Answers + Evidence

The abolition of nuclear weapons is an idea whose time has come, and a future we must achieve. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still a lot of questions.

Fortunately, we’ve got answers. Check out our Q&A, below — and learn why abolition is getting such strong, nonpartisan support that even skeptics have to give it a fair hearing. Want to take the answers with you? Download our formatted factsheet.

If you’ve got a question that we haven’t answered, be sure to let us know by clicking the box to the right. We’ll do our best to respond — and we might even add your question to the list of Answers + Evidence.

is abolition possible?

Actually, the vast majority of nations have already renounced nuclear weapons by their participation in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Many of these nations, like Brazil, at one point deliberated on whether to develop nuclear weapons capacity, and rejected that course. And the former states of the Soviet Union decided to give the nuclear weapons deployed on their soil back to Russia.

But the most powerful example is certainly apartheid-era South Africa, which had a secret nuclear weapons program that had produced six bombs. When President F.W. de Klerk came to power, he told his advisors that they needed to do two things in order to bring South Africa back into the community of nations: 1) abolish apartheid and 2) abolish their nuclear weapons. South Africa completed its disarmament in 1991, becoming the first nation to voluntarily give up nuclear weapons it had developed itself.