Pacific Island states have an important, ongoing role to play in the campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
The "Baker" underwater nuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Dozens of World War II vessels were used as targets for this weapons test, and now lie on the atoll's lagoon floor. Photo: US Navy. Photo: Supplied/ Giff Johnson
The comment by Pacific researcher Dr Vanessa Griffen comes as the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons today received the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Campaign, a coalition of NGOs, organised the nuclear weapons ban treaty adopted in July by 122 states, including six pacific countries, in the UN General Assembly.
Dr Griffen, a long-time anti-nuclear advocate, said it would be significant if all 12 Pacific Island states ratified the treaty.
"That would be quite a high percentage of the fifty that we need. And we have, I think, a vested historical and moral and health interest in this treaty, because there are two sections of it, on victims assistance and environmental remediation, which are directly relevant to the Pacific," said Dr Vanessa Griffen.
This picture from KCNA - taken on 29 August and released on 30 August - shows North Korea's Hwasong-12 lifting off from an undisclosed location near Pyongyang. Photo: AFP / KCNA via KNS
Dr Griffen said the Nobel award was timely given the treaty and the current threat of nuclear war.
Listen to Dateline Pacific interview about the threat of nuclear weapons with Dr Vanessa Griffen
North Korea threat
The level of threat over the North Korean nuclear programme, was also mentioned this morning in Oslo by the Campaign's executive director, Beatrice Fihn, in the Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
Animosity between US President Donald Trump and the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had created a risk of global nuclear annihilation greater than during the Cold War.
Dr Vanessa Griffen Photo: Gem Romuld, ICAN Australia.
Ms Fihn said that it showed how widespread destruction which would affect the whole world was just one "tantrum away".
"We have a choice, the end of nuclear weapons or the end of us," said Ms Fihn.
While 122 nations signed the treaty, at least fifty would to have the treaty ratified in their own country for it to enter into force. The six Pacific Island countries that signed the treaty at the UN are Fiji, Kiribati, Palau, Samoa, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.
The UN Security Council during an emergency meeting over North Korea's latest nuclear test, on 4 September, 2017, at UN Headquarters in New York. Photo: AFP
According to Dr Griffen, the direct experience of being affected by nuclear testing in the Pacific Islands region underpinned commitment of regional states to the treaty.
Pacific Islanders already knew intimately about the health and genetic impacts, as well as displacement caused by nuclear testing, particularly in states such as Marshall Islands and the French Pacific.
"The Pacific states have been really great, not just in the immediate adoption of the treaty, but all the years before of... having a resolution to say we must negotiate for a treaty, attending the humanitarian conferences that preceded the General Assembly resolution that produced the Treaty process."
Anti-nuclear campaigning has been conducted in the Pacific Islands for decades. This demonstration in Suva in the 1970s features Dr Vanessa Griffen on the right. Photo: Supplied/Dr Vanessa Griffen.
Consequences don't adhere to borders
Of the bigger countries in the wider South Pacific region, Indonesia, New Zealand and Chile have signed the treaty for the nuclear weapons ban.
But Australia voted against the resolution, along with nuclear weapon-bearing states like the US, Israel, Russia, France and the United Kingdom.
However Dr Griffen urged the international community as a whole to wake up to the global consequences of nuclear war.
"What would happen to food supply, to nutrition, to food production, if you have a black cloud surroundnig the earth, as it would, or it would move around the earth, covering the sun.
"We simply cannot see anything sane about these weapons, and the fact they can possibly be used. The states' boundaries simply do not matter in this case," she warned.