THE United Nations is expected to pass a new convention banning nuclear weapons on Friday after the final draft was released on Monday.

The third and final draft circulated at the three-week conference at the UN headquarters in New York stated that the only way to guarantee the tools of mass destruction are never used again was to “completely eliminate” them.

The “legally binding” convention would ban the development, testing, production, acquisition and stockpiling of nuclear weapons.

Transferring or handing control of nukes to another nation or other party would also be banned, along with basing one country’s weapons in another.

Non-nuclear Nato members Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey currently host about 180 US nuclear bombs at six bases, including Turkey’s Incirlik, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Costa Rican ambassador and conference president Elayne Whyte Gomez said: “Each one of us has assumed the historic responsibility to give humankind an instrument that reflects the moral imperative of prohibiting nuclear weapons.

She said the goal was “a future free of nuclear weapons, as was the case more than seven decades ago,” following the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

The victims of fallout from nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands — the US carried out 23 tests there between 1946 and 1958, using the islanders as radiation guinea pigs — and elsewhere were also mentioned.

The United States, Britain, China, France and Russia — the original five nuclear powers — did not attend the conference, and the only Nato member present was the Netherlands. Negotiators hoped they would sign the convention in the future.

The other known nuclear powers are India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. South Africa and Libya voluntarily abandoned their nuclear weapons programmes.