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More than 120 nations adopt first treaty banning nuclear weapons

A man walks by a TV screen showing a news program reporting on North Korea's missile firing at Seoul Train Station in Seoul on Wednesday.
(Lee Jin-man / Associated Press)
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More than 120 countries have approved the first-ever treaty banning nuclear weapons at a United Nations meeting boycotted by all nuclear-armed nations.

Friday’s vote was 122 countries in favor with the Netherlands opposed and Singapore abstaining.

Elayne Whyte Gomez is president of the U.N. conference that negotiated the legally binding treaty. She said it was the first multilateral nuclear disarmament treaty to be concluded in more than 20 years.

Whyte Gomez said, “the world has been waiting for this legal norm for 70 years,” since the use of the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of World War II.

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