ABSTRACT
Before the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, policy makers in Norway had already started to draw parallels between their experience in previous humanitarian disarmament initiatives and nuclear disarmament and argued for a humanitarian focus on nuclear weapons. In 2011, when no tangible progress in the implementation of the Action Plan was visible, Norway took a number of steps that can be considered the operational launch of what became known as the Humanitarian Initiative. On 26–27 September 2011, an informal meeting, funded by Norway, was convened in Amersham, United Kingdom by the International Law and Policy Institute. The main objective of the Amersham discussion was therefore not a ban treaty, rather a re-framing and reinvigorating of the nuclear weapons discourse. A conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons took place on 4–5 March 2013 in Oslo, Norway. The conference was intended to provide a facts-based, rigorous, scientific background with which to re-frame nuclear weapons discourse in a humanitarian direction.
