Ivana Hughes

And then it was, I think that whole intention

2010, there was actually a review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that actually had come up with a kind of action plan that was very promising.

It was a 13 steps towards a world free of nuclear weapons kind of action plan with

sort of very specific, both a kind of set of goals and timelines and so on.

And then by 2015, all of that had collapsed.

And it's large part because of what happened in Ukraine in 2014.

Now we start to see this, you know, distrust between the United States and Russia.

It's again, it's no longer, you know, maybe we're working together to rid the world of the threat, which was really the goal of both Reagan and Gorbachev.

Instead, now we're adversaries again.

And now, in some sense, the international community is sort of locked in on...

kind of living in a world which could end at any point.

And it was really a group, a large group of states.

This was an effort that was beginning right around that time.

They're focused on what people refer to as humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons.

So this is, again, going back to what have nuclear weapons done to people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

What have they done through these nuclear so-called nuclear testing programs to 2000 explosions around the planet?

And what is the research, the kind of stuff that I've been describing, nuclear winter, ozone layer destruction, so on, that tells us about what is at stake in the world with nuclear weapons.

So these states...

started negotiating eventually an agreement, which is called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

That was negotiated in 2017, and it's an international treaty