IZMIR

It has been 72 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by atomic weapons and hundreds of thousands were killed or injured.

Apparently, the destructive power of nuclear weapons that was clearly illustrated in Japan was not strong enough to convince humanity of the need to get rid of these dangerous weapons.

On the contrary, the extraordinary destructive power of nuclear weapons must have increased their attractiveness for many countries and their leaders, so much that the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and the People's Republic of China followed in the footsteps of the United States in developing nuclear weapons.

Over the following decades, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea joined the club of countries in possession of atomic bombs.

Fewer nuclear warheads

Nuclear weapons are perhaps the most serious threat with a potential to end all human life on this planet.

We know for a fact that our civilization narrowly escaped a total nuclear destruction at least once, and that was during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

It is true that compared to the 1980s and the Cold War, when the number of nuclear warheads exceeded 60,000, this number has declined to around 10,000 today thanks to the major reductions made in their arsenals by the U.S. and Russia after the Cold War.

However, even the presence of 10,000 nuclear weapons, the vast majority of which are kept ready at full alert status, makes it impossible to take a deep breath and relax.

To the contrary, in recent years, we have witnessed developments that have brought the danger and possibility of a nuclear war back in the limelight across the globe.

As we have seen once more as recently as the first days of September, North Korea, for instance, has been making a special effort to keep nuclear weapons on the agenda of the world public opinion by testing its nuclear weapons as well as its ballistic missiles to carry those warheads on almost a monthly basis.

Risk of cyber-attacks and populism

As a matter of fact, nuclear weapons may not always be used knowingly and willingly. It is not a remote possibility whereby nuclear weapons are accidentally or unintentionally fired through such circumstances as interference or cyber-attacks – a phenomenon that came to constitute a major problem for modern civilization thanks to rapid advances in information technologies.

Equally worrisome is the wave of populist political leaders spreading rapidly around the world . Those leaders are mostly irrational and bereft of the most basic notion of empathy. It has always been assumed that whenever it came to nuclear weapons, countries that possessed them would display restraint and act maturely, and they would recognize how tremendously different nuclear weapons are from conventional ones.

However, irresponsible and dangerous rhetoric has been employed in the recent battle of words with North Korea by the leader of the oldest and supposedly mature nuclear power of the world, namely the U.S. – a development which. has cast shadow on all those assumptions. Among the nuclear states using irresponsible rhetoric, one should also mention Russia -- alongside the U.S. and North Korea -- which sees no harm in threatening its non-nuclear neighbors with nuclear strikes.

Inability to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, ever-growing cyber-security risks, and populist and/or authoritarian leaders now in power in many states have all become factors forcing us to reconsider the role of nuclear weapons with regard to world security today, and the serious risks and dangers that they came to constitute.

In fact, we are faced with a paradigmatic shift, along with in which all arguments employed so far to legitimize nuclear weapons and portray them as necessary are challenged one by one.

For example, the argument propagated by nuclear powers that nuclear weapons make conflicts too dangerous and risky and thereby actually better serve peace and international stability is losing its persuasive power and coherence to a great extent under the new circumstances.

New treaty adopted by 122 UN members

It is no surprise that perceptions on nuclear weapons are rapidly changing and that this change is triggering a number of new processes and initiatives.

For instance, a new international treaty adopted in July at the United Nations by 122 members completely bans and outlaws the development, testing, deployment, and use of nuclear weapons.

The treaty will be presented to the member states for their approval in September and enter into force once signed by 50 states. This will become a heavy yet ineffective blow to nuclear weapons' legitimacy and legal status.

Unsurprisingly, nuclear weapon states and their allies to have agreed to host those nuclear weapons on their territory, sat out the UN vote.

With their conspicuous absence, they implicitly declared that they would not recognize this initiative and demand for denuclearization, already supported and approved by 122 countries.

What we can deduce from this is that the countries in possession of nuclear weapons as well as those who have secured themselves a place under the "protective umbrella" of nuclear states favor the continuation of the current order with nuclear weapons unabated, whereby those weapons would remain an essential, legal, and institutional element of international relations.

And in favoring this present state, they are ready to accept all the risks and dangers posed by nuclear weapons.

'70s legal framework

The current institutional and legal framework for nuclear weapons is regulated primarily by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), signed in 1970.

In the most generalized terms, the NPT divided countries into two groups: those eligible to possess nuclear weapons, and those which are not.

The five states that had the right to have nuclear weapons and enjoyed the privileges were those to have already acquired nuclear weapons at the time when the treaty was negotiated.

Coincidentally, those five states were also the five permanent members of the UN Security Council with vetoing powers.

By putting the NPT into effect, what the international community actually did was to accept the nuclear status quo in the world as it was as of the late 1960s, with all its problems and injustices, and freeze it in place. And this was done in the name of preventing a larger number of states from laying their hands on nuclear weapons.

And in return, commitments and promises were made to the states to have relinquished their right to own nuclear weapons.

Among those commitments were; nuclear weapons would be reduced in time and be eventually eliminated altogether,,that nuclear weapons would never be used against countries to have relinquished their right to own nuclear weapons;, and there would be no obstacles to accessing and using nuclear technology for commercial and scientific ends.

Nuclear states undermine deal's legitimacy

Unfortunately, almost half-century went by, what we have witnessed has been several examples of those assurances and commitments being forgotten and neglected.. There were even cases in which the complete opposite of whatever was envisaged by the NPT was done.

States in possession of nuclear weapons themselves have in this way cast a shadow over the legitimacy and legality of the NPT and also their own nuclear weapons by failing to properly comply with the requirements of a deal that had provided their own nuclear arsenals with legitimacy and legal status in the first place.

Let alone getting rid of them, all the countries with nuclear arsenals, without exception, are currently carrying out modernization programs worth billions of dollars to make their warheads more effective and lethal.

Covert restrictions on peaceful use of nuclear technology continue to be well and alive. The damage has already been inflicted on one of the main pillars of the NPT by the failure to respond decisively to non-signatory states such as India and Israel developing and deploying nuclear weapons.

As a result, as the institutional structure formed around the NPT for half a century is cracking, a strong bottom wave is accumulating in favor of a complete ban on nuclear weapons. But it is not difficult to predict that the nine states with nuclear arsenals will not easily relinquish their privileged positions.

A threat that is not remote

In a nutshell, the world goes through a very dangerous state of nuclear stalemate and the humanity may not have much time left to resolve it.

Trump, during his election campaign, remarked that the countries such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea which have so far benefited from America's nuclear deterrent umbrella, should rather be deploying their own nuclear warheads. This has inflicted enough damage by adding impetus to further proliferation of nuclear weapons.

When Germany and Japan, for example, have this right, then who could say no, on what grounds and rationale, to Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey?

As a matter of fact, in all these countries we nowadays find opinions and ideas being put forth more and more assertively that the time is ripe to own nuclear weapons.

Yet, one should question whether a world where dozens of countries developed and deployed their own nuclear weapons will indeed be safer than today.

After all, would the risks of accidental or inadvertent use not increase dramatically? If nobody can enjoy any advantages in a new setting whereby all the others also have nuclear weapons, then wouldn’t be easier and less perilous  to try and achieve the same outcome by eliminating all nuclear weapons worldwide?

The well-known particle physicist Brian Cox has recently triggered a lively debate about the Fermi paradox. The latter questions why humanity has not come into contact with any extraterrestrial life forms despite the fact that there are more than 100 billion planets in our own galaxy alone. Cox argued that the speed with which civilizations gain institutional and political maturity happens to be slower than the speed at which they develop their technology. Consequently, Cox concluded, every civilization with a sufficient level of technological advancement will eventually find means to to destroy itself.

And this is the reason why, according to Cox, there could never be any civilizations in the universe advanced enough to reach our world.

It is possible to apply Cox’s inference to our own world and our own civilization. If we fail to endow ourselves with the due maturity and capacity to be able to control and contain the technologies that we develop, we might easily destroy our own civilization with our own inventions. The link to nuclear weapons is obvious: if we fail to generate ways to control and manage them very fast, nuclear weapons are the prime candidates to prove Cox’s prophecy right.

Translator: Omer Mansur Colakoglu

*Opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Anadolu Agency.