Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I commend Deputies Eoghan Murphy and Duncan Smith on seeking this debate. The 50th anniversary of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons is an important occasion to remind ourselves of the utter obscenity and horror of nuclear weapons.

If the Nazi Holocaust was probably the greatest crime that was ever committed against humanity, a very close second is the decision of one of the most wealthy, powerful countries in the world, the United States - a country that claims to be civilised - to drop two nuclear weapons in the course of three days on top of two Japanese cities. A conscious decision was made to incinerate between 180,000 and 230,000 mostly completely innocent civilians. The barbarism of it is beyond obscene. The other Allied powers signed off on it and agreed in advance that those weapons would be used against Japan. The horror of it is hard to fully get one's head around. In the initial blast in Hiroshima, 70,000 to 80,000 people were killed in the first few minutes as a result of the blast and the firestorm that engulfed the city. Tens of thousands more people died in the following weeks. The consequences in terms of cancer rates continued long after.

The Irish resolution, the role of Frank Aiken and the development of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons was a welcome attempt to try to rein in the obscenity and madness that was being pursued by the most powerful nations in the world. Even under this treaty, they are still legally allowed to hold these weapons and to dominate the UN Security Council to this day, and they can effectively veto efforts by any other country in the world to rein in their activities. It is also worth saying that while the commendable desire to prevent proliferation is in the treaty, we have seen very little sign of willingness on the part of those who, supposedly, legally hold nuclear arsenals to make a serious move towards the decommissioning of those nuclear arsenals. Many of those states continue to be part of the NATO military alliance, which has a first-strike policy on the use of nuclear weapons. The fact that any alliance would contemplate and continue with an official policy of reserving the right to have a first-strike policy on the use of nuclear weapons after what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is beyond comprehension and exposes the lie that the states which dominate NATO are in any way guardians of civilisation, peace or democracy. They are people who reserve the right to use mass murder and terror against civilians in the context of war.

In that context, it is also lamentable that we continue to facilitate the use of Shannon Airport by the US military machine when it continues to use depleted uranium. As well as being a possessor of a large nuclear arsenal, which it retains the right to use, it uses depleted uranium weapons to devastating effect in conflicts like the criminal war on Iraq that claimed the lives of up to 1 million people and where the consequences of the use of depleted uranium continue to give rise to high cancer rates and to birth defects in Iraqi children. It is quite shocking. There is the continued willingness to treat as normal states countries like Israel, which illegally possess hundreds of nuclear weapons and by doing so are further encouraging and inciting regimes like Iran potentially to want those weapons as well.

It is right to ponder the horror of nuclear weapons and the efforts globally to deal with them but we should be under no illusion that the threat of nuclear destruction is, like the states that reserve the power to use such weapons, sadly very much still with us.

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