UNITED NATIONS, Oct 31 (IPS) – The ongoing aftermath of nuclear testing by the world’s nuclear powers has had a devastating impact on hundreds and thousands of victims around the world.
The history of nuclear testing, according to the United Nations, began on July 16, 1945, at a desert test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, when the United States detonated its first atomic bomb.
In the five decades between 1945 and the opening for signing of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) In 1996, more than 2,000 nuclear tests were conducted around the world.
- • The United States carried out 1,032 tests between 1945 and 1992.
• The Soviet Union carried out 715 tests between 1949 and 1990.
• The United Kingdom carried out 45 tests between 1952 and 1991.
• France carried out 210 tests between 1960 and 1996.
• China carried out 45 tests between 1964 and 1996.
• India carried out 1 trial from 1974.
Since the CTBT was opened for signature in September 1996, 10 nuclear tests have been carried out:
- • India carried out two tests from 1998.
• Pakistan carried out two tests from 1998.
• The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea conducted nuclear tests in 2006, 2009, 2013, 2016 and 2017.
On October 30, just before his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Donald Trump announced on social media that the US will resume testing nuclear weapons for the first time in more than three decades.
But this time on an “equal basis” with Russia and China.
The most important former US nuclear test sites were the Nevada Test Site (now the Nevada National Security Site) and the Pacific Proving Grounds in the Marshall Islands and near Kiritimati (Christmas) Island. Other testing also took place in various locations across the United States, including New Mexico, Colorado, Alaska and Mississippi.
The Nevada testing site, located in Nye County, Nevada, was the most active, with more than 1,000 tests conducted between 1951 and 1992.
At a meeting on September 26, on the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned that “nuclear testing threats are returning, while the nuclear sabre-rattling is louder than in recent decades.”
Meanwhile, an Oct. 29 New York Times story headlined “China Races to Become the World Leader in Nuclear Energy” harkens back to China’s 45 nuclear tests between 1964 and 1996.
According to one report, survivors of nuclear tests in China, particularly ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang, face a situation where their health problems due to radiation exposure go largely unrecognized and their voices are systematically silenced by the government.
“The Chinese state has actively suppressed information about the devastating impact of its nuclear testing program on the local population.”
According to an AI-generated overview, the Chinese tests included both atmospheric and underground tests, including 22 atmospheric blasts, which exposed the local population to significant radioactive fallout.
The Chinese government claimed the testing site was a “barren and isolated” area with no permanent residents. In reality, Uyghur herders and farmers had lived there for centuries.
Independent research and anecdotal evidence paint a bleak picture of the human and environmental costs.
Medical experts have documented a disproportionate increase in cancers, birth defects, leukemia and degenerative diseases in Xinjiang compared to the rest of China.
Alice Slater, board member of World BEYOND War and the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, and UN NGO representative for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, says that regardless of China’s unfair treatment of downwinders in Lop Nor, this is even more egregious than the treatment of downwinders in Nevada, Kazakhstan and the Marshall Islands, who are suffering the consequences of US, Russian and French tests.
What can we learn from China in these terrible times as nuclear annihilation looms?
They just renewed their joint call with Russia to negotiate treaties to ban weapons in space and war in space, vowing never to be the first to use or place weapons in space. Unlike the US and Russia, which keep their nuclear bombs on missiles ready and waiting to be fired, China separates its warheads from their missiles, she said.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons DID enter into force when fifty countries ratified it, she pointed out. Although more than 50 countries have now signed and ratified it, NONE of the nuclear weapons states or any of the U.S. allies under the U.S. nuclear “umbrella” have signed, Slater said.
Tariq Rauf, former head of Verification and Safety Policy at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), tells IPS: Is the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty a flawed treaty?
The goal of a comprehensive nuclear test ban was originally truly comprehensive: non-proliferation and disarmament, but the CTBT lacks a substantive link with nuclear disarmament, he emphasized.
“During the treaty negotiations, the goal of banning all forms of testing gradually became divorced from the ultimate goal of total elimination of nuclear weapons.
In the final text, the non-nuclear weapon states were hardly able to establish a link between the exhortations to disarmament in the preamble and the operative text.
The CTBT even allows non-explosive forms of testing, which, with technological advances, can today be used to refine nuclear weapons and design new ones. Nuclear test sites remain active in China, Russia, USA (DPRK, India, Pakistan ??). France is the only NWS to decommission its testing site.
China, Egypt, Iran, Russia and the US must ratify the treaty, but no pressure is put on these NPT states during NPT meetings. And the same goes for the non-signatories, North Korea, India, Israel and Pakistan, he said.
“It looks like the CTBT will never come into effect, but hopefully the moratorium on nuclear testing will continue?”
Kazakhstan and the Marshall Islands are leading efforts to establish an international trust fund for nuclear test victims, under the auspices of Article 6 of the TNPW. The CTBT lacks any provision on helping victims of testing, Rauf said.
According to the United Nations, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty bans nuclear testing anywhere on the planet – on the surface, in the atmosphere, underwater and underground.
The Treaty takes on significance because it also aims to hinder the development of nuclear weapons: both the initial development of nuclear weapons and their substantial improvement (for example, the arrival of thermonuclear weapons) make real nuclear tests necessary.
The CTBT makes it virtually impossible for countries that do not yet have nuclear weapons to develop them. And it makes it nearly impossible for countries with nuclear weapons to develop new or more advanced weapons. It also helps prevent the damage caused by nuclear testing to people and the environment.
In response to Trump’s announcement, U.S. Senator Jack Reed (Democrat-Rhode Island), the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said: “President Trump has once again been wrong on nuclear weapons policy.”
This time he appears to have ordered the Pentagon to resume testing of nuclear explosives. This confusing directive reflects a fundamental misunderstanding about our nuclear enterprise: It is the Department of Energy, not the Department of Defense, that manages our nuclear weapons complex and all testing activities.
“Breaking the moratorium on explosives testing that the United States, Russia and China have maintained since the 1990s would be strategically reckless and inevitably lead to Moscow and Beijing resuming their own testing programs.”
Further, he said, U.S. explosive testing would provide justification for Pakistan, India and North Korea to expand their own testing regimes, destabilizing an already fragile global nonproliferation architecture at precisely the time we can least afford it.
“The United States would gain very little from such testing, and we would sacrifice decades of hard-won progress in preventing nuclear proliferation.”
IPS UN office report
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