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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The treaty was endorsed by 122 countries at the United Nations headquarters in New York on Friday after months of talks in the face of strong opposition from nuclear-armed states and their allies. Only the Netherlands, which took part in the discussion, despite having US nuclear weapons on its territory, voted against the treaty.
All of the countries that bear nuclear arms and many others that either come under their protection or host weapons on their soil boycotted the negotiations. The most vocal critic of the discussions, the US, pointed to the escalation of North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programme as one reason to retain its nuclear capability. The UK did not attend the talks despite government claims to support multilateral disarmament.
[...] The 10-page treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons will be open for signatures from any UN member state on 20 September during the annual general assembly. While countries that possess nuclear weapons are not expected to sign up any time soon, supporters of the treaty believe it marks an important step towards a nuclear-free world by banning the weapons under international law.
[...] Previous UN treaties have been effective even when key nations have failed to sign up to them. The US did not sign up to the landmines treaty, but has completely aligned its landmines policy to comply nonetheless. “These kinds of treaties have an impact that forces countries to change their behaviour. It is not going to happen fast, but it does affect them,” Fihn said. “We have seen on all other weapons that prohibition comes first, and then elimination. This is taking the first step towards elimination.”
Under the new treaty, signatory states must agree not to develop, test, manufacture or possess nuclear weapons, or threaten to use them, or allow any nuclear arms to be stationed on their territory.
[...] Instead of scrapping their nuclear stocks, the UK and other nuclear powers want to strengthen the 1968 nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT), a pact that aims to prevent the spread of the weapons outside the original five nuclear powers: the US, Russia, Britain, France and China. It requires countries to hold back from nuclear weapons programmes in exchange for a commitment from the nuclear powers to move towards nuclear disarmament and to provide access to peaceful nuclear energy technology. The new treaty reflects a frustration among non-nuclear states that the NPT has not worked as hoped.
-- submitted from IRC
For perspective, see the 14m25s video on YouTube: "1945-1998" by ISAO HASHIMOTO which depicts the over 2000 atomic bomb blasts that occurred within that period, with each month of time depicted in one second.
(Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Monday July 10 2017, @12:08AM (2 children)
Not all wars are equal. And one of the ways they are very unequal is in how many people die. To ignore that is to ignore what peace actually is. It's not the pure absence of war, it is the many people who don't have to fear dying in war.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 10 2017, @02:08AM (1 child)
(Another AC)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll [wikipedia.org]
58 million is hard to beat...
So are current weapons less lethal? Better aimed? Is medical assistance better? Should WW2 numbers be split per country as modern wars mostly are located in one country or two (in some cases acting as playfield for a proxy war)? Do we count extermination of own population for the destruction records (Khmer Rouge is not listed as war in the above, but deaths are 740K-3M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge#Number_of_deaths [wikipedia.org] , same with Great Leap Forward 23M-55M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Famine_deaths [wikipedia.org] )? Is formal war declaration needed or "armed conflict" is enough? Does destruction of infrastructure, universities, monuments count for war importance or only lives lost?
My guess is people is more exposed to news, and some are manipulation, but seeing 20th-21st place become barely 14th century level in some years is not very encouraging about "more peace", no matter how many alive. Also the other AC didn't mention deaths, just wars.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday July 10 2017, @10:52AM
It depends on the situation. But nuclear weapons definitely are more lethal than anything that came before.
Well, was it a war? The Great Leap Forward, for example, wasn't a war since there was no conflict. It turns out that peace can be lethal as well.
Armed conflict is good enough for me. And destruction of infrastructure and such can be well approximated by lives lost. There really isn't a point to distinguishing between the two because how are you going to maintain the infrastructure without the people? When the latter goes, so does the former.
Is the world barely "14th century" just because parts of Syria are? It's an absurd consideration. I'm not barbaric merely because you can find someone else who is.
Second, number of wars is extremely misleading here since that doesn't actually measure anything interesting, aside perhaps from an indication of the number of identifiable factions out there that are waging wars of some form. Deaths measure in the most important way the severity of wars and that has gone down a lot since the first half of the 20th century. As I noted earlier, wars are not all equal. The bald fact that the Second World War by itself has caused more deaths than all of the wars that follow to our present day is demonstration enough that we need a better way to understand war than merely the number of them.