilities around the world—is nearly complete. A union of ingenuity, engineering and international cooperation, IMS has demonstrated its ability to meet the verification requirements of the Treaty on multiple occasions, including detection of all six nuclear tests conducted this century. The global cooperation required to design, implement and operate the verification regime offers a blueprint for how to develop effective multilateral verification measures.
The verification regime also provides value beyond the core mission of nuclear test monitoring. The range of applications of data collected by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) are broad and offer myriad benefits for the global community, from the contribution of real-time data to tsunami early warning systems to earthquake detection and climate change research.
The use of CTBTO data for civil and scientific applications also furthers our nuclear test monitoring mission. When scientists and researchers use the data to study whale migration patterns or asteroids entering the Earth’s atmosphere, their enhanced understanding of these processes helps CTBTO analysts distinguish naturally occurring events from nuclear explosions.
While the Treaty has already helped advance the nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament agenda, we must remain vigilant. The proliferation of nuclear weapons and the threat of their use continue to pose unacceptable risks to humanity. There are nearly 13,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, and as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres noted in his address to the Tenth Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (New York, 1–26 August 2022), humanity is “just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”
Effective arms control and disarmament measures are the best tools we have to address this risk, and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and its verification regime are integral to the non-proliferation and disarmament architecture. As we continue to build on the Treaty’s success, my hope is that every 29 August we pass, we are that much closer to achieving a complete end to nuclear testing. We owe this to ourselves and especially to future generations.
Click here to see Executive Secretary Floyd’s video message on the occasion of the International Day Against Nuclear Tests – 29 August 2022.
The UN Chronicle is not an official record. It is privileged to host senior United Nations officials as well as distinguished contributors from outside the United Nations system whose views are not necessarily those of the United Nations. Similarly, the boundaries and names shown, and the designations used, in maps or articles do not necessarily imply endorsement or acceptance by the United Nations.
Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (PDF)
Taken from the site https://www.un.org/en/un-chronicle/ending-nuclear-testing-advance-global-peace-and-security
Incidence
Officially known are four nuclear test sites that belonged to the superpowers: Nevada (USA, Great Britain), Novaya Zemlya (Russia), Moruroa (France), Lop Nor (China). In addition, the Semipalatinsk test site (Kazakhstan) was intensively used in the USSR, which is currently not functioning. It was at these points that the bulk of the test explosions of nuclear and thermonuclear charges were made. There are 2077 of them (according to other sources – 1900), of which 1090 belong to the United States, 715 to the USSR, 190 to France, 42 to Great Britain, 40 to China.As a result of nuclear weapons testing, about 30 million curies of 137Cs and 20 million curies of 90Sr were released into the environment. In the 1960s, about 5 tons of 239Pu entered the biosphere. All this led to a powerful outbreak of the global background radiation.According to the World Health Organization, exposure to chemicals and high levels of radiation may be the leading factors in the development of a significant number of human diseases. This is an increase in general and childhood morbidity; an increase in the number of cases of individual nosological forms not directly related to environmental factors, but due to a decrease in the overall resistance of the organism under their influence; an increase in the frequency of pathology of pregnancy; an increase in the frequency of violations of intrauterine development of the fetus, etc.In a study conducted in Cambridge, blood samples were taken from forty different families living in one of the areas of Kazakhstan who were directly exposed to high doses of radioactive fallout from Soviet bomb tests.The researchers found that people living in areas that were contaminated by radioactive fallout between 1949 and 1956 had about an 80% increase in the number of mutations in minisatellite DNA regions. And their children had 50% more mutations than their control peers.In addition, there is growing evidence that these mutations may increase the genetic predisposition to certain diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, and a correlation has been found between exposure to radioactive fallout and the incidence of cancer (the most common sites of solid tumors were the esophagus, stomach, lungs, mammary glands and liver). There is also evidence that increased DNA mutation rates and cancer mortality correlate with long-term exposure to radiation.That is why the problems of the quality of life and maintaining health are a priority and require, according to UN experts, close attention from the government and the public of all countries.
The IAEA’s role in fighting cancer
The IAEA is focusing on forging new partnerships and tapping into diverse funding sources, including from governments, international financing institutions and the private sector to ensure maximum reach, impact and sustainability of Rays of Hope.
Taken from the site: https://www.iaea.org/
Nuclear pollution
The concept of radioactive contamination of the area came into world use after the discovery of the consequences of a nuclear explosion in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the ensuing arms race in the Cold War, nuclear weapons testing continued. The USSR carried out explosions in Semipalatinsk and Novaya Zemlya, the USA and Great Britain – in the deserts of Nevada, France – on the Mururoa atoll in the Pacific Ocean, China – on the Lop Nor plateau, formed on the site of a dried-up lake. According to official data, by the beginning of 1993, more than 2,000 nuclear explosions had been carried out at the five nuclear test sites in the world.
The greatest harm to people and the biosphere surrounding them was caused by nuclear explosions carried out in the atmosphere. At the same time, air currents scattered radiation over great distances from the epicenter.So, on November 22, 1955, an RDS-37 hydrogen bomb with a capacity of 1.5 megatons was detonated over the SNIP from a height of 2 km. A significant part of the territories of the Semipalatinsk test site and the adjacent areas of Pavlodar, Semipalatinsk, East Kazakhstan and Karaganda regions were recognized as zones of ecological disaster. And in China on June 17, 1967, an atmospheric explosion with a capacity of about three megatons from a height of over 3 km, thanks to the wind, covered large areas in the Far East and Siberia, as well as in Central and Central Asia. The consequences of the Chinese experiment still affect the inhabitants of these places.China stopped air testing in 1980. The USSR and the USA, respectively, in 1962 and 1963. As a result of the many years of use of atomic weapons in the upper layers of the atmosphere, dust particles formed there by explosions carried radiation to all corners of the globe. Together with precipitation, contaminated nuclear dust penetrated the soil, water bodies, human and animal organisms. According to some estimates, ground-based nuclear explosions account for more than half (up to 5 tons) of plutonium currently dispersed in the biosphere.At the same time, according to the Director General of the National Nuclear Center of Kazakhstan, Erlan Batyrbekov, during a comprehensive environmental survey of the territory of the former SNTS, “significant areas of radiation contamination and the spread of radioactive substances were identified. The survey made it possible to form an understanding that radioactive contamination at the landfill is local in nature and does not spread to the entire territory of the landfill.Thus, according to the materials of the Ministry of Energy of Kazakhstan, a comprehensive environmental survey of the landfill with a total area of 18.3 thousand square meters. km has been carried out since 2008. Several million measurements were taken, revealing 8.9 thousand square meters. km of usable land. Meanwhile, the analysis of tens of thousands of soil samples showed above-standard pollution of the earth on the territory of 9.4 thousand square meters. km (940 thousand ha). The bill “On the Semipalatinsk nuclear safety zone” was submitted by the Ministry of Energy to the Parliament of Kazakhstan.CONSEQUENCES OF RADIOACTIVE CONTAMINATIONThe main consequences of radioactive contamination of the environment, which occurs as a result of the use of nuclear weapons and peaceful atom, is a change in the natural background on the planet that has existed since the dawn of life, and a mortal threat to life itself:- genetic degeneration of flora and fauna, leading to deformities in offspring;- increased morbidity among residents of the affected area;- a sharp change in their number in the direction of decreasing or increasing the population;- unusual sizes of living beings;- decreased immunity;- increased susceptibility to diseases, especially cancer.