Scaling the Mountain: The UN Ban Treaty & the Quest for a Nuclear-Free World

Lisa Perry:

I'm Lisa Perry and you're listening to At The Brink, a podcast about the dangers of nuclear weapons and the stories of those fighting to protect us. On May 29th, 1953, the world was astonished by the news that two individuals had achieved a seemingly impossible feat. Edmund Hillary, a 33-year-old beekeeper from New Zealand, and Tenzing Norgay a 39-year-old son of a yak herder from Nepal, were the first people to reach the top of Mount Everest. The newsreels proclaimed that it took seven weeks for the intrepid pair to summit Everest. But the truth is that the journey to that mountaintop began over a century and a half earlier and involved the efforts of thousands of people. Although Norgay and Hillary would ultimately be the first to stand on top of Mount Everest, they also stood on the shoulders of everyone who attempted the climb before them.

Newsreel narrator:

Questioned about the main reason for the success of the expedition, their leader, Colonel Hunt, modestly pays tribute to the many who tried but failed in previous assaults. "Uh, I don't hesitate to say that the basic reason for our success is the accumulation of experience and information provided for us by all our illustrious predecessors on the mountain.

Lisa Perry:

But just as humanity had succeeded in reaching the closest point to the heavens we had ever been, we were also busy perfecting our ability to create hell on earth. Seven months prior to Hillary and Norgay's triumph in the Himalayas, the US had detonated Ivy Mike, the world's first thermonuclear bomb. Three months after the success on Everest, the Soviet Union detonated their first hydrogen bomb. This quantum leap in humanity's ability to destroy itself presented the world with a new challenge, one every bit as daunting as climbing Mount Everest: how to control and ultimately abolish these suicidal weapons. In this episode of At the Brink, we will be hearing from those who have been accumulating the experience and information needed to guide humanity to a different sort of summit.

Sam Nunn:

Well, I kinda was brought up as a, you know, in Sunday school and church in the Methodist Church in Perry, Georgia, and the expression to me is sort of biblical: "going to the mountaintop". To me, it means moving toward a much more perfect world, whether in the religious sense or in the national security sense.

Lisa Perry:

That's former Senator Sam Nunn. You might remember him from episode three of At the Brink, where we talked about the Nunn Lugar Act that worked to dismantle the loose nukes in the former states of the Soviet Union. In 2007, Senator Nunn joined forces with three other renowned cold warriors to declare their vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. Achieving a world without nuclear weapons....

Sam Nunn:

...was like climbing a very high mountain. The mountaintop would be a world without nuclear weapons. And the pathway upward was steep, a lot of pitfalls, a lot of rock slides, and the need was for the United States to exercise leadership in trying step by step to move up that mountain and each step of the way getting other countries to join us

Lisa Perry:

To climb this mountain, they recognized there are two equally important elements, the vision of the goal and the steps required to get there.

Sam Nunn:

The way I see it, without the bold vision of a world without nuclear weapons, the actions that countries have to take around the world will not seem urgent and they will not seem fair, and without the steps that have to be taken as we move toward a world without nuclear weapons, the bold vision of ultimately getting rid of all nuclear weapons in the world will not seem realistic, nor will it seem achievable.

Lisa Perry:

The vision of a nuclear-free world has existed since the beginning of the nuclear age, but earlier anti-nuclear efforts amidst the precarious climate of the Cold War focused on containing the threat. However, since the Cold War ended, many have turned their sights towards that mountaintop, the elimination of nuclear weapons. Today you'll hear some of the stories of these abolitionist mountaineers and the steps that they have charted up the mountain. These efforts may not succeed in reaching the summit, but as with the early expeditions up Everest, we can learn something from each attempt and we would be wise to heed the warnings from those on the path.

Lisa Perry:

Do you think that there will be a future for humanity if we don't eliminate nuclear weapons?

William Perry:

I do not.

Lisa Perry:

That's my grandfather, William Perry, a former US Secretary of Defense and one of the cold warriors who joined Senator Nunn in declaring support for an end to nuclear weapons. Having spent his entire career grappling with the logic of our defense strategies, at 94 years old, he's come to believe that the odds on nuclear weapons are just not in our favor.

William Perry:

We have had nuclear weapons for 75 years and it's a sort of a miracle we've gone this far without having used them again, but it would be even more miraculous if we could go another 10 or 20 years. It seems to me inevitable they're going to be used if we do not do something significant to reduce the number of nuclear weapons very dramatically. The best way to do that, I believe, is to have a goal heading for the abolition of nuclear weapons altogether.

Lisa Perry:

While today my grandfather publicly supports nuclear abolition, it's been a long journey for him to come to this conclusion. He, like most of the defense establishment, originally accepted the prevailing Cold War mindset.

William Perry:

During the Cold War, we believed the Russians were planning a surprise attack against us, a surprise nuclear attack. We believed that, I believed it at the time and we feared it, and therefore we dedicated our whole policy, our weapon development to making that less likely, trying to make clear that such a surprise attack could not work. The beginning of wisdom for me on the subject was when I came to realize that that was not a real threat. We had convinced ourselves of a phantom threat and it drove our policies not only spending lots of money and building an incredibly ridiculous number of weapons, but it drove us to policies that made a blunder into a war even more likely.

Lisa Perry:

As the Cold War began to thaw, my grandfather was able to build relationships with dozens of his Soviet counterparts and he came to understand that the Soviet policies were based around their similar concerns of a surprise attack from the United States. We were both caught in a trap of our own making with the potential fate of humanity resting in between. The rhetoric during the Cold War had gone beyond deterrence. People began to talk about actually winning a nuclear war.

William Perry:

People were talking then about how many weapons you needed to prevail in the nuclear war. They were saying that you would win a war if the Soviet Union loses say a hundred million people, while we lost only 60 million people. Everybody accepting the fact that there'd be tens of millions of people killed in both countries in a nuclear war. There were scientists doing calculations of how many people would be killed, ensuring that this strategy versus that strategy would be better because there were twice as many people killed in the Soviet Union than were killed in the United States. As I think back on that now, it does seem utterly ridiculous, but that's what we were thinking and that's how we were talking.

Lisa Perry:

But once the Soviet Union collapsed, the kind of apocalyptic thinking began to wane. During his term as Secretary of Defense, in the nineties, my grandfather oversaw the dismantling of 8,000 nuclear weapons, both in the US and the former Soviet Union. When he left office in 1997, he believed we were headed towards the end of our reliance on nuclear weapons. But he was wrong.

William Perry:

At first, I believed we were going to continue the dismantlement that we'd started during my term in office, but in a few years, it became clear that was not going to happen. It seemed clear that when the Cold War had ended, people believed the danger of nuclear weapons also ended and they just dismissed them from their mind. I resolved that I was going to try to do something about that and joined forces with George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn, to see if we could actually move constructively in the direction of abolishing nuclear weapons.

Lisa Perry:

These four national security heavyweights, two Democrats, and two Republicans, were behind the scenes during some of the darkest days of the Cold War. George Schultz had served in multiple cabinet posts, most notably as President Reagan's Secretary of State, where he helped lay the groundwork for the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons. Henry Kissinger also had numerous cabinet positions and was active in shepherding several major arms control agreements to fruition. Unfortunately, we were unable to speak with them for the podcast, as George Schultz passed away in 2021, and Kissinger at 98 years old is enjoying his retirement, Sam Nunn, who coined the mountaintop metaphor that guided the group was a longtime chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Sam Nunn:

That was a strange combination, but not quite from the headline perspective that it seemed. I know that headlines read, Hey, these guys built up all this stuff, now they wanna get rid of it. That's an easy way to say that, but the truth of it is each in our own way were trying for many, many years to reduce nuclear dangers in one way or the other. I think our views all evolved

Lisa Perry:

As Senator Nunn and Secretary Perry recall, with the assembly of this powerfully connected national security supergroup, their next task was to determine how they might be able to best use their influence to move the needle towards abolition.

Sam Nunn:

We started thinking about, Hey, could we do something together in terms of announcing some type of concept to, to ultimately end the danger nuclear weapons were posing to the world.

William Perry:

The first move in that direction was an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The op-ed spelled out the dangers of nuclear weapons, called for their abolition, and said that until we could abolish them, we should take steps to reduce their dangers.

Lisa Perry:

The first in what would eventually become a series of five op-eds was published in January of 2007. It was boldly titled A World Free of Nuclear Weapons and it brought a different kind of focus to the debate

William Perry:

Long before we wrote our op-ed, many scholars had pointed out the dangers of nuclear weapons and called for their elimination, but they were written off simply as peaceniks. Unrealistic. We could not be dismissed as simply peaceniks. We could not be dismissed as wooly-headed thinkers. We were recognized as hard-nosed cold warriors and therefore our message was taken much more seriously.

Lisa Perry:

Following their public declaration in support of nuclear abolition, the bipartisan group of senior statesmen gained a snappy new media moniker, the Gang of Four. And to the surprise and delight of the gang, their vision was soon being echoed by other former defense and foreign ministers internationally who began to weigh in with similar op-eds of their own.

Sam Nunn:

This op-ed got attention around the world. In fact, there were 13 countries where, let's call it gangs of four, where the other countries basically followed our example and had four prominent leaders endorse this op-ed, and endorse this direction, including surprisingly Russia, Britain, France, Italy, a number of countries around the world.

William Perry:

We were getting our message to the highest level of political leaders all around the world, and I can remember feeling a sense of excitement that this is really working. We're getting this message across. It's being taken seriously.

Lisa Perry:

Their message also made an impact on the new leadership back home.

William Perry:

Shortly after President Obama took office, he invited the four of us to the White House to discuss the whole issue. He made it clear that he supported our goals and that he had been influenced by our op-eds and by our positions.

Sam Nunn:

And of course, when the president of the United States endorses a concept or puts his weight behind it, that's that's a big deal.

Lisa Perry:

Six weeks after his inauguration, in front of a crowd of tens of thousands in Hradcany Square in Prague, Obama embraced the nuclear-free vision of the gang of four in a milestone speech.

President Obama:

As a nuclear power, as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it. We can start it. So today I state clearly and with conviction, America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.

Lisa Perry:

The Prague speech was a landmark moment in part because it demonstrated that nuclear abolition was no longer politically taboo.

William Perry:

I can remember my feelings at the time of excitement that this was really going to work. Besides the good response we had gotten in foreign countries, we had the leader of the free world, President Obama, come out very strongly in supporting our views. But from that point on, things went downhill. That became evident when President Obama, following up on his convictions, took the first step of negotiating a reduction in nuclear weapons with Russia.

Lisa Perry:

That reduction was the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty or New START an extension of the START I treaty originally signed by President George HW Bush. New START was an important treaty, but the negotiations process would result in a cascade of unintended consequences that we are still dealing with today.

William Perry:

He came to an agreement by which we made a small but meaningful reduction in nuclear weapons. It turned out that President Obama was not able to get that treaty ratified in the US Senate. And after failing to get it ratified, he had serious negotiations with the senators opposing ratification, and he finally came to an agreement with them whereby he agreed to a new nuclear arms buildup. Russia, of course, followed suit and so the nuclear arms race restarted. That was the turning point in the wrong direction.

Lisa Perry:

It also became a turning point for the Gang of Four, as they shifted to more individual advocacy efforts. George Schultz turned to academia. He became a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution where he led vigorous exploration of climate change and nuclear issues, and he was supported in these efforts by Henry Kissinger. Sam Nunn focused on the work of his nonprofit, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which continues to advance some of the most important work on nuclear issues today. My grandfather would go on to write a book about his personal journey to supporting nuclear abolition, the same book that would inspire this podcast.

Lisa Perry:

While the Gang of Four demonstrated that support for nuclear abolition was reaching the highest levels of defense establishment, individuals up and down the nuclear chain of command had been sounding the alarm about nuclear weapons for decades. You may remember Bruce Blair from episode two of At the Brink when he walked us through the steps required to launch a nuclear weapon. Bruce Blair's concern around nuclear weapons was born from firsthand experience. As a young man, Bruce served in the Air Force as a nuclear missile launch officer. Their mission was to spend days at a time locked in underground bunkers waiting for the order to unleash nuclear missiles around the globe. Unfortunately, the world grew a little darker in July, 2020 when Bruce passed away from a sudden stroke. The clips you're hearing now are from an interview I recorded with him earlier that year.

Bruce Blair:

You sort of carried the weight of the world on your shoulders as a young 20-some-year-old person. The first time that you pull an alert and actually go down the elevator and enter that launch center, which is about the size of a large school bus and you hear the air conditioning humming and see the lights glowing. You're in, you know it's underground 60 or 70 feet. It's an eerie, eerie feeling. We could fire up to 50 missiles out of their silos, two of us alone.

Lisa Perry:

Bruce's profound experience as a launch officer would inspire him to become an expert on US and Russian nuclear policies. He would go on to spend much of his career working closely with US government officials on international security, and eventually, his deep knowledge of nuclear weapons protocols would lead him to the same conclusions as my grandfather and his colleagues.

Bruce Blair:

My experience throughout my career was to identify risks of the inadvertent, accidental, unauthorized use of nuclear weapons and then advocate for remedies. At some point, decades into that effort, I realized ah, very clearly that these things keep popping up and we're never gonna fix them all and something is going to bite us in the back that we had not discovered in time and it's going to be a catastrophe

Lisa Perry:

Determined to do something, he founded a new organization, their mission right there in the name: Global Zero.

Bruce Blair:

Global Zero is an international movement for the elimination of nuclear weapons, and we launched it in 2008 and it originally was a group of about 300 senior former military generals and officials from governments from around the world who shared the view that the world would be safer to eliminate nuclear weapons. It turns out that this was a view that was kind of in the mainstream, that if we didn't eliminate nuclear weapons, eventually they will be used. Uh, it's almost inevitable. This was an idea whose time had come.

Lisa Perry:

While the Gang of Four leveraged their reputation as national security heavyweights to influence nuclear policymakers, Global Zero focused on arms control agreements, how we could negotiate our way down to zero. With the support of an impressive list of international experts and former military and government officials, Global Zero mapped out a potential route up the mountain that begins with deep cuts to the two largest nuclear arsenals, those of the United States and Russia. This would be followed by intensive multilateral arms negotiations between nuclear-armed and nuclear-capable nations to begin a process of incremental global disarmament.

Bruce Blair:

Global Zero would unfold in stages. This is a timeframe that is measured in decades, not in weeks and months. So it's a long slog, but it's necessary. It's not optional.

Lisa Perry:

Even after his passing, Bruce's conviction continues to fuel the movement he started, Today, Derek Johnson is the chief executive at Global Zero.

Derek Johnson:

I was so fortunate to work under someone like Bruce who I think truly knew more about nuclear weapons, nuclear risk from probably anybody alive today. Bruce's experience at the bottom of that bunker, the launch key in his hand, he had an opportunity to peek under the hood of nuclear deterrence and it really shook him. He came away from that experience with a conviction that this is madness. He really understood how little there is standing between the world we live in now and that horrific day after. He understood that future was inevitable as long as these weapons exist, because these weapons require that we carry on forever without ever making a mistake. He understood that for the delusion that it was.

Lisa Perry:

While Bruce recognized the terrifying reality of the threat that we face, it wasn't fear that motivated his work.

Derek Johnson:

Bruce was a guy who saw beauty everywhere and I think at the end of the day that's sort of a big part of really what drove him. He understood how fragile the world is. He was really focused on not just saving humanity from its obsession with nuclear weapons, but also protecting our capacity for beauty. I remember he said, very specific, I'll never forget it, "you are never more alive than when you're participating in something beautiful. Make sure that you don't lose sight of what it is you're doing all this work for."

Lisa Perry:

When President Obama's efforts to move towards a nuclear-free world stalled, Global Zero didn't lose sight of the mountaintop. They realized that they needed to extend the conversation beyond defense insiders if they were going to build the political capital they needed to enact their vision.

Bruce Blair:

We launched Global Zero as sort of an elite effort globally and realized however, that we really weren't gonna get where we needed to be unless we could mobilize grassroots. We were and continue to try to crack the code to unleashing public concern about this issue and raise it to a critical mass that would really produce change. We haven't gotten there yet, so we keep pushing.

Lisa Perry:

While the Gang of Four generated political support for nuclear abolition and Global Zero charted a strategic roadmap to nuclear disarmament, on the other side of the globe, another group was envisioning an entirely new approach to the summit. Instead of a state-centric security issue, the newly formed International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons reframed the nuclear weapons debate as a legal and humanitarian concern.

Beatrice Fihn:

If you look at the consequences of nuclear weapons, you very quickly realize that these weapons should not be legal weapons that indiscriminately mass murder civilians. Under the laws of war, you're not supposed to target civilians, it shouldn't be legal to use nuclear weapons.

Lisa Perry:

That's Beatrice Finn. She's the Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. The group, also known as ICAN, was founded in Australia in 2007, the same year that the Gang of Four published their first op-ed and a year after the launch of Global Zero. Like many of her generation, Beatrice came to the nuclear weapons issue from a very different perspective than Bruce Blair or the Gang of Four.

Beatrice Fihn:

I studied international relations and law, but I never really thought about nuclear weapons. You know, I'm born in the eighties and grew up after the Cold War. So for me it wasn't an issue. Uh, it was never something I thought about, but I got involved with an organization working on foreign policy in Sweden and they asked me if I wanted an internship working on nuclear weapons, and I remember being really almost like disappointed 'cause I wanted to do human rights <laugh>. I was like, oh, nuclear weapons. That seems really lame and just very old-fashioned, not something that was current, but when I learned more about it, I became really fascinated with it. For me, it's an issue that's so much more than the actual weapon. It's a question of justice and equality and equal rights for everyone.

Lisa Perry:

This modern intersectional perspective of the issue was shared by the founders of ICAN, who wanted to consolidate the efforts of an abolition movement that had struggled to find a unifying goal since the end of the Cold War

Beatrice Fihn:

In 2007, there was a lot of organizations working on nuclear weapons, but everyone was kind of working on different things. So the founders of ICAN kinda identified that there was a lack of a more modern, broader movement and therefore founded ICAN very much based on this kind of idea of humanitarian disarmament. That weapons is not just a national security issue, it's a humanitarian issue, and we have to protect civilians in warfare and also try to broaden the issue to not just focus on the traditional peace movement, but the human rights crowd, the environmental crowd, the emergency responders. Just bring in other perspectives on nuclear weapons.

Lisa Perry:

Think of ICAN as like the Justice League, not just another anti-nuclear organization, but rather an international coalition of over 500 different disarmament and humanitarian groups from 103 countries who have chosen to combine their efforts behind a single goal, make nuclear weapons illegal under international law. To make this goal a reality, they went to the United Nations where they proposed a treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons, a treaty that simply became known as the Ban treaty. A key part of their strategy was the recognition that while only nine countries actually possessed nukes, all countries shared in the risk from these doomsday weapons.

Beatrice Fihn:

It's a power issue. It's a few countries that have taken the absolute power to hold the whole world hostage and the rest of the world is just kind of passively waiting, hoping that nothing will happen. The South African delegation called it nuclear apartheid. You know, one rule for this small group of countries that dominates everything and kind of oppress the rest of the world with these weapons. But when the big majority rise up and say we don't accept it anymore, that's when things change. I think what was new with ICAN was the idea that you could do it even without the nuclear states.

Lisa Perry:

The frustration of non-nuclear states created a powerful incentive for these countries to adopt ICAN'S new approach. Ray Atcheson, director for ICAN partner organization, Reaching Critical Will was heavily involved in the treaty negotiations and recalls distinctly how this power struggle was at the heart of the battle over the ban treaty.

Ray Atcheson:

The big element of the process to ban nuclear weapons really was exactly this question of who gets to have a say. For so long, the nuclear-armed states have been very dismissive of the opinions of countries of the global south, saying that they didn't have a stake in this game. Some of the things we heard during the process leading up to negotiations was that they're not serious states. That was something that someone actually said that they're not militarily significant states and therefore it shouldn't have an opinion on this issue. This has kind of been the underlying sentiment now for 70 years, but now you were just outright saying it to our face that our voice doesn't count and that we don't get to have a say over this, just blatantly saying it.

Lisa Perry:

There's some bitter history behind this debate. In a landmark 1970 agreement called the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, non-nuclear states pledged to not seek nuclear capabilities, while nuclear states pledged to pursue the eventual elimination of their nuclear weapons. However, 50 years later, and there is still no indication that nuclear powers are working towards disarmament, and in fact, many have been growing their arsenals. Now, many non-nuclear states see the BanTreaty as a referendum against the failures of nuclear nations to act on their obligations.

Ray Atcheson:

There was this element for some of the, the representatives of these countries, of defiance and of just feeling like enough is enough. We have listened to you for so long tell us that we can't say anything about this, that you're gonna handle it, that we just have to sit here and wait for you to deal with this situation and you're not dealing with it. You're walking away from all the commitments that you've made over the years in terms of nuclear disarmament. You know, you're investing trillions into modernizing these arsenals. You are not dealing with the problem, so we're gonna deal with the problem for you.

Lisa Perry:

Negotiations for the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons took place over several weeks in the summer of 2017 at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. I actually happened to be in New York while the negotiations were happening that summer, and I knew that I had to witness what felt like history in the making. I managed to secure a pass to sit in on the proceedings on one hot and sticky day in Manhattan. I'd only been working in the nuclear field for about a year and a half, and most of the time it felt a little like David versus Goliath, a constant struggle to make any sort of impact on this massive issue. But walking into the UN that day, it felt different. Suddenly I could see that we were not just shouting into the storm, we were the storm. Hundreds of people from around the world focusing their collective efforts towards achieving this monumental goal. You could feel the energy in the room.

Beatrice Fihn:

I think that everyone in the room really felt that we were part of something big. You could really feel this sense that there's going to be a ban on nuclear weapons.

Lisa Perry:

The task that ICAN had taken on was formidable: getting over a hundred different nations to agree to a treaty that provides a step-by-step path for nuclear disarmament and prohibition for it to be more than just symbolic. Beatrice Fihn knew that it was critical they got the details of the treaty right.

Beatrice Fihn:

The number one thing was to get a really clear prohibition of the kind of main activities so that the treaty could have a strong normative impact in the future. Because this wasn't a protest treaty that was just there to make a point. This is a treaty that's actually going to guide the world towards nuclear disarmament in the future. And the thing that was really, really fundamental for us was of course the recognitions of the humanitarian consequences and the victim assistance and environmental remediation part of the treaty, to make sure that this treaty really recognized that there are people that are being impacted of nuclear weapons use and testing in the past. Even if the nuclear states never joined it, we can still use this treaty to actually provide concrete support to people that have been harmed by nuclear weapons. If we can help one person with this treaty, it was worth it.

Lisa Perry:

The treaty that ICAN helped to create was the first international treaty to formally recognize and provide assistance to the victims of the use and testing of nuclear weapons. These provisions have the potential to be life-changing for the hundreds of thousands of victims of the decades-long legacy of nuclear testing around the world, some of whose stories we've heard throughout the season. Two weeks after my visit to the UN, the treaty came up for a vote and Beatrice Fihn was there to celebrate this moment, which had been years in the making.

Beatrice Fihn:

Mr. Secretary General, President of the General Assembly, Excellencies, Colleagues, and friends. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has worked long and hard for this treaty to come into being. Important progress is rarely easy. Groundbreaking steps forward do not start with consensus agreements. Progress does not just happen when everyone is ready. It must be fought for and someone has to be brave and lead. This is what a real step looks like.

Lisa Perry:

All of the nuclear weapons nations boycotted the treaty negotiations and the vote that followed. Nevertheless, on July 7th, 2017, the attending nation delegates voted 122 to one to adopt the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons. Now it was ready for ratification by the governments of the world.

TV announcer:

As we wrap up today talking about what happened at the United Nations headquarters in New York this past weekend, 122 countries have approved a historic global treaty to ban the use and possession of nuclear weapons.

UN official:

Kindly confirmed that their votes are accurately reflected on the screen. The voting has been completed, the machine is locked. [applause]

Lisa Perry:

Setsuko Thurlow is a Hiroshima bombing survivor and she was on the floor of the UN that day. Setsuko has spent the last several decades of her life traveling the world and recounting her experiences of that horrible day in 1945 in order to try and help people understand why we must work to abolish these terrible weapons, a story she shared with us in episode eight. Setsuko had been working directly with ICAN on the treaty efforts for several years when it was finally put to a vote and after a lifetime spent advocating for disarmament, she was stunned when the vote came back showing overwhelming global support for nuclear abolition from the non-nuclear powers.

Setsuko Thurlow:

On July 7th. Wow. I really couldn't believe it and people just jumped up and screamed and I, you know, hugged and kissed. To be honest with you, I aspired for it, but <laugh>, I don't think I ever believed I would see that moment. I never did. And this didn't happen overnight. This is the accumulation of years and years of hard work and people from around the world worked together. When people started to focusing attention on the consequences to human beings and the environment. That's why ICAN campaign has been successful. The preciousness, worth, and dignity of each and every human being; that is the core of democracy.

Lisa Perry:

Reflecting on ICAN's achievement, Beatrice Fihn also recognizes that their success didn't occur in a vacuum.

Beatrice Fihn:

I think there was a sense that there was a momentum on the nuclear weapons issue in a way. The Gang of Four op-Ed, for example, the Prague speech of Obama, Global Zero coming on to speak out; it helped showing that this wasn't just a peace movement, traditional NGO's issue, something was changing, showing that there is very broad support for nuclear disarmament.

Lisa Perry:

A dramatic manifestation of this broad support came less than two months after the Ban treaty passed in the UN.

Nobel announcer:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2017 to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, ICAN.

Lisa Perry:

ICAN had been unsuccessfully nominated for the prize before. So the announcement came as quite the surprise to ICAN's director Beatrice Fihn.

Beatrice Fihn:

We knew that we were nominated, but to be honest, being nominated for the Nobel Prize, it's not like an Oscar nomination where they select five, and one of them will win. Being nominated does not mean that you have a, you know, a particularly big chance of being awarded the, the prize. So I was like really annoyed that morning 'cause journalists kept calling, I just wanna check where you are in case. I'm like, oh, we're not gonna win this. Stop doing this. Stop wasting my time. And then the phone in the office rang and there was someone from Norway who wanted to talk to me and I was just like, okay, is it a Norwegian journalist maybe? And then he introduced himself and he said he was from the Nobel Committee <laugh> and I just could not really take it in at that point. And then he said, I'm calling with what I hope to be some good news.

And I was like thinking, maybe they call us to say that we didn't win. Like did they do that? Maybe they do that. I dunno, <laugh>. And then he said that, you know, ICAN has been awarded Nobel Peace Prize. I was just completely speechless. We had to actually turn on the live show of the press conference that they held in Oslo and just watch it on the TV first to see that it was actually real, that it wasn't a prank. It was incredibly overwhelming. Like it, it, it, it took a long time for it to actually sink in,

Lisa Perry:

In keeping with their mission of centering the voices of victims of nuclear weapons, Beatrice Fihn was joined by Hiroshima survivor, Setsuko Thurlow to accept the award on behalf of the global organization.

Setsuko Thurlow:

When I was a 13-year-old girl trapped in the smoldering rubble, I kept pushing, I kept moving toward the light and I survived. Our light now is a Ban treaty. To all in this hall and all listening around the world, I repeat those words that I heard in the ruins of Hiroshima. Don't give up, keep pushing, keep moving. See the light, crawl towards it.

Lisa Perry:

While many around the world joined the Nobel Committee in celebrating the Ban treaty, the governments of the nuclear states continued their efforts to undermine its impact.

Beatrice Fihn:

The nuclear arms states have been very negative to this treaty and very hostile, extremely critical, and aggressive in their criticism. And I see this as a sign of them understanding the, the power of it. And you can see that because they spend a lot of time and energy and resources on trying to stop the treaty. If it was so meaningless without their participation, why are they trying to stop other countries from joining it? For me, seeing the United States put, you know, efforts into stopping a tiny Pacific Island state from signing this treaty shows that that Pacific Island state is important and international law matters.

Lisa Perry:

Even though the treaty had been successfully voted on by the national delegates, for it to become international law, the governments of 50 countries needed to ratify it. in the face of opposition from the US and other nuclear nations, ICAN spent three years lobbying countries to formalize their support for the treaty. Finally, in October of 2020, Honduras became the 50th nation to ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. And on January 22nd, 2021, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recognized this milestone moment as the treaty officially became international law.

Secretary General Guterres:

I am pleased to recognize today's entering into force of the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, the first multilateral nuclear disarmament treaty in more than two decades. I commend the states that have ratified the treaty and welcome the instrumental role of civil society in advancing negotiation and entry into force.

Lisa Perry:

Hundreds of civil society groups made up of thousands of people from around the world, spent years orchestrating, coordinating, and negotiating the first multilateral nuclear disarmament treaty in over 20 years. A remarkable achievement, but will it really make a difference in how countries deal with nuclear weapons?

Beatrice Fihn:

We know of course, that in international law you can't force a country to do anything, but it puts this bar there that this is unacceptable behavior to the majority of states in the world. And you are on the outside of that. This is how we can work around a government that doesn't like to sign and ratify treaties. You can still influence the behavior through these norms

Lisa Perry:

And there's a clear precedence for this sort of influence. The Nuclear Ban Treaty is actually the fifth UN weapons ban convention, following bans on biological weapons, chemical weapons, cluster munitions, and landmines. And while these bans haven't always led to a total elimination of these weapons, the treaties have successfully affected their manufacturing and use.

Beatrice Fihn:

In order to get to disarmament, you have to remove the power and the prestige from this weapon. You have to make it unacceptable to have it. And I think that the treaty has that kind of power. For example, the Landmine Treaty. Yes, you have the big producers who haven't joined, the United States, China, Russia, but the production of landmines have just dropped completely. Uh, there's no market for these weapons anymore. And the same thing with the Cluster Munitions Convention. It entered into force in 2010 and two years ago, the last American producers of cluster munitions announced that they would stop making them because there was a growing international stigma, they had been blacklisted by a lot of banks in Europe that had banned these weapons. So for them, it became a business decision, and that's really what we're hoping to do with nuclear weapons as well. With or without the formal signature of some countries, this is what we can do. This is the thing that we can use our power for.

Lisa Perry:

Many have tried to dismiss the Ban Treaty as inconsequential because nuclear arm nations have refused to participate. But the power of normative influence extends beyond simple signatures on a piece of paper. And the Ban Treaty has already accomplished something significant by formally recognizing the victims of the use and testing of nuclear weapons and providing mechanisms for redress. As we have heard throughout the season of At the Brink, the damage done by nuclear weapons extends beyond their blast radius. Atomic bomb survivors like Setsuko Thurlow and victims of testing like Downwinders, Atomic Veterans, and the people of the Marshall Islands are still grappling with the damaging consequences of the continued existence of nuclear weapons.

Setsuko Thurlow:

This is a great victory. We have to go many miles yet to achieve the final goal of elimination, but we'll keep working.

Lisa Perry:

Having been witness to the arc of nuclear history, my grandfather recognizes this treaty as a powerful milestone in the journey up the mountain to abolition.

William Perry:

My hat is off to ICAN. Many people believe they couldn't do it. They were just spinning their wheels. ICAN proved them wrong. The same people are saying, well, now that you have this treaty, it doesn't amount to anything. That cannot be true. This is setting a moral standard for the world. In time, it might become a political standard as well, but the first step is setting a moral standard that nuclear war is wrong, that nuclear war is immoral.

Lisa Perry:

The summiting of Mount Everest was an amazing accomplishment, but it only became a reality because people imagined it could be possible and pressed onwards despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

William Perry:

When George and Henry and Sam and I would talk with people about the danger of nuclear weapons, many people would say, you cannot accomplish this. Why do you spend your time doing this? It's not going to succeed. And sometimes George would come back and say, there's a power of ought. O-U-G-H-T ought. We are saying what ought to be done. It will not be done this year, will not be done next year. But as more people come to believe that it ought to be done, then that increases the probability that in time it will happen.

Lisa Perry:

The intrepid Everest mountaineers did not take their failures to summit as proof that their task was impossible, but rather that a new approach must be attempted. In the journey up the mountain to nuclear abolition, the Ban Treaty is a new base camp.

Beatrice Fihn:

I feel that sometimes we think about nuclear weapons as very much black and white, like only if we get rid of the last nuclear weapons. Is it a success? The treaty is a starting point. It's not just that we are going to do this until we finally get to the last one. The whole point is just to shift behavior. I don't have zero nuclear weapons as the only measurement of success. It's really the journey.

Lisa Perry:

Unlike summiting Everest, reaching nuclear abolition would not be the end of this journey. Invariably, we will have to climb this mountain many times over as new challenges to abolition arise. But with each new climb, we will have more advanced technology. We'll be more skilled at maneuvering, and the journey will be easier to accomplish.

William Perry:

When the four of us set a goal of elimination of nuclear weapons, we considered that to be the top of a mountain. We understood that the goal is a long and arduous climb, and we couldn't expect to achieve that goal overnight. We should hold ourselves with the standard that any action, any action we took, it took us a little higher up a mountain, was a successful action.

Lisa Perry:

Do you think that your viewpoint that we should try to eliminate nuclear weapons is a radical viewpoint?

William Perry:

The vision that we can get rid of nuclear weapons is seen as radical, but what's radical, what's radical is that we should have them and use them and have the vision of a winnable nuclear war. That's what's really radical. I think making a moral stand on this now is right and is important. The argument that we should wait suggests that we have time to wait, suggests that nothing's going to happen while we wait. But every year we get by without using nuclear weapons, it's a gift from God, and we cannot count on another year.

Lisa Perry:

The quest for a nuclear weapons-free world is fraught with practical and political challenges. It's possible that eliminating nuclear weapons is a mountain we will never be able to scale, but if we never try, it ensures that we will never succeed. The question shouldn't be, can we get rid of nuclear weapons? But, can we afford not to try?

Lisa Perry:

That’s our show. But before we go, we wanted to say one more thing. Like we talked about today, the struggle against the threat of nuclear weapons is far from a straight line. As we were finalizing this episode, we received news that Global Zero was suspending operations indefinitely, one of a number of disarmament organizations that have shut down in the past year.

The root cause? A funding crisis. In a major blow to the global disarmament movement, one of the largest sources of financial support for nuclear non-profits, the MacArthur Foundation, has stopped funding any non-proliferation efforts, citing frustration with the slow pace of progress. But turning our backs on the problems of nuclear weapons won't magically make the danger disappear. The potential repercussions of this funding deficit are far-reaching, especially in the wake of crumbling arms control agreements and escalating global conflicts involving nuclear powers.

There is another casualty of this funding gap — this podcast. We have been grateful to be able to bring you two seasons of AT THE BRINK, and we hope that we shed a new light on this incredibly complex, and incredibly important issue. This episode will be our final episode. And if you take anything away from this show, we hope you understand that we can do something about the threat of nuclear annihilation. We have to start talking about nuclear weapons again. And we have to demand action from our government, to turn away from nuclear escalation policies, and towards a nuclear-free future. And to do this, we need to start supporting organizations who are putting in the work to make that future a reality. So now it’s your turn. Go out there and try and save the world, one donation at a time.

As we close out our final episode, we want to extend our warmest gratitude to the many people who supported this project, including Robin Perry, Ragani Harris, Carmen Macdougall, Mimi Hall, and the entire team at NTI. Thank you to my husband, Michael Maiatico, for his endless encouragement, and to my father and co-producer David Perry, for his help in making this big idea a reality. And a very special thank you to my grandfather, William Perry, whose tireless work to lower nuclear dangers is the reason this podcast exists. May we all strive to live up to the example you set.

Lisa Perry:

AT THE BRINK was created and written by myself and David Perry. Production Coordination was provided by Jeff Large and Maggie Fischer of Come Alive Creative. Audio Editing was handled by Isadore Nieves, and Ryan Hobler is responsible for Sound Design, Composition and Audio Mixing. Production assistance was provided by Maggie O’Brien and Katherine Leede. I'm your host, Lisa Perry.  Thanks for listening.