Ghana urged to play lead role in advocacy to ban nuclear weapons
DISCUSSANTS at a roundtable meeting to commemorate Nuclear Abolition Day have called on the government to play a leading role in the sub-region in calling for a ban on nuclear weapons.
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“We ask Ghana to use every opportunity available to rally fellow West African and African states and take leadership role in the call for a treaty banning nuclear weapons,” they said.
On the theme, “Nuclear abolition, a moral and humanitarian necessity: The role of Ghana,” the discussants, however, commended Ghana for showing “strong support to a treaty banning nuclear weapons when it participated in the Mexico Conference of States”.
They also recalled that Ghana recently signed onto the Austrian Humanitarian Pledge in support of a ban treaty.
Ghana commended
Setting the tone for the discussion, a Board Member of the Foundation for Security and Development in Africa (FOSDA), organisers of the meeting, Ms Amina Montia, said, “These are commendable steps and we ask for more. We ask Ghana to show stronger and consistent commitment to the process and call for a ban in the nearest future.”
Ms Montia said even though Ghana and most African states neither produced nor possessed nuclear weapon, “we should not settle for the status quo, which puts the world at risk of humanitarian catastrophe of unimaginable proportion”.
“We have been fortunate to avoid a detonation so far, but we must now stop relying on sheer luck and start negotiating a ban on nuclear weapons,” she stressed.
The Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Defence and Security, Mr Fritz Baffour, said the desire to ban nuclear weapons dated back to 1946, when the United Nations (UN) in a resolution, called for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons from the earth, explaining that although that was not complied with, it was the beginning of burgeoning movement worldwide to ban nuclear weapons.
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Ghana at the forefront
Mr Baffour said Ghana had been at the forefront of the struggle to ban or reduce nuclear weapons from the early 1960s.
“Ghana was among the first countries to host a ‘Ban the Bomb Summit’ in Accra and promote the establishment of nuclear weapon free zones throughout the world. It has been a signatory to all international treaties towards that aim,” he told the participants.
Health and environmental impact
In a presentation on the health and environmental impact of nuclear weapons, an official of the Ghana Red Cross Society, Mr Mahama Saladin, who described the nuclear weapon as “the greatest instrument of mass destruction”, took participants through the devastating effects of nuclear weapons.
He said nuclear weapons had short and long-term effects, adding that 70 years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, the impact was still felt and added his voice to the call for the ban on nuclear weapons.
Long overdue
An official of the National Commission on Small Arms, Mr Leonard Tettey, said in spite of its potential disastrous consequences, nuclear weapons remained the only one yet to get any international convention banning them, describing it as long overdue.