Girl Power and Atomic Radiation: Re-Setting the Definition of Protection
October 24, henceforth is a day to celebrate, and mark on the calendar: the return of hope and a commitment to future generations in the hearts of men and women who have chosen to support a new path forward towards a nuclear-weapons-free Planet Earth.
Honduras became the 50th nation to ratify the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), bringing the international legal process across the threshold and the Treaty will enter into force in 90 days. Nuclear, like chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction will be illegal, and the forward-looking process of national-self-declaration as nuclear-weapons-free states will begin while protocols for nuclear transition are refined.
In honor of these events Gender and Radiation Impact Project announces a new initiative: Girl Power and Atomic Radiation, Re-Setting the Definition of Protection.
“Our work shows that radiation regulation is based on the adult, primarily male, workforce required to create and maintain the nuclear fission industrial base. The protection rules fail to actually protect our human lifecycle—females of any age are outside the boundary of current protection and we lack sufficient data on impact to either the male, or female, parts of the reproductive phase,” said Mary Olson, Director of Gender and Radiation Impact Project.
“Revisions in society require hope. The growing support for the new TPNW is a source of hope, and inspires our ‘first-step’ approach towards effective radiation protection. GRIP recommends a first step which would keep the same structure, which relies on a single Reference Individual. It is time to retire Reference Man (and his hermaphrodite cousin), and adopt in his place, a new Reference Little Girl.” GRIP would apply this Reference to everyone.
Gender and Radiation Impact Project (GRIP) is proud to have been called to support the vision and the journey to new Treaty. GRIP was able to reflect on nuclear impacts like indiscriminate destruction, greater harm to Indigenous Peoples, and disproportionate harm to half the world’s population (female) from ongoing radiation exposure.
Mary Olson, GRIP founder, spoke to the UN General Assembly, bringing the truth about uranium impacts and environmental justice, as well as radiation harm to the 2010 Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In that review of the NPT a short statement about the need to consider the Humanitarian Consequences of nuclear weapons won support for inclusion.
It is the Humanitarian consequences, not considered in current nuclear accords, which roots the TPNW in the jurisdiction of the General Assembly, and in Humanitarian Law, like the 1999 Mine Ban Treaty. Honored to be called to present the findings that ionizing radiation is more harmful to females compared to males, as evidence of previously invisible humanitarian impacts, GRIP founder, Mary Olson spoke at the Vienna Conference on Humanitarian Consequences of Nuclear Weapons, 2014; with the UN delegations of Ireland and Austria in New York, at side session on Gender and Nuclear Weapons during the review of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 2015; 2016 with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) at a regional Red Cross / Red Crescent meeting in St Petersburg, Russia; and in 2017, GRIP hosted, with Austria, a series of side events during the negotiation of the TPNW; in 2020 GRIP was again called by the ICRC to participate in a consultation to update findings on humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons.
Today GRIP is pleased to announce a new initiative: Girl Power and Atomic Radiation, which will review the bases of existing regulation of public and occupational exposure to ionizing radiation, and open a dialogue across disciplines for how to create a new regulatory basis that would be protective of the human life-cycle.
Revisiting the use, and allowable level of release of ionizing radiation to our environment is long over-due. The affirmation of life in the TPNW and the jurisdiction of Humanitarian Law, home to the Universal Statement of Human Rights, is an opportunity to address the need for policies, practices and regulations that are appropriate to the whole human family, rather than the military and paramilitary workforces of the Manhattan Project, Cold War and ongoing nuclear weapons regimes. Stories of nuclear impacts on communities are shared at Nuclear Voices and #stillhere.
For more on the findings on the disproportionate impact of ionizing radiation on girls and women compared to boys and men, see “Disproportionate Impact of Radiation and Radiation Regulation” (Olson, 2019).
The text of the treaty is quite brief and affirms a self-determination process for nations to make a declaration of nuclear-weapons-free lands and waters which is now guaranteed as a right under international Humanitarian Law. Mechanisms for transition by any state that has nuclear weapons are laid out. The Nobel Peace Prize winning (2017) International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) is a great resource on TPNW.
The path to universalization of any the treaty takes time. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which remains in-force along side the new Treaty required more than two decades to become close to universal. GRIP looks forward to supporting this process for TPNW.
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May 2015 United Nations Conference to Review the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, side session on Gender and Nuclear Weapons sponsored by Ireland and others; Mary Olson on panel.