The agreement, she added, “is a very clear statement that the international community wants to move to a completely different security paradigm that does not include nuclear weapons.”

More than 120 nations adopted the first international treaty banning nuclear weapons on Friday at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. To loud applause and cheers, Elayne Whyte Gomez, president of the U.N. conference that has been negotiating the legally binding treaty, announced the results of the “historic” vote — 122 nations in favor, the Netherlands opposed, and Singapore abstaining. “We (are) … saying to our children that, yes, it is possible to inherit a world free from nuclear weapons.”

“The world has been waiting for this legal norm for 70 years,” since atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 at the end of World War II, she said. “It is the most important step in my lifetime towards the Hibakusha (survivors) goal of totally abolishing all these criminal weapons of mass destruction.”

Although there was reason to celebrate, the fact that all nuclear powers, including the United States, boycotted the negotiations takes some of the wind out of the proponents’ sails, CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk reports. During a vote at the UN General Assembly in December, 113 countries voted in favour of starting negotiations on the new treaty while 35 opposed the move and 13 abstained. She added that it will be opened for signatures in September and come into force when 50 countries have ratified it, and that its language leaves the door open for nuclear weapon states to become parties to the agreement. Ambassador Nikki Haley said on March 27 when talks began on the treaty that “there is nothing I want more for my family than a world with no nuclear weapons, but we have to be realistic.”

But she asked whether anyone thought North Korea would give up its nuclear weapons, arguing that Pyongyang would be “cheering” a nuclear ban treaty and Americans and others would be at risk.
The United Nations votes in favour of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons with 122 in favour, 1 abstention, and 1 against. The treaty conference and negotiations had been boycotted by the nuclear weapon states and by the members of NATO.