Melissa Parke is a soft-spoken anti-nukes activist from Australia who advocates for the elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide. Her bullhorn is the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a Geneva-based civil society group that she leads in the global nuclear disarmament movement. She is here in New York City this week at the United Nations, participating in the third meeting of the states parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW. It was adopted in 2017, the same year it later won a Nobel Peace Prize.
The conference, from March 3-10, coincides with the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings; the first use through testing of the nuclear weapon Trinity; and the 80th anniversary of the UN, whose first resolution focused on the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Activists are using the conference to cheer on states parties to the treaty amid the risk that use of nuclear weapons has never been higher even as more countries join the pact. In 2024, Indonesia, São Tomé and Príncipe, the Solomon Islands and Sierra Leone ratified it, totaling 73 countries, or nearly half of the world.
TPNW members call this high-risk moment — shadowed by Russia’s threats to use nukes in Ukraine — an opportunity to turn the tide toward full denuclearization globally. They perceive President Donald Trump’s remarks about denuclearization at the World Economic Forum in January as somewhat positive, given that he said: “Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about . . . . So, we want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible.”
As Parke said, “These are the only devices ever created with the capacity to wipe out all complex life on Earth.”
The treaty was adopted by the UN General Assembly on July 7, 2017, with 122 countries in favor. Rejecting the theory of nuclear deterrence, it instead emphasized the damaging humanitarian effects of nukes. Seventy-three countries have since ratified the pact. Rooted in international humanitarian law, it emerged from decades of advocacy from non-nuclear states, civil society groups and survivors of nuclear bombings and tests.
Unlike the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which allows nuclear-armed states to retain their arsenals indefinitely while preventing proliferation, the TPNW promotes a complete ban on the development, possession, use and threat of nuclear weapons. Yet, its advocates have not been able to convince the chief nuclear states, the United States and Russia, to disarm, reflecting overall staunch opposition from the other nuclear powers and their allies — primarily European countries.
Parke, 58, is a former minister for international development and Parliamentarian with Australia’s Labor Party. She has been running ICAN since September 2023. Her involvement in disarmament began in the 1990s, when she campaigned against a proposed global nuclear waste dump in western Australia. Beyond politics, Parke has served as an ambassador for ICAN Australia in a career spanning international law and human rights, including working for the UN in Kosovo, Gaza and Lebanon. More recently, she was a member of the UN Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen.
In PassBlue’s conversation with her on March 4, she discussed TPNW’s significance in fighting nuclear proliferation and the challenges in achieving a world free of nuclear weapons. The interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and flow.
PassBlue: How did you get into this work? What brings you joy and satisfaction from it? What are the frustrations? Is the world safer because of the treaty?
Melissa Parke: I used to work for UNRWA. I remember attending a Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemoration at Gaza Harbor one August. Hundreds of Palestinian children had gathered, crafting small paper boats with candles inside them. As night fell, they lit the candles and set the boats afloat on the harbor. It was extraordinarily beautiful and deeply moving. These were children who themselves were being bombed, yet they were remembering the children of another time and place who had suffered the same fate.
Just last year, I visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the first time. I met Hibakusha, now in their 80s and 90s, who had been children during the bombings. It struck me that some of them were the very children remembered by those Palestinian children two decades earlier. And now, some of these Hibakusha were leading rallies in support of Gaza. They did this because they understood; these tragedies are connected across space and time. The same justifications used for nuclear weapons are used to justify war on children, even genocide. The same governments, the same corporations, are often complicit in supplying the weapons or enabling these atrocities. That realization was a key moment for me.
I also grew up in Australia, where British nuclear-weapons testing in the 1950s and 60s devastated Indigenous communities. The primary victims were Indigenous Australians, whose lands were contaminated and whose descendants continue to suffer intergenerational health effects. These injustices shaped my understanding of nuclear weapons as not just a security issue but a profound human rights violation.
As a parliamentarian in Australia, I became involved in the campaign for nuclear disarmament. I was deeply inspired by former Australian minister Tom Uren, a prisoner of war in Japan during World War II. He was just outside Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped. When he returned home, he dedicated his life to peace and nuclear disarmament, calling it “the most important struggle for the human race.” My entire career . . . has been about justice. And to me, there is no greater injustice against humanity and the planet than nuclear weapons.
PB: How did you get specifically involved in the anti-nukes movement?
MP: I originally started in Melbourne in 2007 with a small group of people sitting around a kitchen table, asking themselves what they could do to rid the world of its most dangerous weapons. Given the failure — the outright refusal — of nuclear-armed states to disarm in accordance with their legal obligations under the NPT, they decided to launch a campaign modeled after successful efforts to ban landmines and cluster munitions. The principle was to prohibit the weapons, and they become both legally and morally unacceptable to use.
Within 10 years, ICAN moved its base to Geneva, built a global network of hundreds of partner organizations, evolved into a powerful civil society movement and won the Nobel Peace Prize. ICAN was recognized for highlighting the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons and for playing a pivotal role in the adoption of the TPNW. Many said it couldn’t be done. But this achievement is a testament to the power of collective action in pursuit of an urgent and necessary cause.
PB: Is the world safer because of the TPNW?
MP: The treaty and its states parties are sending strong messages about the fallacy of nuclear deterrence . . . how it endangers the entire world. They are raising alarms about nuclear threats and the ongoing modernization of nuclear arsenals, which is wasting global resources that could instead be used to address urgent crises like climate change and social inequality.
PB: The goal of TPNW is total elimination of nuclear weapons, but how can you get Britain, China, France, Russia and the US, the major nuke powers and not parties to the treaty, to drop their weapons?
MP: The whole point of the treaty is to pressure nuclear-armed states — the rest of the world making it clear that it is unacceptable to possess weapons of mass destruction. These are the only devices ever created with the capacity to wipe out all complex life on Earth. The goal is to turn nuclear weapons into a reputational liability for the states that hold onto them. These countries maintain contradictory positions: they claim these weapons are essential for their own security, yet insist that no one else should have them.
But the more they cling to their nuclear arsenals and argue that they are vital for security, the more others will want them. So, they are actively encouraging proliferation. TPNW states parties have identified nuclear deterrence as a major obstacle to disarmament, and a strong declaration on this will emerge from this meeting. Some nuclear-armed or nuclear-complicit states argue that the TPNW takes a soft, humanitarian approach, not rooted in real security. But the reality is the opposite. They are talking about catastrophic humanitarian and environmental consequences — about the wholesale destruction of infrastructure, ecosystems, economies, the deaths of millions from blast burns and radiation and the deaths of billions from starvation in a nuclear winter.
PB: Japan, which is the only country to have suffered from a nuclear weapon attack, has never participated in a TPNW conference. How can you convince Japan to take part, even as an “observer”?
MP: I’ve just been speaking to a group of Japanese parliamentarians who are here. There’s a parliamentary conference that ICAN convenes with every meeting of state parties. We’ve got . . . 27 parliamentarians from 17 countries that are nuclear armed states or nuclear allied states. And they said they will work very hard to see Japan become an observer to the next meeting of state parties. I said, no, that’s aiming far too low.
Japan is in a unique position to be leading the issue of disarmament, given its history. Yet it will not bring itself to even engage with the treaty, even though it has a lot of expertise to contribute. Japanese government officials, when I visited last year, expressed a lot of fear about losing their alliance with the Americans if they were to join the treaty. But as I’ve told the Parliamentarians today, many countries with strong military alliances with the United States are already parties to this treaty, such as Thailand, Philippines and New Zealand. My own country, Australia, has not yet joined the treaty, but it has observed all the meetings of state parties and is observing this one.
So, there is no reason on Earth why Japan should not be here as an observer. However, I don’t think the Parliamentarians should settle for Japan merely observing; they should aim for Japan to join this treaty and take its rightful role as a leader in this area. The reality is that the Japanese people overwhelmingly support the TPNW. Every poll shows that nearly 99 percent of the population wants Japan to join.
PB: How does ICAN assess the role of the US in nuclear disarmament work, especially in light of President Trump’s recent remarks on denuclearization?
MP: President Trump has actually had a long track record of talking about nuclear weapons and the danger they pose to humanity. So, it’s not something new for him. He raised it during the election campaign and for decades leading up to this. He mentioned it in his message to the World Economic Forum in Davos [in January] and at a press conference at the White House in February. He also talked about the massive amounts of money being squandered by nuclear-armed states every year: $91 billion, according to our own report. Any international leader who takes this issue seriously and calls for reducing or ending nuclear weapons is something we take seriously and want to encourage.
It’s important to remember that when President Ronald Reagan came into office, he promised to rebuild America’s military and confront the Soviet Union. Yet, seven years later, he was in Iceland, almost eliminating nuclear weapons with President Mikhail Gorbachev. They didn’t completely eliminate them, but they did significantly reduce them through the START pact.
PB: Russia has threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine in its war against the country. How has that possibility affected TPNW? Are more countries joining the treaty because of Russian dangers? Have some countries de-ratified the treaty as the war in Ukraine continues?
MP: We haven’t seen any countries leave the treaty, but we have witnessed significant growth. I think we’re seeing, especially in the context of Ukraine, that nuclear weapons are not providing the stability and security that is often claimed by nuclear-armed states. Instead, they’ve been used to coerce and intimidate. And when we talk about tactical nuclear weapons, it’s important to note that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed a quarter of a million people, would today be considered tactical nuclear weapons. But some of these are sitting there with megatons, 100 kilotons or more.
PB: Since its adoption in 2017, what is the treaty’s biggest achievement?
MP: Having 73 countries, civil society members, affected community representatives, scientists and academics come together from all around the world to discuss the threat posed by nuclear weapons and the urgent need to abolish them is incredibly powerful. Progress is also being made in redressing the harms to communities and environments impacted by nuclear weapons use and testing.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. often linked the Black freedom struggle with the need for nuclear disarmament. In his famous speech at Riverside Church in New York, he talked about the “fierce urgency of now” and warned that there is such a thing as being “too late.” I think we really feel that sense of urgency, along with momentum, especially with the 80th anniversaries. All of these things are coalescing around this moment. So, yeah, it’s a really exciting time.
This article was made possible through a grant from the Lex International Fund.
Arshi Qureshi is a freelance journalist based in New York City, focusing on politics and social issues. She holds a master’s degree in political journalism from the Columbia University School of Journalism.
