Photograph Source: xiquinhosilva – CC BY 2.0

All this week, professional dreamers who insist on the abolition of nuclear weapons have been meeting at the United Nations in New York. The very upbeat gathering was the 3rd “Meeting of States Parties,” a treaty-speak for the 73 UN member states that ratified the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

What’s so extraordinary about the TPNW, in the words of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons which helped shepherd the treaty through the UN negotiating process and won a Nobel Prize for it, is that “it is the first globally applicable treaty that categorically prohibits the most destructive, inhumane instruments of war ever created.”

The prohibition applies only to states that ratify, so the U.S. can continue its 80-year H-bomb frenzy of radioactive pollution and global bomb threats — known quaintly as “deterrence” — a collapsed charade of terror and unimaginable risk-taking that most of the world has renounced.

Among the 73 “states parties” at this week’s meetings are major players on the world stage including Brazil. There are also over a dozen treaty “signatory states” from........

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