Is the world on the brink of nuclear catastrophe? This expert thinks so

The former federal member for Fremantle, Melissa Parke, is executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. I spoke to her on Thursday at the ICAN HQ in Geneva.

Fitz: Melissa, I do want to talk to you about the bombing of Iran and what it means for nuclear disarmament and the rest of it, but before we get to that, what a fascinating past you’ve had. And it all started with a law degree?

MP: I’d say it really started with a passion for justice. I had a few years of legal experience in private practice in Sydney and WA, but didn’t like it, especially the billing aspects of it. It wasn’t for me.

Melissa Parke: “Australia’s current reliance on US nuclear weapons in our defence policy is both dangerous and absurd.”Credit: Jenny Magee

Fitz: You must be the first lawyer in the history of Australia who didn’t like billing people?

MP: [Laughs.] Well, I didn’t. And so that’s when I went to work in the Bunbury Community Legal Centre helping people who couldn’t afford a private lawyer, did a few years there, and then I decided I wanted to pursue my dream of working with the UN. So I went back to uni and did a masters in international law. My first job with the UN was with the new peacekeeping mission in Kosovo in 1999, and on my first day there, my boss asked me to write a traffic code for Kosovo. We were building a nation from the ground up.

Fitz: And then to Gaza, in your mid-30s?

MP: Yes. I went in early 2002 for two-and-a-half years. The Palestinian people were very welcoming and warm, but they were also suffering under a brutal occupation. When I arrived, there was a bombing campaign going on by Israel. That included one evening when I was moving into the apartment I’d rented, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. I could see Israeli battleships and helicopters sitting offshore, and they were firing past my building into Yassar Arafat’s presidential compound next door. If it wasn’t so terrifying, it would have been a spectacular light and sound show. And that was my introduction to Gaza, where I worked as an international legal officer for the UN agency for the Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, reporting on violations of international human rights and humanitarian law.

Fitz: And from there to the United Nations headquarters itself, then Lebanon?

MP: Yes, and while in Lebanon I received an email from Dr Carmen Lawrence, the then-federal member for Fremantle, who said she was thinking of retiring and asked me if I would consider coming back to Australia to stand for ALP preselection in her seat. I knew I would always regret it if I didn’t give it a go.

Fitz: Lights, camera, Kevin07!

MP: Yes, and in parliament, the issues of concern to my Fremantle constituents tended to be the same things I was passionate about: that Australia should be a good global citizen, protect the environment, respect human rights and animal welfare, practice good governance and [be an] advocate for nuclear disarmament.

Fitz: And what propelled you to leave parliament a decade later, even though by that point you’d had a stint as the minister for international development in the second Rudd government?

MP: I’d been there for three terms and felt it was time to let someone else have the extraordinary privilege of being the federal MP for Freo. And frankly I was pretty burnt out. The next year I was asked to become an ambassador for ICAN Australia, and it went from there.

Fitz: Which brings us indeed to ICAN. What is the central idea?

MP: The idea is to abolish nuclear weapons globally. The campaign started in Melbourne in 2007, with a small group of people sitting around a kitchen table who decided to start a campaign based on earlier successful campaigns to ban landmines and cluster munitions, as well as chemical and biological weapons – you ban these inhumane weapons, and they become morally and legally unacceptable. Within 10 years of having started that campaign, ICAN had become a global civil society movement headquartered in Geneva, made up of hundreds of partner organisations around the world.

A mushroom cloud after an atomic bomb test in French Polynesia in 1971.Credit: Getty

It won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its work to highlight the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, and for helping to get a new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons adopted at the UN General Assembly with the support of 122 countries. That treaty is basically the only bright light for nuclear disarmament, which had been stalled for decades.

Fitz: And yet while half the countries of the world have signed that treaty, and many more support it, Australia still isn’t one of them?

MP: Not yet. Anthony Albanese, in 2018 when he was in opposition, introduced a resolution to the national ALP platform, that Labor in government would join the treaty and Anthony, I think, has a personal commitment on this issue. Labor is now in its second term of government and it has a great opportunity to honour that platform commitment and its own strong history of championing nuclear disarmament by joining the treaty. There will, of course, be resistance from the defence establishment, but Australia’s current reliance on US nuclear weapons in our defence policy is both dangerous (because it makes us a nuclear target) and absurd (because the US would never sacrifice one of its cities for ours). If Australia was to join the nuclear ban treaty we would be improving our own security and that of our region and the world.

Fitz: Is Iran a signatory of the treaty to ban nuclear weapons?

MP: Iran and the United States are both parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty from 1970, which aims to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, requires nuclear-armed states to negotiate disarmament, and allows countries to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes under strict safeguards. Israel is not a party to the NPT. None of those countries have yet joined the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and we are encouraging them to do so. But Iran is entitled under the NPT to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

Fitz: The problem being it’s only a small step from having a nuclear energy program to having nuclear weapons?

MP: Until the attacks on it by Israel, Iran had been co-operating with international inspectors and engaging in talks with the US about its nuclear program. US intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Agency had assessed that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon. And so the attacks by Israel and the United States on Iran were clear violations of international law, since Iran had not attacked either country, had not threatened an imminent attack on those countries, and did not have nuclear weapons. These attacks were not only illegal but also counterproductive because Iran has now made a decision to suspend its co-operation with international inspections. Israel is the only country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons, and it has never subjected itself to international inspections. It is arguably Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons that has emboldened it to be a nuclear bully, to commit atrocities and genocide in Gaza and to attack other countries in the region, not only Iran, but also Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

Fitz: But hang on, Melissa, Iran actually had launched some ballistic missiles at Israel before this strike.

MP: The two incidents in April and October last year involved Iran responding to assassinations by Israel. They are entirely separate from Israel’s June attacks this year, which Netanyahu himself claimed were “pre-emptive self-defence” based on Iran being close to developing a nuclear weapon, which we know is not the case. That is, even Israel itself is not claiming the June attack on Iran was retaliation for last year’s events.

Fitz: I confess surprise at the strength of your language. As the executive director of ICAN it seems you’re in a quasi-diplomatic role and it is rare that diplomats use very strong language like saying Israel’s committing “genocide” in Gaza. And yet you don’t hesitate.

MP: Well, I’m an advocate and an international lawyer rather than a diplomat. The word “genocide” has been applied by many international legal experts to the Israel/Gaza situation, and every major international human rights organisation, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. “Genocide” is not an emotive expression, it is a legal one, applying the terms of the Genocide Convention to what is happening in Gaza, and it is very clear. The International Court of Justice has said it is plausible that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. You know it’s not a controversial opinion in most of the world.

Fitz: And you take it as absolute fact that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons? How do you know?

MP: The same way we know that every other non-nuclear weapon state that is party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty is not developing nuclear weapons, because there’s a very strict inspections regime that’s carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which the international community trusts. US intelligence and IAEA had both assessed that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon. So I’m not saying it as a guess or an assumption.

Fitz: And so the net result of the American bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities a fortnight ago?

MP: The world is on the brink of nuclear catastrophe right now. These events expose the double standards inherent around nuclear weapons. You had here two countries with nuclear weapons – Israel and the US – attacking another country that does not have nuclear weapons, Iran. And as former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, “There are no right hands for wrong weapons”. Nuclear weapons are the only devices ever created that have the capacity to destroy all complex life on earth. No country should be able to threaten the end of life on this planet. No country should have these nuclear weapons. And these events have shown that you can’t bomb your way to nuclear non-proliferation or security. You’ve got to negotiate agreements. You’ve got to return to the diplomatic process because these illegal attacks did not make the region or the world any safer. They’ve made it more dangerous by undermining the non-proliferation regime and international law itself. Striking nuclear installations is specifically banned under international law and risks causing radioactive contamination that’s harmful to human health and the environment. This misadventure by Israel and the US may well have prompted Iran to consider building a nuclear weapon for the first time.

Fitz: What is the doomsday scenario that keeps you awake at night?

MP: This year the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest we’ve ever been to global catastrophe – and that was before the recent India/Pakistan and Israel/US/Iran confrontations. There are more than 12,000 nuclear weapons in the world, with 2000 of them on high-alert launch status. As long as any nuclear weapons remain anywhere they are bound one day to be used, whether by design or by accident or miscalculation – the situation becomes even more dangerous with the increasing integration by the military of AI into nuclear command and control systems. When the experts “war-game” likely scenarios, there’s virtually none where the firing of one nuclear weapon doesn’t lead to an escalatory exchange that results in all-out nuclear war.

Fitz: And the bombing of Iran makes this more, not less, likely? Well, you didn’t choose your words carefully on Israel, so what about US President Donald Trump? Is he now the most dangerous man in the world?

MP: We don’t know. It’s entirely unpredictable. For instance, during his election campaign and then in his message to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, Trump was talking about the need for denuclearisation, and saying he was going to talk to Russia and China about denuclearisation, and that nuclear weapons cost so much money that could be spent on other things, which is all true.

ICAN’s latest report shows that the nuclear armed states spent $US100 billion last year on their nuclear arsenals. The US is spending trillions of dollars on its nuclear modernisation program. So, Trump says he wants to denuclearise, but at the same time is approving increases to nuclear weapons modernisation programs. So we haven’t seen him act consistently on this issue, and we really don’t know which way it will go. He’s apparently quite keen to get a Nobel Peace Prize. So if he could eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the earth, maybe [he could get one].

Fitz: So if he could do that, you’d call it all even on the card for the many shocking things that he’s done?

MP: Well, I probably wouldn’t call it even because they are pretty bad. But it would be a great contribution to humanity for him to do that.

Fitz: All strength to you and your organisation.

Peter FitzSimons is a journalist and columnist. Connect via X.

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