Question for the candidates: Will the United States sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons?

Editor’s note: Alicia Sanders-Zakre, the policy and research coordinator at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, suggests that the 2024 US presidential candidates be asked whether they will join the international effort to ban nuclear weapons. (This is part of an “experts comment” series of questions for the candidates.)

Before the 2016 US presidential election, Princeton physicist Zia Mian wrote an essay asking then-candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the Bulletin whether they would be ready to start talks to ban nuclear weapons. Eight years and two presidents later, both the Trump and Biden administrations have rebuffed the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) and chosen instead to persist with current US policies to maintain and upgrade nuclear weapons—despite a legal obligation to disarm, public support for the TPNW, and the existential threat to humanity of adherence to the debated theory of nuclear deterrence.

The TPNW is the first international treaty banning all nuclear weapons activities, including nuclear use and threat of use, testing, stationing, and development. The treaty’s Article 4 provides a verifiable pathway for nuclear-armed states to join and disarm. And Articles 6 and 7 create the first international regime to provide assistance and remediation to people and environments harmed by nuclear weapons use and testing; an effort led by countries that have been bombarded by Soviet and British nuclear detonations. This treaty currently has 93 signatory states and 70 states parties from every region of the world.

The United States—like other nuclear-armed countries—has chosen to undermine and dismiss this good faith effort by nearly half the world’s governments, including US allies, to rid the world of nuclear weapons. In 2020, the Trump administration even urged states to withdraw their instruments of ratification. Meanwhile, the United States has failed to implement the obligation it undertook more than half a century ago under Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) to pursue nuclear disarmament and instead spent $51.5 billion in 2023 alone to upgrade its nuclear arsenal. The continued investment of nuclear powers in maintaining and rebuilding their nuclear arsenals, while paying mere lip service to disarmament, is a source of contention within the NPT and undermines the nuclear non-proliferation regime.

Foreign policy goals aside, US presidential candidates should adhere to democratic principles and align their policies with public opinion and support for the treaty among local governments to join the TPNW: According to a 2022 study, 65 percent of the US population supports joining the TPNW. Cities and towns across the country—from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles to Yellow Springs, Ohio—have adopted local resolutions calling on their government to join, alongside five US states. Members of the US Congress, as well as local and state politicians, have also called on the United States to join the ban treaty.

Support for the TPNW is based on a clear-eyed assessment of the risks that nuclear weapons pose as long as they exist—and an understanding of the naiveté of relying on the rationality of statemen like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, or former US president Donald Trump to decide the fate of humanity.

Scholars have shown that the reason humanity has escaped nuclear annihilation since the dawn of the nuclear age may have more to do with sheer luck than with any successful strategy.

No one will want to be around when luck runs out.

We know all too well what that would look like and the incapacity of humanitarian organizations to respond. A new report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons documents in gut-wrenching detail the harm that nuclear weapons have done to children and the threat they continue to pose to them, including those bombed by the United States in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some of those children survived and now give testimony to—and remind leaders of—the urgent need to abolish these weapons. This report adds to the robust body of literature on the devastating humanitarian and environmental consequences of nuclear weapons.

Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the United States and the world have continued to face the threat of accidental or intentional nuclear annihilation, a threat that has continued to grow in recent years. It is time to chart a new course and to eliminate nuclear weapons, which is the only fail-safe way to eliminate the threat of their use.

Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump should be asked: If elected President, will you sign and submit to the Senate for ratification the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons?