The humanitarian dimensions of nuclear weapons

Global treaties ban chemical and biological weapons, landmines and cluster munitions.

For each of these inhumane, indiscriminate weapons, the unacceptable harm they cause eventually enabled arguments about military utility to be swept aside.

Nuclear weapons, the worst of all, make these others look like child's play. Yet we have no treaty to eradicate them.

That is why this week's "Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons" international conference in Oslo is so welcome. Because sixty-eight years after the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed our world, nine governments continue to threaten all our futures with radioactive incineration.

All the world's governments bar four agreed at the 2010 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty Review Conference that any use of nuclear weapons would cause catastrophic humanitarian consequences. Yet policies on nuclear weapons continue to be driven by myth. Myths that nuclear weapons can be kept but never used, that their use could be justified, that governments can be prevented from acquiring weapons others claim as essential to their security, that there can be right hands for the wrong weapons.

These myths remind me of the pre-Fukushima myths in Japan that nuclear power is essential and severe accidents cannot happen.

Evidence, not myth, needs to drive policy, especially on the most critical existential challenges. Through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, hundreds of experts worldwide rigorously review emerging evidence and present their findings to the public and policy-makers. Yet despite the World Health Organization identifying nuclear weapons as the greatest immediate threat to human health and welfare, we have no such process for nuclear weapons.

In fact the most acute climate threat we face is nuclear. Atmospheric scientists confirm that just one hundred Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons (small by today's standards) detonated on cities would ignite coalescing fires, injecting more than five million tons of smoke into the stratosphere. Abrupt global cooling, darkening, and reduced rainfall, persisting for over ten years, would deplete food production. One billion people already chronically malnourished would starve. Loss of food imports, conflict and infectious disease epidemics would jeopardise hundreds of millions more.

Nuclear famine could be triggered by less than 0.5 per cent of the world's current stockpile of nuclear weapons and less than 0.1 per cent of their total explosive power. Thus, the arsenals of China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan and UK, not only of Russia and the US, pose existential global threats. Nuclear weapons anywhere are our common enemy.

The first five states to acquire nuclear weapons (the "P5" – China, France, Russia, UK and USA) are jointly boycotting the Oslo conference. According to Rose Gottemoeller, US Acting Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, the US decision was taken in consultation with the other P5 states. The US administration views the Oslo conference as a distraction; diverting attention, discussion and energy away from the practical step-by-step approach which they feel is most effective to stabilise and reduce nuclear dangers. Although the P5 regard others of their club as potential nuclear adversaries, when nuclear weapons are challenged, it seems a united front is possible.

For the states which between them own more than 98 per cent of the world's nuclear weapons to collectively boycott the conference is reprehensible. It indicates an unwillingness to face the facts about the horrifying catastrophe any use of nuclear weapons would unleash, the impossibility of any effective humanitarian response, and the resultant urgent need to eradicate the scourge of nuclear weapons. It suggests dysfunctional denial in being unwilling to review updated evidence about the greatest immediate threat to human health and welfare. It ignores the need for evidence to drive policy, especially on such critical matters. Unfortunately, ignoring the threat will not make it go away, it only increases it.

The P5 boycott is doubly misguided as the outcome document of the 2010 Review Conference of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) for the first time recognised the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons. This document was supported by all 189 states signed up to the NPT, including the P5. The P5 repeatedly emphasise the importance of the NPT.

This Oslo conference is the first meeting of states ever to specifically address the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons. Despite not being signatories to the NPT, nuclear-armed India and Pakistan have notified their intention to participate.

The P5 boycott makes the Oslo conference even more important. Such vital matters cannot be left to a few states. Sixty-eight years after nuclear weapons were first used on cities, we should not continue to allow ourselves to be held hostage by a few states, waiting for crumbs that may fall from their table. These states that created the problem and continue to invest more than $100 billion annually in modernising their nuclear arsenals are unlikely to lead us out of this mess.

Although more than 140 nations support the goal of a treaty banning nuclear weapons, Australia is not among them. This is despite high-level advocacy for such a step from many Australians. Nearly eight hundred recipients of the Order of Australia – including former prime ministers, governors-general, foreign affairs and defence ministers, premiers, governors, High Court justices and chiefs of the armed forces – have called on the government to adopt a nuclear-weapon-free defence posture and work for a nuclear weapons convention. An opinion poll has shown that more than 90 per cent of Australians support a ban.

Back in September 2009, the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, reporting on Australia's nuclear treaties and how parliament could strengthen non-proliferation and disarmament, recommended that the government make clear in international forums its support for a nuclear weapons convention, and that the parliament adopt a resolution on its commitment to the abolition of nuclear weapons.

A weak parliamentary resolution was finally adopted in 2012, but Australia continues to vote against a nuclear weapons ban at the UN, and undermines nuclear disarmament by continuing to put the nuclear weapons of the US at the centre of its military security. Australia's uranium exports add to the fissile materials stockpile and potential fuel for weapons.

Humanity's survival depends on people and their governments refusing to be held hostage any longer by inertia and the vested interests in a few states.

It depends on breaking the logjam in disarmament, on a group of leading states seizing the initiative to begin negotiations on banning nuclear weapons, the logical next step towards their elimination. It is time for the shared interest of humanity to prevail. Understanding the catastrophe of any use of nuclear weapons, and the imperative to prevent the untreatable, will drive such a process, which should follow from the conference in Oslo.