ABSTRACT
Nuclear weapons are now subject to two international legal frameworks. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), although successful as a non-proliferation regime, had reached the limits of its potential for advancing nuclear disarmament. The five nuclear weapon states stubbornly refused to act on their NPT commitment to nuclear disarmament even while nuclear risks kept growing. Disarmament was reframed into a pressing humanitarian concern. To exert normative pressure towards elimination, 122 NPT states parties adopted a new United Nations instrument in 2017 called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (or Ban Treaty). It forces nuclear-dependent states to decide whether they intend to continue to shelter under the nuclear umbrella or start behaving like non-nuclear weapon states. Ban Treaty advocates will have to engage with the possessor states and also the nuclear-dependent states to assuage their security concerns. Overall, there is a need to harmonise the two complementary-cum-competitive treaties to address this fundamental challenge: to recreate a global normative framework for responsible nuclear conduct that is at once sufficiently steeped in realism to gain purchase with the nine nuclear-armed states and their allies, yet so infused with vision as to capture the aspiration of a world free of the existence and threat of nuclear weapons.
