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I remember the morning in early 2009 when I called on then Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda to tell him about the news that broke the previous night. I said, “Have you heard, Pak, that President Obama has committed himself to having the CTBT ratified?”

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 10, 1996, and Indonesia signed it later that month. The treaty bans all nuclear explosions in all environments, whether they are for military or civilian purposes.

Hassan looked startled for a second, like someone who had just been granted a wish that he thought was impossible. “That’s ours,” he said. “That’s our ideology!”

His successor, Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa, put it another way at a United Nations conference in 2010: “Indonesia’s commitment to the pursuit of nuclear disarmament is total and absolute.”

Hassan and Marty were both referring to the same thing: Indonesia’s constitutionally mandated quest for a world of peace and social justice, which cannot be genuinely attained as long as there is a single nuclear weapon in existence.

Days after Barack Obama pledged to ratify the CTBT, Hassan said that the minute the United States ratified the treaty, Indonesia would follow suit. Unfortunately, it is not the White House but the US Senate that ratifies US-signed treaties, and American senators have other priorities.

Why didn’t Indonesia begin the process of ratifying the treaty right after signing it? The fact is that the CTBT is not a stand-alone treaty. It is linked to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), through which non-nuclear states have promised to refrain from acquiring or producing nuclear weapons. In 1995, these non-nuclear states agreed to the indefinite extension of the NPT, provided that states with nuclear weapons also signed and ratified the CTBT, which was to be concluded the following year.

Most people called this deal “the grand bargain.” The late Ali Alatas, foreign minister of Indonesia in those days, called it a “gentleman’s agreement.” To him, it was a matter of honor for nuclear-weapon states to meet their side of the bargain.

Not all the NWS have kept their part of the gentleman’s agreement. Even today, China and the United States have not ratified the CTBT. Apart from Indonesia, they have to ratify the treaty before it comes into force, as do six other countries that had nuclear or nuclear research reactors when the treaty was negotiated.

Nevertheless, on May 3, 2010, Marty announced that Indonesia had started the ratification process. And earlier this month, he was delighted to tell the world that Indonesia had actually ratified the treaty.

Indonesia’s position of waiting for nuclear states to ratify the treaty first, Marty explained, had served its purpose. Indeed, because of initiatives taken by the Obama administration, there is now a glimmer of hope that disarmament can move forward more quickly. Indonesia brightened that hope by ratifying the treaty itself.

It helps that the international community has the science today to enforce a ban on nuclear weapons. Of the 337 monitors wielding four technologies that the CTBT Organization will use to police nuclear explosions, 250 are already in place, and six were contributed by Indonesia.

Obama hailed Indonesia’s ratification of the CTBT as “a strong example of the positive leadership role that Indonesia can play in the global effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.” Indonesia had demonstrated this leadership months earlier when Marty guided Asean negotiators to reach an agreement on a protocol to the treaty on the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone. Hence, the minister said, Asean and Indonesia scored a double breakthrough for disarmament this year.

As for what Indonesia will do next, an Egyptian scholar-diplomat, Sameh Aboul-Enein, cites Marty’s proposal at the 2010 NPT Review Conference for “negotiations on a comprehensive multilateral treaty to ban nuclear weapons and provide for their elimination in accordance with an action plan with benchmarks and a time frame.”

You can’t get any more concrete than that. Such a treaty would be the most credible assurance that humankind will one day live in a world free of nuclear weapons.

In the years ahead, you can expect Indonesia to remain at the forefront of the struggle for disarmament. As Hassan said, it’s a matter of ideology, or in Marty’s words, a total and absolute commitment.

It is also a passion for peace that all true diplomats share.

Jamil Maidan Flores is a poet, fiction writer, playwright and essayist who has worked as a speechwriter for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 1992