With North Korea’s state-controlled media warning that America’s “military provocations” risked triggering nuclear conflict, Senator Richard Gordon has called on the Senate to support the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement’s bid to achieve a world without nuclear weapons to protect humanity as an obligation towards future generations.
Gordon filed Senate Resolution No. 349, expressing the full support of the Senate of the Philippines in the appeal of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement for the global prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons.
“Whereas, given the real and serious threat and the catastrophic global consequences of any use of nuclear weapons, whether deliberate or not, and its general incompatibility with international humanitarian law, the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons is a humanitarian imperative,” he said in the resolution.
As of early 2017, there are approximately 14,900 nuclear warheads existing worldwide, according to the Federation of American Scientists, an organization dedicated to reducing the number and spread of nuclear weapons.
During the United Nations’ Conference on the Prohibition and Elimination of Nuclear Weapons held in Nagasaki, Japan in April 2017 that Gordon attended, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement appealed to all the states to participate in the next phase of the negotiations to prohibit nuclear weapons.
“We have witnessed the past devastation and heard of the ongoing physical and psychological suffering of thousands of atomic bomb survivors seventy-two years on. By negotiating and adopting a treaty that recognizes the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons and contains a clear and unambiguous prohibition, States have the opportunity to ensure that Nagasaki is the last place in history to have suffered the effects of an atomic bombing,” the Red Cross Movement appeal read.
The Red Cross pointed out that the destructive capacity of nuclear weapons in arsenals today is many times greater than the bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“The risk that nuclear weapons will again be used by intent, miscalculation or accident is higher than most people realize and ever increasing. The threat to humanity is beyond imagination,” it added.