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ICAN achieves early vision of creating nuclear weapons ban treaty

by Fumiyasu Miyano, Staff Writer

In the summer of 2012, Tim Wright, a young leader of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), said that the group would convey to the world the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the use of nuclear weapons and move forward with the idea of creating a nuclear weapons ban treaty with smaller nations that supported this goal. And he said that this treaty would be created within a few years.

He made it sound so easy then, but five years later, his words became reality when the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was adopted at the United Nations in July. To be honest, I find this incredible.

When I was a postgraduate student majoring in nuclear disarmament, I did a 0ne-month internship in Melbourne, Australia, where ICAN was launched. Mr. Wright was my supervisor. The office had two full-time staff back then. Student interns and volunteers came to the office and assisted the staff members.

For one project, they sent paper cranes, a symbol of peace, to the political leaders of certain nations and asked for their support to establish a treaty that would ban nuclear weapons. They looked for countries that they thought would support the idea of a treaty. Through the Internet, they found local NGOs that could back up their efforts and call on the leaders of these countries to support the treaty. Then they reached out by email to the local NGOs and sought their help for the organization’s goal.

I helped with these efforts as an intern. The work was unremarkable, but strategically important. They modeled their activities on the achievement of the Landmine Ban Treaty, seeking prospective partners for their aim so that the nuclear weapons ban treaty could be realized through the cooperation of supportive nations and NGOs.

On ICAN’s website can be seen photos of the representatives of nations that received those paper cranes. One such photo came from Costa Rica, whose representative was the president of the conference on the nuclear weapons ban treaty. A letter signed by that nation’s president is also on the website.

Along with their approach, their working style for this new age is also impressive. Led by young activists, they distribute videos through the Internet, make excellent use of social networking services, and deliver their message directly to the public. Their logo, too, is unconventional: a nuclear missile that has been broken in two. In the beginning, not all the NGOs accepted their proposal for pursuing a legal ban on nuclear weapons with the non-nuclear nations alone, before the weapons themselves would be eliminated. But this idea caught on and became a guiding principle of the movement, and the treaty was eventually materialized.

After nations began signing the treaty on September 20, I received an email from Mr. Wright. He said that the next step is to get Australia and Japan involved in the treaty. For ICAN, whose goal is abolishing nuclear weapons from the world, the adoption of the treaty and winning the Nobel Peace Prize are only intermediate steps on its way toward achieving that greater aim.

(Originally published on October 9, 2017)

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