Even with the passing of the UN’s Nuclear Weapons Ban
Treaty, Japan still remains an outlier, betraying the hopes of atomic
bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It started with just 12 of them. With a bold mission, this group of activists set sail to Amchitka island
off Alaska to protest the detonation of an underground US nuclear test.
It was September 1971, and though the mission was initially
unsuccessful, it was the beginning of what became Greenpeace, and just
one of the many issues – the elimination of nuclear weapons - that the environmental organisation would campaign endlessly against.
Fast forward to 2017, and what was once a hard-fought
battle and one of Greenpeace’s legacy issues, has now become a
successful defeat. On 7 July, the United Nations adopted the "Nuclear Weapons Treaty"
with an overwhelming majority - an epoch-making agreement that
prohibits not only the development, experiment, manufacture, possession,
and use of nuclear weapons, but also the "threat to use". Nuclear and
chemical weapons, and anti-personnel landmines and cluster bombs were
also banned. The Treaty will be open for signature by states on
September 20th.
To our disappointment, however, Japan did not join
the 122 countries, or two-thirds of the United Nations member countries,
that stood up to stop nuclear weapons. The peculiar absence of Japan,
whose preamble explicitly recognizes “unacceptable suffering of and harm caused to the victims of the use of nuclear weapons (Hibakusha) as well as those affected by the testing of nuclear weapons” begs explanation.
Data: 04.08.2017
Fonte: www.greenpeace.org
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