Nuclear Truth at 1MSP

Photo: Benetick Kabua Maddison, Co-Chair Nuclear Truth Project and Executive Director of the Marshallese Educational Initiative (MEI) and Jemila Rushton from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons Australia. Credit: Alexander Papis

THE NUCLEAR TRUTH PROJECT AT THE 1MSP

The First Meeting of States Parties (1MSP) to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) took place in Vienna between 21-23 June 2022. 

At this meeting, the Nuclear Truth Project first launched our Protocols for working with affected communities, both through materials shared with governments and civil society representatives at the meeting and through an official working paper. 

The Nuclear Truth Project was represented at this meeting by Janene Yazzie, from the Diné Peoples. Janene was the coordinator of the newly forming Protocols for working with affected communities.

Yazzie to UN: Nuclear war doesn't start with detonation of bomb 

By Kathy Helms, Special correspondent
Gallup Independent

June 24, 2022

GRANTS – Janene Yazzie, a community organizer and human rights advocate from the Navajo Nation, this week joined colleagues at a United Nations meeting in Vienna, Austria, to discuss an international law banning nuclear weapons. 

Noticeably absent from the “First Meeting of State Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons” was the United States and the eight other nuclear weapons states.

In a message to “Relatives” and Navajo Nation leaders, Yazzie stated that she was attending the U.N. meeting as a member of the Nuclear Truth Project where she serves as coordinator of the Protocols Working Group. The working group presented the protocols it developed as a guiding framework for states, NGOs, researchers, and all actors working to implement the treaty and build a nuclear-free world.

“Even if the US has not signed the Treaty, it is still effectively International Law that will only continue to grow stronger with each new state that joins this global commitment [three more have joined in the last two days],” Yazzie told Navajo leaders.

Indigenous peoples have an “extraordinary opportunity” to lead meaningful actions and discussions in the United States, she said, “making our own commitments as sovereign nations, and holding our state accountable for the harms our communities continue to face from the legacy of uranium contamination and nuclear-related activities.”

U.S. missing in action

Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety in Santa Fe shared an article Thursday on its website authored by Ralph Hutchinson of Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, questioning why the United States was not participating in the meeting as an invited non-state party or sending observers. 

“First, what is the U.S. afraid of?” Hutchinson asked. “With a stockpile of more than 4,000 nuclear warheads and bombs, 1,500 of them deployed around the globe on hair-trigger alert, one would think the U.S. would be strong enough to walk into a room where the only weapons allowed are words and defend its position.”

Hutchinson said that if the United States is committed to pursue nuclear disarmament as it promised in the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, it should welcome the chance to talk about what that could look like – “all the nuclear armed nations coming to an agreement on protocols, verifications, and an enforceable timetable for eliminating nuclear stockpiles,” he said.

Threats condemned 

With Russian President Vladimir Putin's threats to use nuclear weapons in its war with Ukraine fresh on the world's collective mind, the states parties in the Vienna Declaration adopted Thursday, expressed their alarm and dismay at threats to use nuclear weapons, and condemned unequivocally “any and all nuclear threats, whether they be explicit or implicit and irrespective of the circumstances,” according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

The states parties resolved to move ahead with implementing all aspects of the treaty, including the positive obligations aimed at redressing the harm caused by nuclear weapons use and testing.

“In the face of the catastrophic risks posed by nuclear weapons and in the interest of the very survival of humanity ... We will not rest until the last state has joined the Treaty, the last warhead has been dismantled and destroyed and nuclear weapons have been totally eliminated from the Earth,” the Declaration states.

Irreparable harm

The impacts and consequences of nuclear war do not start with the detonation of a bomb, Yazzie said.

“Nor does the mass murder that results from the nuclear weapons and in the aftermath, the impacts of the blast. Nuclear war, as my people understand it, and as many other people understand it, begins with the mining of uranium and the devastation to the health of our peoples and our environment. 

“That devastation and that impact and that legacy continues as long as our waters are undrinkable and our soils are contaminated and our babies are being born with uranium in their bodies or with birth defects due to the exposure of pregnant women to radioactive contamination,” she said.

Yazzie noted that she often has heard state delegates and even NGO representatives state that the potentiality of a future nuclear war “could be the end of our way of life,” a thought she can appreciate because of the footprint the legacy of uranium mining and nuclear testing has left on the Navajo Nation. 

“We can't drink the water available to us anymore. It means we can't gather the wild foods or grow the traditional foods that our communities have depended on for millennia,”

Yazzie said.

“It means that it's dangerous to live in the places of our ancestors, the place where the land knows our name, because it makes our people and our loved ones and our children sick. We do not have the technologies or the answers to fix those issues yet. 

“If this isn't experiencing the end of our way of life, I don't know what is,” she said.