Today marks the annual International Day for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Awareness, which seeks to raise public awareness and understanding of disarmament issues. Weapons of mass destruction, in particular nuclear weapons, are the main focus of the day, owing to their destructive power and the threat that they pose to humanity. And while it is indeed important to address such issues and use events to spread awareness, many of the UN and international days are starting to seem like a checklist of things the UN is failing to deal with, especially since Israel launched its genocide on Gaza. What is the point of holding days against more weapons of mass destruction, genocide, discrimination and denial of self-determination if the global architecture is unable to do anything about these problems? There has now been a genocide in Gaza since October 2023. The Palestinian right to self-determination is drifting further and further away as Israel annexes more and more land, and several nations are actually upgrading their nuclear arsenals. Iran is not one of them; it does not even have such weapons. The US and Israel are. And yet, it is the former that is being criticised, sanctioned and now bombed by the latter.
A key theme of the bombings has been the false allegations from the US and Israel that Iran is trying to or is close to acquiring a nuclear bomb. The US, stalwart champion of the rules-based order that it is, has decided not to let this slide, all while expanding its own nuclear arsenal, has allowed the New START nuclear treaty with Russia to expire and is pushing its military spending to a record $901 billion. In the aftermath of the ongoing attacks on Iran, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency has affirmed that Iran has no structured nuclear weapons programme. But this just about sums up the current global order. Powerful nations act with impunity, all while claiming to uphold a ‘rules-based order’, while the countries actually playing by the rules are attacked for totally made-up offences by the offenders themselves.
What is worse than this trend is the fact that the international order, particularly the UN, seems nowhere closer to doing anything about it. In response to the ongoing illegal strikes on Iran, the UN secretary general condemned the military escalation in the Middle East and declared that the use of force by the US, Israel and Iran was undermining peace and security. But this lacks any moral clarity. Where is the recognition that it is the US and Israel who have illegally attacked Iran based on false pretences and that Iran is actually defending itself? Given the fact that the Zionist alliance is actually manipulating solid UN principles, in this case disarmament and non-proliferation, to advance their illegal aims, it would seem incumbent upon the international order to call this out and distance itself from such schemes. Failure to do so will only undermine important principles in the long-run. Already, one wonders what the point of having an International Day for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Awareness is.
