Nobumasa Akiyama (Professor, Hitotsubashi University)
＊この記事は『広島平和研究』９号に掲載されたものです。
“the readiness to use nuclear weapons against other human beings – against people whom we do not know, whom we have never seen, and whose guilt or innocence it is not for us to establish – and, in doing so, to place in jeopardy the national structure upon which all civilization rests, as though the safety and the perceived interests of our own generations were more important than everything that has ever taken place or could take place in civilization: this is nothing less than a presumption, a blasphemy, an indignity – an indignity of monstrous dimensions – offered to God!”
George Kennan, The Nuclear Delusion, 1983: 206-7.
Introduction
On November 24, 2019, Pope Francis paid a visit to the A-bombed cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Thirty-eight years had passed since the first papal visit to the A-bombed cities, that of Pope John Paul II to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the meantime, the Cold War had ended, and it has been believed that the risk of nuclear war among the major powers has decreased, and the momentum for nuclear disarmament has gradually grown. President Barack Obama’s speech on a “World Without Nuclear Weapons” in Prague in 2009 raised awareness of the inhumanity of nuclear weapons (Obama, 2009).
The norm of calling out the inhumanity of nuclear weapons came to fruition as the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in 2017, after three international conferences on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons held between 2012 and 2014. The TPNW was adopted at the General Assembly of the United Nations in September 2017 and entered into force on January 22, 2021, after being ratified by the 50 countries in October 2020 as required for it to enter into force. In addition, President Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima in 2016. Indeed, it can be said that there is a growing movement to eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons from a moral perspective. However, the risk of nuclear weapons, and tensions among nuclear powers have been rising for decades even before and during the Obama administration (Mizumoto, 2009)
Some view that the international security environment surrounding the abolition of nuclear weapons is becoming increasingly difficult. The U.S.-Russia nuclear arms control regime is now at the verge of collapse. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) between the U.S. and Russia expired in August 2019, and no agreement has been reached between the two countries on the succeeding arrangement of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which was extended for five years upon its expiration in 2021. The growing tension between the U.S. and China over many aspects of political, economic and military issues makes great power rivalries far more complicated and riskier as well.
It is not only the deterioration of strategic relations among the major powers that makes th4e progress in nuclear disarmament difficult. Relations over nuclear weapons at the regional level have also worsened. In South Asia, competition between India and Pakistan is becoming increasingly fierce. In East Asia, the delay in North Korea’s denuclearization is also a matter of serious international concern. Additionally, Iran’s nuclear activities keep posing threats of nuclear proliferation and the deterioration of regional security in the Middle East.
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