NUCLEAR WEAPONS: HISTORIC OPPORTUNITY TO ENSURE THEY WILL NEVER BE USED AGAIN

By Nor Faridah Abd Rashid

KUALA LUMPUR, April 21 (Bernama) -- With recent positive developments
pertaining to nuclear weapons, states have an historic opportunity to bring the
era of such weaponry to an end, once and for all, International Committee of the
Red Cross (ICRC) president Jakob Kellenberger said Tuesday.

He said developments such as the endorsement by the United Nations Security
Council of the objective of "a world without nuclear weapons" and the
recognition by US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev
of their countries' responsibilities in reducing these weapons, signalled an
unprecedented opportunity to reduce and eventually eliminate the threat posed by
these arms.

In his address to diplomats in Geneva, Kellenberger appealed to States to
ensure that nuclear weapons were never used today.

His statement was made available to Bernama here.

The ICRC is headquartered in Geneva and has a Regional Delegation office
here.

The ICRC president underscored the importance of next month's Review
Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons.

Kellenberger said the ICRC supported efforts to negotiate an international
agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons, pointing out that preventing the use of
nuclear weapons required fulfilment of existing obligations to pursue
negotiations aimed at prohibiting and completely eliminating such weapons
through a legally binding international treaty.

He added that it also meant preventing their proliferation and controlling
access to materials and technology that could be used to produce them.

Arguing that the ICRC stance was based on its understanding of the
suffering caused by war, Kellenberger highlighted the testimony of ICRC delegate
Marcel Junod, who was the first foreign doctor to bring assistance to victims of
the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945.

"The centre of the city was a sort of white patch, flattened and smooth like
the palm of a hand. Nothing remained," Junod wrote after his visit on Sept 8,
1945.

Witnesses told him that within seconds of the blast, "thousands of human
beings in the streets and gardens in the town centre, struck by a wave of
intense heat, died like flies. Others lay writhing like worms, atrociously
burned."


The ICRC president stressed that the death toll in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
doubled or tripled over the five years, following the blasts, and warned that 65
years later, the world remained ill-equipped to assist the potential victims of
a nuclear strike.

"The ICRC has recently completed a thorough analysis of its capacity, and
that of other international agencies, to bring aid to the victims of the use of
nuclear, radiological, chemical or biological weapons.

"Despite the existence of some response capacity in certain countries, at
the international level there is little such capacity and no realistic,
coordinated plan.

“Almost certainly, the images seen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be those
resulting from any future use of nuclear weapons," he said.

Turning to international humanitarian law, Kellenberger said that already in
1950, the ICRC had expressed its alarm to the States' party to the Geneva
Conventions over the total destruction associated with nuclear weapons, which
could "make illusory any attempt to protect non-combatants by legal texts."

He said that nuclear weapons were unique in terms of their destructive
power, the unspeakable suffering they caused, and the impossibility of
containing their destructive power in space and time, and also in terms of the
threat they posed to the environment, to future generations, and indeed to the
survival of humanity.

"The ICRC finds it difficult to envisage how the use of nuclear weapons
could be compatible with the rules of international humanitarian law," he
concluded.

-- BERNAMA