by Jerry Tetalman | Oct 14, 2025 | Peace, UN Reform
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the major countries of the world have been aligning in two different blocs: NATO (which includes most European nations, the United States, and Canada), Japan, and South Korea, on one side, and Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and India on the other. Both blocs of countries are supporting their side in the war with weapons, trade, or troops. The negotiations to end the Ukraine-Russia war have so far failed due to Vladimir Putin’s reluctance to engage. NATO has so far only supplied weapons and military support. Still, it has been careful not to confront Russia with troops directly―probably because Russia has a large nuclear arsenal and the United States and NATO are trying to avoid a full-scale war. This strategy, so far, has resulted in a protracted stalemate.
If allowed to spread and escalate, however, the Ukraine-Russia war might trigger World War III.
So, how does the United States deal with this dilemma? One option is to do more of what it has been doing: provide more weapons and sanctions, in the hope that they will bring Putin to the negotiating table in earnest. Another, more daring approach is to look at what causes war and then address the root cause of war.
We live in a world where most nations or groups of nations solve their disputes through military force rather than the force of law. But in some parts of the world, we have replaced war with law and government. For example, the European Union has created peace between its member states, such as France and Germany, countries that had fought bitterly against one another in World Wars I and II. Now these nations settle their disputes by voting in the European Parliament and the European Union courts.
Why has the European Union succeeded in creating peace among its members while the United Nations has failed in these efforts? The answer lies in the fact that the United Nations is based on treaty law, a voluntary system of agreements among nations that lacks an enforcement mechanism that true law uses.
A new, more powerful, and democratic United Nations, however, could create peace among the world’s countries. By convening a UN reform conference under Article 109 of the UN charter, it would be possible to engage the world’s nations in creating a rules-based system of international law that is enforceable rather than voluntary. Building a civilized world based on law and rules, rather than on military power, would create a global framework for peace, and hopefully, reverse the schism of the world into warring camps.
Would such a framework solve the Russia-Ukraine war? Not directly, but it would provide an institution capable of resolving it.
If left on their current trajectory, international relations and military conflict will soon reach a dark place that will be difficult to recover from. The alternative is not radical; indeed, rules and laws provide the basis of civilization, and today they are desperately needed at the international level. These can be provided by a structure of limited world government, similar to that of the European Union. Individual nations would remain free to develop their own laws dealing with their internal affairs, but, in international affairs, they would abide by the laws between countries. In this fashion, a small piece of sovereignty would be exchanged for a peaceful world.
The world’s nations can begin this process by invoking Article 109 of the UN Charter to call for a global conference to craft a new, more effective United Nations. For such a mission to succeed, many details must be worked out, but the alternative of more war and destruction is unacceptable.
by Jacopo DeMarinis | Oct 9, 2025 | World Federation
On September 18th, the United Nations Security Council, the principal organ of the United Nations entrusted with maintaining international peace and security, introduced a resolution demanding an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, the immediate release of all hostages, and the lifting of restrictions on humanitarian aid to prevent the growing famine. Fourteen members of the fifteen-member council voted in favor. One member, the United States, voted against it. The resolution was thrown out.
Does this seem fair to you? Well, this is par for the course at the UN Security Council. Five permanent members (P5)—China, the United Kingdom, the United States, Russia, and France—can veto any resolution, immediately discarding it. The significance of this is heightened by the fact that the Security Council’s resolutions are binding, unlike the more representative General Assembly, whose resolutions are merely recommendations. In the past, the Security Council has passed binding resolutions authorizing dozens of peacekeeping operations to address conflicts in the Balkans, Angola, Somalia, Haiti, and other countries.
Unfortunately, history has shown that the P5 will leverage their position in the Council to block a resolution that threatens their interests, as Russia did regarding a February 2022 Security Council resolution that would have demanded an end to the Ukraine war. More recently, Russia blocked a UN Security Council resolution calling an end to the civil war in Sudan. Since the inception of the Security Council in 1945, a veto has been cast 326 times; out of these, Russia has wielded the veto 161 times, the United States, 94 times, China, 21 times, and the United Kingdom and France, 32 and 18 times, respectively.
To enhance the P5’s accountability to other UN countries, the UN General Assembly recently passed a resolution urging the veto-casting member to provide an explanation for their decision. This resolution harks back to the 1950 UN General Assembly “Uniting for Peace ” resolution, which provided the General Assembly with the opportunity to address any matter pertaining to international peace that has paralyzed the UN Security Council.
“Great power” capture of the global landscape is also apparent in nuclear disarmament issues. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which entered into force in 1970, requires nuclear weapons states, which include the P5, to negotiate the complete disarmament of their nuclear weapons. Despite this mandate, nine countries now have nuclear weapons and these countries are upgrading their “strategic nuclear forces,” in defiance of the NPT. Unsurprisingly, these same countries unanimously oppose the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The TPNW was borne out of non-nuclear weapons states’ frustration with noncompliance with NPT, by prohibiting any country party to the treaty from possessing nuclear weapons.
Then, there is climate change. Despite embracing green energy more, the world’s top polluters, including the United States and China, are still burning carbon dioxide at an unsustainable rate which threatens to raise global temperature increase to above the 1.5 degree Celsius limit set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This means that the worst effects of the climate crisis will not be averted. Furthermore, the fact that powerful countries like the United States have openly defied international climate treaties like the Paris Accords- which the United States withdrew from in 2020, rejoined in 2021, and then withdrew from again with the re-election of Donald Trump- weakens international climate coordination and fosters a culture of unaccountability and skepticism about global climate governance.
Furthermore, the COP29 conference last year in Baku is seen by many climate activists and governments in the Global South as a failure, albeit a step in the right direction. Wealthy countries agreed to commit $300 billion a year by 2035 to aid developing countries in reducing carbon dioxide emissions and transitioning to clean energy, which is far from the $1.3 trillion annually for climate financing that developing countries were pushing for. It’s ironic that the burden will be felt mainly by small island states and developing countries in the Global South that have contributed least to the crisis.
To address this climate injustice, the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu initiated proceedings with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2023, requesting an advisory opinion regarding the legal obligations of states with respect to climate change. Vanuatu’s decision to present a UN General Assembly resolution initiating climate proceedings with the ICJ was due mainly to the determined climate justice efforts of youth activists from Pacific Island states, including civil society organizations like World’s Youth for Climate Justice. While the ICJ’s advisory opinions are not legally binding on countries, the ICJ’s ruling will hopefully set a precedent regarding international action to address climate change. Updates regarding the ICJ’s climate case can be viewed here.
It’s clear that the big power-dominated international order is unsustainable. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ decision to move the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest to complete catastrophe we’ve ever been, has highlighted the importance of constructing an international system characterized by political equality and social and economic justice. The actions detailed above- creating the TPNW, involving the ICJ in climate matters, holding the P5 accountable to the General Assembly, and proposals for comprehensive Security Council reform are a definite starting point.
However, we must treat not just the symptoms but also the underlying disease: gross global power imbalances. This requires strengthening international law and modifying and/or establishing global institutions. Civil society organizations like Democracy Without Borders and Citizens for Global Solutions advocate for establishing a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, which would allow the citizens of the world to directly elect their UN representatives. This Parliamentary Assembly would eventually be empowered, in conjunction with the UN General Assembly, to pass universally binding resolutions regarding global issues. Such an assembly in the UN system would accord currently overlooked countries, concentrated in the Global South, with much more decision-making power than they currently have, building a United Nations that truly serves all of humanity.
Other possible adjustments to the structure of global politics to ensure true political equality include ensuring the universal jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which the United States, Russia, China, and about sixty other countries are currently not party to. We should also strengthen the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, which the LAW not War campaign is focused on. In addition, we could establish an International Court for the Environment to settle cases pertaining to the environment and climate change.
Big power domination of our global politics is not merely an international relations issue. It is a matter of social justice, economic justice, and political equality on a global scale. It’s about whether we are to live on a livable planet and build a sustainable future for future generations. It all starts with constructing a more just, multilateral international order that answers to all of us. The time to start building it is now.
by Lawrence Wittner | Sep 25, 2025 | Global Justice
On September 13, the British public was startled when more than 110,000 people turned out for a raucous far-right rally in London featuring racist conspiracy theories, anti-Muslim hate speech, and violent assaults upon police. Whipping up the crowd, Tommy Robinson―a popular far-right agitator, march organizer, and five-time convicted criminal―told the assemblage that British government officials believed “that Somalians, Afghans, Pakistanis, all of them, their rights supersede yours, the British public, the people that built this nation.” Signs carried by the demonstrators invoked racist and xenophobic themes, such as: “Why are white people despised when our money pays for everything?”
Well-known speakers from abroad echoed these sentiments. The prominent French far-right politician, Eric Zemmour, warned the angry crowd that they were facing “the great replacement of our European people by peoples coming from the south and of Muslim culture.” Elon Musk, the arrogant U.S. multibillionaire, demanded the dissolution of parliament and new elections. Thanks to the “rapidly increasing erosion of Britain with massive uncontrolled migration,” he said, “violence is coming,” and “you either fight back or you die.”
In recent years, the racially-tinged hatred of immigrants, particularly Muslims, Arabs, Africans, and Latin Americans, has fueled the rise of political parties on the far right. These “populist” parties have made astonishing gains in European nations, and they top the polls today in powerful countries like Britain, Germany, and France. Far-right political parties, drawing upon anti-immigrant rhetoric, have also experienced surges of popularity in Japan, Australia, and the United States.
When nations face sharp xenophobic and racist divisions within, they do have governments that can take action to counter them. Responding to rightwing violence at the London rally, police made dozens of arrests and Prime Minister Keir Starmer publicly proclaimed that Britain would “never surrender” to far-right protesters who used the British flag as a cover for violence and to instill fear. Britain is a “diverse country,” he said, and he would not tolerate people being “intimidated on our streets” because of their background or the color of their skin.
But the situation is quite different in the international arena, which more closely resembles a lawless wilderness in which nations can engage in criminal violence.
In February 2022, the Russian government―flouting the UN Charter and its 1994 treaty commitment rejecting the use of force against Ukraine―launched a full-scale military invasion of that much smaller nation. Seeking to justify the onslaught, Vladimir Putin claimed that Ukraine was “Russian land” and that he had to “denazify” it. On March 2, when the UN General Assembly passed a resolution condemning Russia’s invasion and calling for its withdrawal from Ukraine, 141 nations supported it, 5 nations (including Russia) opposed it, and 35 nations abstained. Two weeks later, the International Court of Justice ruled, by an overwhelming vote, that Russia should “immediately suspend” its military operations in Ukraine.
The Russian government, however, simply continued its military assault upon Ukraine and, over the ensuing years, nearly a million Russian troops and close to 400,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed or wounded. In addition, according to a February 2025 UNICEF report, thanks to the Russian bombardment of Ukraine’s housing, electrical systems, water supplies, and other civilian infrastructure, 3.7 million Ukrainians have been internally displaced, more than 6.8 million have fled abroad, and much of the country lies in ruins. “No place is safe,” it noted. “Overall, some 780 health facilities and more than 1,600 schools have been damaged or destroyed.” This July, the United Nations announced that there had been some 48,000 documented civilian casualties in Ukraine, among them thousands of children.
The Israeli government, too, has displayed a shocking disregard for international law and human life. After the Hamas-led terrorist attack upon Israel of October 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a massive military invasion of the tiny Palestinian enclave of Gaza. The assault, vastly excessive in firepower and bloodshed for the task of defeating Hamas or pacifying Gaza, sent millions of innocent Palestinians desperately fleeing death and destruction as Israel’s military forces obliterated homes, schools, hospitals, journalists, and humanitarian aid workers. According to observers, some 65,000 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians, have been killed, famine is rampant, and much of Gaza has been pounded into rubble. A recent report by a UN commission of inquiry that examined the conduct of the invasion and the statements of the Netanyahu administration concluded that the government of Israel was committing the crime of genocide in Gaza.
Furthermore, the Israeli government has ignored international law for decades by refusing to withdraw from the West Bank―Palestinian territory seized by Israeli military forces during the 1967 war―and by bringing in hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers to colonize it. In turn, the settlers, now numbering 700,000, have engaged in widespread violence, recently escalating, against the residents of Palestinian villages in an effort to drive them out and seize their land.
The United Nations, of course, is supposed to maintain international peace and security. Unfortunately, however, it has never been granted the necessary power and resources to handle that job. Furthermore, the UN Security Council is hamstrung by the great power veto. As a result, effective global governance is sadly lacking, and rogue nations remain free to flout international law and the norms of civilization.
In addition to giving a free hand to national criminality, the absence of effective governance on the global level also cripples efforts to tackle other major world problems. After all, how are vital issues like curbing the nuclear arms race, combating climate change, and battling disease pandemics going to be addressed without a global approach and global enforcement?
Consequently, much of the world’s future hinges on empowering international institutions to enforce international law, overcome dangerous social divisions, and help ensure human survival.
by Lawrence Wittner | Aug 26, 2025 | United Nations
If one examines Donald Trump’s approach to world affairs since his entry into American politics, it should come as no surprise that he has worked to undermine the United Nations.
The United Nations is based on international cooperation, as well as on what the UN Charter calls “the equal rights…of nations large and small.” It seeks to end “the scourge of war” and to “promote social progress” for the people of the world.
By contrast, Trump has advocated an aggressively nationalist path for the United States. Campaigning for the presidency in 2016, he proclaimed that “America First” would “be the major and overriding theme of my administration.” In his 2017 inaugural address, he promised: “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first.”
Indeed, “America First” became his rallying cry as he championed an aggressive nationalism. “You know what I am?” Trump asked a crowd in Houston. “I’m a nationalist, O.K.? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist!” Sometimes, his displays of superpatriotism―which appealed strongly to rightwing audiences―included hugging and kissing the American flag.
Given this aggressively nationalist orientation, Trump turned during his first administration to dismantling key institutions of the United Nations and of the broader system of international law. He withdrew the U.S. government from the Paris Climate Agreement, the World Health Organization, the UN Human Rights Council, and the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). He also had the U.S. government vote against the Global Compact on Refugees, suspend funding for the UN Population Fund and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, and impose sanctions on a key international agency, the International Criminal Court, which investigates and prosecutes perpetrators of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.
Nevertheless, many of these Trump measures were reversed under the subsequent presidency of Joseph Biden, which saw the U.S. government rejoin and bolster most of the international organizations attacked by his predecessor.
With Trump’s 2020 election to a second term, however, the U.S. government’s aggressively nationalist onslaught resumed. In January 2025, U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on her nomination to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, assailed the world organization, and promised to use her new post to promote Trump’s “America First” agenda. “Our tax dollars,” she argued, “should not be complicit in propping up entities that are counter to American interests.” Joining the attack, Senator Jim Risch (R-Idaho), the committee chair, sharply criticized the United Nations and called for a reevaluation of every UN agency to determine if its actions benefited the United States. If they didn’t, he said, “hold them accountable until the answer is a resounding yes.” He added that “the U.S. should seriously examine if further contributions and, indeed, participation in the UN is even beneficial to the American people.”
Simultaneously, a new Trump administration steamroller began advancing upon UN entities and other international institutions viewed as out of line with his “America First” priorities. At his direction, the U.S. government withdrew from the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, refused to participate in the UN Relief and Works Agency, announced plans to withdraw from UNESCO, and imposed new sanctions on the International Criminal Court. In the UN Security Council, the U.S. government employed its veto power to block a June 2025 resolution demanding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and release of all hostages―a measure supported by the 14 other members of that UN entity.
The Trump administration has also worked to cripple the United Nations by reducing its very meager income. In July 2025, rescissions legislation sponsored by the administration and passed by the Republican-controlled Congress pulled back some $1 billion in funding that U.S. legislation had allocated to the world organization in previous budgets. This action will have devastating effects on a broad variety of UN programs, including UNICEF, the UN Development Program, the UN Environment Program, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and the UN Fund for Victims of Torture.
Moreover, the administration’s fiscal 2026 budget proposes ending UN Peacekeeping payments and pausing most other contributions to the United Nations. Although U.S. funding of the United Nations is actually quite minimal―for example, dues of only $820 million per year for the regular UN budget―the U.S. government has now compiled a debt of $1.5 billion (the highest debt of any nation) to the regular budget and another $1.3 billion to the separate UN Peacekeeping budget.
The Trump administration’s hostility to the United Nations is sharply at odds with the American public’s attitude toward the world organization. For example, a Pew Research Center poll in late March 2025 found that 63 percent of U.S. respondents said that their country benefited from UN membership―up 3 percent from the previous spring. And 57 percent of Americans polled had a favorable view of the United Nations―up 5 percent since 2024.
Furthermore, a University of Maryland public opinion survey in June 2025 found that 84 percent of Americans it polled wanted the U.S. government to work with the United Nations at current levels or more. This included 83 percent supporting UNICEF, 81 percent UN Peacekeeping, 81 percent the UN World Food Program, 79 percent the World Health Organization, and 73 percent the UN Environment Program.
Nor was this strong backing for a global approach to global affairs a fluke. Even when it came to the International Criminal Court, an independent international entity that the U.S. government had never joined and that Trump had roundly denounced and twice ordered sanctioned, 62 percent of Americans surveyed expressed their approval of the organization.
Trump’s “America First” approach can certainly stir up his hardcore followers. But most Americans recognize that life in the modern world requires moving beyond a narrow nationalism.
by Hannah Fields | Aug 24, 2025 | Global Justice, Human Rights
From online news reports to social media platforms, the rise of authoritarianism and the surge in catastrophic armed conflicts are being broadcast in real time. The world has witnessed numerous atrocity crimes, causing many observers to speak out against the violence, but with no clear end in sight.
Sudan is experiencing one of the worst humanitarian disasters to date, with its two-year civil war resulting in more than 150,000 deaths and displacing at least 12 million people from their homes. In addition, the crisis has led to famine, mass starvation, and war crimes, including ethnic cleansing and sexual violence, all of which have received lukewarm condemnation and international neglect.
Similar circumstances prevail in Gaza as the Israeli government continues its crimes against humanity in the region. According to the Human Rights Watch World Report 2025, Israeli authorities have intentionally deprived Palestinians of access to humanitarian aid, including food and water essential for survival. They have also wounded and killed thousands of civilians, destroyed vital infrastructure such as homes and hospitals, decimated schools and camps housing displaced families, and left few or no safe spaces for those caught in their crosshairs.
More atrocities can be found in Ukraine, Haiti, Afghanistan, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and beyond. These atrocities range from war crimes to gendered violence to civilians suffering under the oppressive hand of authoritarian regimes.
As these violations mount, the international community is being called upon to demonstrate its commitment to democracy, human rights, and humanitarian action. Many nations, however, have failed to rise to the occasion or have sidestepped those commitments completely.
Even in the case of global governance institutions, such as the United Nations Security Council and the International Criminal Court (ICC), formally established to safeguard human rights and prevent atrocity crimes, their effectiveness is often undermined by structural and political limitations.
The Security Council is frequently paralyzed in its efficacy due to the veto power of its five permanent members (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), leading to inaction or slowed response to atrocity crimes. Additionally, the ICC has come under intense scrutiny, with some nations accusing the court of targeting weaker states while powerful actors escape its purview. Other nations have sanctioned the ICC for taking action against the powerful or have refused to comply with its arrest warrants.
With both institutions falling short and coming under the attack of politically motivated aggression from countries like the United States and Russia, some practitioners fear that international law is beginning to erode at its edges. For example, in June 2025, former Pakistani law minister Ahmad Irfan Aslam lamented the diminishing capacity of these institutions to deliver real-world justice, cautioning that “[n]o matter what court you approach, you are not going to get justice,” in part due to politicized state behavior.
With mounting global human rights violations and a waning faith in established global governance institutions, there remains a universal feeling of “what next?” or “where do we go from here?” Some may see no path forward.
But there is still hope to be found, especially in civil society organizations, which serve as important counterweights to the gridlocked state-driven systems.
Civil society organizations can act quickly where institutions cannot and can serve multiple roles, such as first responders, watchdogs, pressure builders, and innovators, among others. These organizations have been stepping up to fill gaps where formal aid pipelines are broken, most notably in areas such as Gaza and Sudan.
Sudanese civil society organizations, along with everyday citizens, have established Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) — grassroots networks that provide shelter, food distribution, education, and medical aid. To date, these networks have assisted over 11.5 million people and earned a nomination for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
In Gaza, local groups, international NGOs, and independent journalists are collaborating to document abuses, distribute aid when possible (although often with limited success), and mobilize global solidarity. Organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also closely monitored the situation, publicly documenting statistics and personal testimonies of civilians, thereby raising broader awareness (and have kept that same awareness and documentation for Sudan).
In these situations, we see communities and civil society, not bureaucracies with billion-dollar budgets, fighting to save lives while countering attempts to normalize or erase suffering, whether in courts, newspapers, or public spaces.
However, activity by civil society organizations faces significant obstacles. Shrinking civic space, repressive laws, accusations of bias, and dependency on donor funding can undermine their autonomy and impact. According to the CIVICUS Monitor, 118 countries now restrict freedoms of association, assembly, or expression. In addition, activists are often harassed, jailed, or even killed, as documented in the Front Line Defenders Report 2024/2025.
Even so, civil society stands as a beacon of hope against the dysfunctional nature of institutional systems. Although civil society organizations can’t replace these systems completely, they can act as a beating heart to improve the overall circulation of these systems.
Institutions must be placed in a position where they work alongside, rather than above, civil society actors. Funding structures must shift to empower local organizations directly, reducing the crippling dependency on donor-state priorities. And civil society must have formalized roles in peace processes and accountability mechanisms. In short, it needs to be involved in institutional conversations, not left on the outside.
As human rights violations and atrocity crimes continue to unfold in full public view, the question is not whether civil society can fill the void being left by deficient institutions. The question is whether the global community will acknowledge, support, and integrate civil society actors into a truly multi-layered system of protection.
If institutions cannot act and civil society is stifled, then a future where human rights can take root at a global level is no more than a fleeting notion planted in the sand.
by Lawrence Wittner | Aug 6, 2025 | Disarmament
Ever since the atomic bombings of Japanese cities in August 1945, the world has been living on borrowed time.
The indications, then and since, that the development of nuclear weapons did not bode well for human survival, were clear enough. The two small atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed between 110,000 and 210,000 people and wounded many others, almost all of them civilians. In subsequent years, hundreds of thousands more people around the world lost their lives thanks to the radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing, while substantial numbers also died from the mining of uranium for the building of nuclear weapons.
Most startlingly, the construction of nuclear weapons armadas against the backdrop of thousands of years of international conflict portended human extinction. Amid the escalating nuclear terror, Einstein declared: “General annihilation beckons.”
Despite the enormity of the nuclear danger, major governments, in the decades after 1945, were too committed to traditional thinking about international relations to resist the temptation to build nuclear weapons to safeguard what they considered their national security. Whatever the dangers, they concluded, military power still counted in an anarchic world. Consequently, they plunged into a nuclear arms race and, on occasion, threatened one another with nuclear war. At times, they came perilously close to it―not only during the 1963 Cuban missile crisis, but during the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war and on numerous other occasions.
By contrast, much of the public found nuclear weapons and the prospect of nuclear war very unappealing. Appalled by the nuclear menace, they rallied behind organizations like the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy in the United States, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain, and comparable groups elsewhere that pressed for nuclear arms control and disarmament measures. This popular uprising secured its first clear triumph when, in the fall of 1958, the governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain agreed to halt nuclear weapons testing as they negotiated a test ban treaty. As the movement crested, it played an important role in securing the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 and a cascade of nuclear arms control measures that followed.
Even when U.S. and Soviet officials revived the nuclear arms race in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a massive public uprising halted and reversed the situation, leading to the advent of major nuclear disarmament measures. As a result, the number of nuclear weapons in the world’s arsenals plummeted from about 70,000 to about 12,240 between 1986 and 2025. At a special meeting of the UN Security Council in 2009, the leaders of the major nuclear powers called for the building of a nuclear weapons-free world.
In recent decades, however, the dwindling of the popular movement and the heightening of international conflict have led to a revival of the nuclear arms race, now well underway. As three nuclear experts from the Federation of American Scientists reported this June: “Every nuclear country is improving its weapons systems, while some are growing their arsenals. Others are doing both.” The new nuclear weaponry currently being tested includes “cruise missiles that can fly for days before hitting their targets; underwater unmanned nuclear torpedoes; fast-flying maneuverable glide vehicles that can evade defenses; and nuclear weapons in space that can attack satellites or targets on Earth without warning.” The financial costs of the nuclear buildup by the nine nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea) will be immense. The U.S. government will reportedly spend over $1.7 trillion on its nuclear “modernization.”
To facilitate these nuclear war preparations, the major nuclear powers have withdrawn from key nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties. The New START Treaty, the last of the major U.S.-Russian nuclear agreements, terminates in February 2026.
Furthermore, over the past decade, the governments of North Korea, the United States, and Russia have issued public threats of nuclear war. In line with its threats, the Russian government announced in late 2024 that it had lowered its threshold for using nuclear weapons.
In response to these developments, the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been set at 89 seconds to midnight, the most dangerous level in its 79-year history.
As the record of the years since 1945 indicates, the catastrophe of nuclear war can be averted. To accomplish this, however, a revival of public pressure for nuclear disarmament is essential, for otherwise governments easily slip into the traditional trap of enhancing military “strength” to cope with a conflict-ridden world―a practice that, in the nuclear age, is a recipe for disaster.
This public pressure could begin, as the Nuclear Freeze movement of the 1980s did, with a call to halt the nuclear arms race, and could continue with the demand for specific nuclear arms control and disarmament measures.
But, simultaneously, the movement needs to champion the strengthening of global institutions―institutions that can provide greater international security than presently exists. The existence of these strengthened institutions―for example, a stronger United Nations―would help resolve the violent conflicts among nations that spawn arms races and would undermine lingering public and official beliefs that nuclear weapons are essential to safeguard national security.
Once the world is back on track toward nuclear disarmament, the movement could focus on its campaign for the signing and ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This treaty, providing the framework for a nuclear weapons-free world, was adopted in 2017 by most of the world’s nations and went into force in 2021. Thus far, it has been signed by 94 nations and ratified by 73 of them.
Given recent international circumstances, none of the nuclear powers has signed it. But with widespread popular pressure and enhanced international security, they could ultimately be brought on board.
They certainly should be, for human survival depends upon ending the nuclear terror.
