Mobilising the world behind the nuclear weapons Ban Treaty 1

As three of the four Indo-Pacific possessor countries are outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it is mostly irrelevant as the legal governance construct for the Indo-Pacific and for the Korean Peninsula, India–Pakistan, and China–India, all potential nuclear flashpoints. The NPT seems wearied with age, its normative potential exhausted. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, for its part, will spur civil society and states to mobilise behind the new normative framework to achieve concrete progress toward the total elimination of nuclear weapons. As Secretary-General António Guterres said in acknowledgment of the historic occasion, abolition “remains the highest disarmament priority of the United Nations.”