Text Fwd: WILPF Statement on the North Korea Nuclear Weapon test

* Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
May 26, 2009
WILPF Response to the Nuclear Weapons Test of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea)

The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) is deeply concerned by and condemns the nuclear weapon test conducted by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea at GMT 0054 on 25 May 2009. This test shows the urgent need for the rapid entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and a powerful shift from security strategies relying on nuclear weapons to those predicated on collective human security.

If the CTBT were in force, an on-site inspection could quickly determine whether the seismic event recorded in the DPRK was indeed a nuclear explosion and if so, its precise characteristics. The Treaty would also give greater legitimacy to international responses. The Executive Secretary of the Preparatory Commission of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), Tibor Tóth, has deplored the DPRK’s action as “a serious violation of the norm established by the [CTBT] and as such deserves universal condemnation.” If the Treaty were in force, its member states could adopt sanctions against the DPRK for violating international law. Currently, the task of coordinating an international response falls to the UN Security Council, a body not entitled to enforce international norms per se, but an unrepresentative political body dominated by the interests of its five permanent, veto-wielding members: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The UN Security Council has issued a presidential statement and is currently preparing another resolution, following on Resolution 1718, which was issued after the first DPRK test in October 2006. Yet two of the permanent Security Council members, China and the United States, have not yet ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. WILPF calls on all states outside the CTBT- China, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, United States, India, Pakistan and the DPRK - to sign and ratify without delay or conditions and to make unilateral declarations of their commitments to a nuclear weapon test moratorium until national level processes for ratification are complete.

All nuclear explosions, in fact all nuclear materials, leave a radioactive legacy for thousands of generations. The exposure of the population, the water, and the land of the Korean Peninsula to this legacy is irresponsible and immoral. The people of Kilju likely had no warning and will suffer from the legacy of this test. Women in particular have suffered from the long-lived mutagenic and tetragenic effects of nuclear weapons tests. The long-term impacts of nuclear testing are so great to all those living near test sites that the French Government has recently acknowledged the harm it caused by testing in the South Pacific and is offering compensation for its nuclear testing victims. WILPF calls on all states possessing nuclear weapons to immediately shut down their nuclear test facilities and to acknowledge and compensate the victims of their testing programmes.

The DPRK first got its nuclear technology while party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)- wherein it agreed to never acquire nuclear weapons in exchange for the assistance, materials, and technology to develop nuclear energy. When the government of the DPRK withdrew from the NPT, and did not return the nuclear technology it had acquired from Treaty-related cooperative agreements, it abused the grand bargain of the Treaty and demonstrated the proliferation risks associated with the development of nuclear energy. Every nuclear energy facility is a bomb waiting to happen, whether through an accident like the one at Chernobyl, or by providing the raw materials to make these horrible weapons. WILPF calls on all states to join the International Renewable Energy Agency and develop clean, safe, sustainable energy technology while shifting away from the environmental and proliferation risks of nuclear energy.

The communiqué issued on North Korean Radio, which stated that this test was “part of measures to enhance the Republic’s self-defensive nuclear deterrent in all directions” highlights the urgency for other states- both those who possess nuclear weapons and those who rely on the nuclear umbrella of other states- to reduce the reliance on nuclear weapons in their security strategies and to immediately abandon the failed concept of nuclear deterrence. As the Canberra Commission said in 1996, “So long as any state has even one nuclear weapon, it is inevitable that other states -- or even non-state actors -- will try to get them.” WILPF calls on all states to eliminate the reliance on nuclear weapons from their security strategies and to effectively negotiate the elimination of the weapons themselves.

While the DPRK communiqué stated that this test would “contribute to safeguard the sovereignty of the country,” WILPF recognizes that the only true way to contributing to anyone’s safety and sovereignty is to move from a unilateral and isolationist security paradigm to one of cooperative and collective human security.


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