The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is scheduled to hold its
next Review Conference May 3-28, 2010, in New York. For many
governments and NGOs, this will be a major focus for their work
during the coming year.
The key themes likely to be addressed were outlined during the
review process and include: making the treaty universal -189 states
are members, but not Israel, India, Pakistan or North Korea;
nuclear disarmament, with an emphasis on updating and reaffirming
the 13 steps agreed upon by the 2000 Review Conference; persuading
more non-nuclear countries to adhere to the Additional Protocol to
strengthen safeguards and prevent proliferation; promoting nuclear
energy for non-military purposes; safety and security for nuclear
materials and programs; regional non-proliferation and disarmament,
particularly the 1995 Resolution on the Middle East; measures to
deter countries from emulating North Korea and withdrawing from the
NPT to use their civilian nuclear programs to make nuclear weapons;
and institutional measures to implement decisions and strengthen
the regime. There are also mentions of civil society, mostly in the
context of supporting disarmament and nonproliferation
education.
The NPT has long been regarded as the cornerstone of the
nonproliferation regime, but despite being extended and
strengthened by the 1995 and 2000 Review Conferences, it is still
geared towards controlling and managing nuclear arsenals and
proliferation rather than facilitating the total elimination of
these inhumane weapons of mass destruction.
As we look towards 2010 and beyond, there are deep-seated concerns
that the NPT's structure and powers cannot be updated and
strengthened sufficiently to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons
and materials to proliferationdetermined
governments and terrorists.
Civil society is increasingly responding to these challenges by
arguing for this inadequate, discriminatory non-proliferation
regime to be transformed into a nuclear weapons abolition regime,
with comprehensive obligations on all. This paper gives a brief
overview of recent disarmament initiatives, from the January 2007
Wall Street Journal op-ed article by George Shultz, Henry
Kissinger, William Perry and Sam Nunn, which set off an avalanche
of editorials and letters from eminent military and political
figures from all over the world, to grassroots efforts to put a
nuclear weapons convention (NWC) onto the negotiating agenda.
Former Nuclear Policy Makers Promote Nuclear
Disarmament
With its acknowledgment that nuclear deterrence is "becoming
increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective,"1 the first Wall
Street Journal editorial from Shultz, Kissinger, Perry and Nunn
reverberated around the world. This was not so much because of what
the article said - nuclear security and disarmament advocates had
been making these arguments for years. The significance of the
editorial was in the timing and the political and diplomatic
eminence of the writers, senior members of recent U.S.
administrations, Republican as well as Democrat.
The article turned out to be a game changer, bringing advocacy of
nuclear disarmament from the activist margins into mainstream
discourse. Twenty years on from the Reykjavik Summit, the goal of a
world free of nuclear weapons shared by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail
Gorbachev in 1986 was put back on the table with "a series of
agreed and urgent steps that would lay the groundwork for a world
free of the nuclear threat."
The eight steps in the article included: reducing reliance on
nuclear weapons, including dealerting operational weapons systems;
further deep cuts by all the nuclear weapon possessors; eliminating
short-range, forward-deployed nuclear weapons; bipartisan action in
the U.S. to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and an
international strategy to bring the remaining states on board so
the treaty can enter into force; raising standards for nuclear
safety and security; dealing with proliferation-sensitive aspects
of the nuclear fuel cycle, particularly uranium enrichment; halting
the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons and phasing
out the use of highly enriched uranium (HEU) in civilian programs;
and, finally, addressing the regional and political conflicts that
proliferation feeds on.2
Some of these steps reflected "the 13 steps" negotiated and adopted
by states parties to the NPT as part of the consensus final
document of the 2000 NPT Review Conference. Some reflected the
post-9/11 heightened awareness of terrorism, notably the security
as well as proliferation risks inherent in nuclear activities. The
game changer was in how these incremental steps were bound into the
comprehensive objective of a world free of nuclear weapons - not
just the management of nuclear arms, but their abolition. The
urgency and the moral and security imperatives for the world's
"future generations" were emphasized in the final paragraph, which
noted: "Without the bold vision, the actions will not be perceived
as fair or urgent. Without the actions, the vision will not be
perceived as realistic or possible."3
A year later, having provoked intense discussion around the world
about the feasibility of nuclear abolition, the Hoover quartet
published a second op-ed, titled "Toward a Nuclear-Free World."
This acknowledged some of the international responses sparked by
the first article, including from Gorbachev and the United
Kingdom's then-Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, in her speech to
the Washington Non-Proliferation Conference of the Carnegie
Endowment in June 2007. The second article was more pragmatic and
U.S.-oriented, proposing eight steps that included entry into force
of the CTBT but which represented a nuclear limitation agenda
rather than nuclear abolition - for example, U.S.-Russian
negotiations to extend the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty,
increasing the warning and decision times for launching
nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, discarding Cold War operational
plans, cooperative multilateral ballistic-missile defense and early
warning systems, increasing security arrangements for nuclear
weapons and materials to prevent terrorists from acquiring a
nuclear bomb, opening dialogue between NATO and Russia on tactical
nuclear weapons, and strengthening monitoring and controls to
counter the global spread of advanced technologies. 4
The "Gang of Four" editorials have made it respectable - even
attractive - to talk in terms of nuclear disarmament and
eliminating nuclear dangers rather than the Cold War categories of
arms control and managing risk. In so doing, they opened a
floodgate for similar articles from other eminent statespersons and
senior retired military officers from several different countries,
including Australia, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, the UK and
even France. Some of these,
like Nobel laureate Gorbachev, published individual articles, while
others formed their own gangs of four (sometimes three or five,
usually representing more than one party) to endorse and echo the
Shultz et al initiative.
Governments gained courage from the popularity of the "Gang of
Four" initiatives. The most influential of these was the speech
given by President Barack Obama in Prague on April 5, 2009. Raising
concerns about the horrors of nuclear weapons and the need to avoid
their use, Obama pledged that "the United States will take concrete
steps towards a world without nuclear weapons." Demonstrating his
intent to address the complexities of realistic security, he
stated: "To put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the
role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge
others to do the same."5
At the same time, in an apparent attempt to reassure conservative
politicians in the U.S. and some of America's allies, Obama felt
the need to reassert the nuclear-armed states' standard view of
nuclear weapons as an effective means of defense and deterrence:
"As long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a
safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and
guarantee that defense to our allies."6
Though the main body of the speech suggested that Obama understands
that nonproliferation
and disarmament become sustainable only when nuclear weapons lose
their military, political and security value, the proof of whether
this analysis will be translated into policy will be in the U.S.
Nuclear Posture Review, the publication of which has been delayed
from 2009. The much-heralded special session of the UN Security
Council that Obama chaired on Sept. 24, 2009, disappointed many
non-nuclear states because there were no significantly new or
concrete disarmament commitments in Resolution 1887, which focused
mainly on securing nuclear technologies and materials to prevent
proliferation and terrorist acquisition.
Many fear that instead of heralding transformative policies to make
nuclear abolition possible, Obama's Prague speech will remain in
the realm of presidential rhetoric, while U.S. policies continue in
the familiar tramlines of nuclear dependence, with incremental
reductions, risk management and efforts to persuade others to take
on further nuclear controls.
During 2007-08, before Obama became president, statements referring
to nuclear disarmament were led by the UK7 and Norway.8 French
President Nicolas Sarkozy made his nuclear policy speech in
Cherbourg on the occasion of the launch of France's latest
nuclear-armed submarine, Le Terrible.9 Australia and Japan
contributed by convening the International Commission on Nuclear
Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, which was published on Dec. 15,
2009.10 While some of these offered concrete suggestions for
specific approaches and measures towards the abolition of nuclear
weapons, others diluted their impact by referring more distantly to
visions of a nuclear weapon-free world.
The "Gang of Four" editorials made it feel safer for mainstream
arms control and non-proliferation organizations to discuss nuclear
disarmament without fearing that they would become marginalized as
disarmament NGOs have been marginalized for so long. In the U.S.,
for example, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) formed a Nuclear
Security Project headed by the Hoover Quartet to take the legacy of
Reykjavik forward, identifying the links between the vision and the
steps, including measures to reach the "base camp" implied in the
mountain analogy of the January 2008 op-ed, and relating the
disarmament agenda to NTI's core work on cooperative threat
reduction and reducing the risks from nuclear weapons and
materials.
Another American initiative that hatched from the op-eds' urgent
moral and security imperative is Global Zero, launched in Paris on
Dec. 8, 2008 by a hundred luminaries from politics, science and the
arts. In addition, various think tanks and academic institutions in
several countries have received funding to analyze ways to get to
zero.
Campaigns for a Nuclear Weapons Convention
The increasing credibility of discussions about
nuclear abolition provided coat-tails for long time nuclear
abolition initiatives to see more of their ideas taken seriously.
The most notable example is the network of organizations and
movements aimed at getting a nuclear weapon convention onto the
international community's negotiating agenda, including ICAN
(International Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons), the International
Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), Abolition
2000, Mayors for Peace and various national and trans-national
parliamentary networks and groups.
During the 1990s, a group of NGOs, doctors, lawyers, engineers and
scientists decided to think through the kinds of technical, legal,
political, institutional and verification steps and measures that
the abolition of nuclear weapons would require, and to write their
analysis in the form of a Model Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC).11
This was updated and reissued in 2007 in conjunction with the
launch of ICAN, a new civil society network with the specific goal
of mobilizing public support for a nuclear abolition treaty.12 As
more governments accept the reasons why nuclear weapons need to be
prohibited and eliminated, the debate has begun to shift towards
how and when nuclear abolition can be advanced and
accomplished.
The model NWC, which was made into a UN document at the request of
Costa Rica, argues that a credible treaty would entail both
negative and positive obligations. Negative obligations would
specify the prohibitions on developing, testing, producing,
otherwise acquiring, stockpiling, deploying, maintaining,
retaining, transferring or using nuclear weapons. Positive
obligations would require governments to (among other tasks):
* Dismantle and destroy all nuclear weapons and their delivery
vehicles;
* Secure fissile and other relevant materials, render them
non-usable for
weapons (e.g., through blending down) and ensure their secure
storage
or disposal;
* Prevent access to and acquisition of weapons materials,
components
or technology by other states or non-state actors (an extension of
the
obligations in the NPT and UNSC Resolution 1540 on Weapons of
Mass
Destruction);
* Enact tighter fuel cycle controls to prohibit - or at least
restrict - uranium
enrichment above the low levels necessary for nuclear power
generation
and the separation of plutonium through reprocessing;
* Enact tighter controls (even selective bans) on missiles or other
means
for delivering nuclear weapons;
* Convert nuclear research and production facilities and bases for
nonweapon
uses. This could be thought of as a worldwide cooperative
threat reduction (CTR) program, converting and utilizing the
weapons
infrastructures and personnel skills for peaceful purposes,
including
verification.
* Close and monitor deployment facilities, such as weapons silos
and naval
bases, and, where necessary, keep them available for inspection by
agents
of the implementing organization. There are precedents for this in
the
1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
While the current non-proliferation regime still needs to be
supported
and strengthened until a more comprehensive nuclear security regime
is
in place, NPT parties must come to terms with the fact that little
can be
accomplished with the present structure.
The NPT regime is perceived by many to be inadequate because
it
lacks universality - specifically because Israel, India and
Pakistan have
remained outside the treaty and North Korea has been able to leave
with
apparent ease. The non-proliferation regime's credibility is also
weakened
by its inability to prevent countries like Iran and North Korea
from using the
atoms-for-peace invocations of Article IV to develop their own
proliferationsensitive
fuel cycle technologies and enrich uranium or separate
plutonium
through reprocessing.
Middle East Proliferation Challenges
These nuclear challenges come together in the Middle East in ways
that undermine the security of other countries in the region and
beyond. The major problems are currently Israel's nuclear weapons
and Iran's uranium enrichment and presumed nuclear ambitions. These
programs hinge on the perceived value attached to nuclear weapons -
whether for deterrence or power projection - as exemplified by the
policies and doctrines of the existing nuclear weapon states and,
in the Middle East, by the fears, practices and programs of certain
states. In this context, status is also attached to national
development of the key fuel cycle technologies, so all the well-
meaning proposals for multilateral fuel cycle arrangements and
international fuel banks will fail to persuade Iran to give up its
own uranium enrichment program.
As a consequence, more states in the region are signing up for
nuclear energy programs, which in the future could cause
significant security, proliferation or safety problems. To address
the nuclear component of Middle East insecurity requires the
engagement of three kinds of intersecting actors - national
governments, national and international civil society and
international institutions, such as the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA).
Specific initiatives recently put forward with a view to
facilitating progress towards a Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone (NWFZ) in
the Middle East include: the League of Arab States' proposal for
the 2010 Review Conference to agree to hold a conference and
appoint a special coordinator to work on moving the different sides
towards fulfilling the 1995 Resolution on the Middle East and
working towards a nuclear weapon-free zone in the Middle East; a
fuel cycle-free zone in the Middle East, as proposed by the
International WMD Commission, with "verified arrangement not to
have any enrichment, reprocessing or other sensitive fuel-cycle
activities on their territories";13 and also, pending a global
declaration stigmatizing the use of nuclear weapons as a crime
against humanity, there may be confidence-building mileage in a
regional agreement on no-first-use of WMD.
There also needs to be an open and informed debate at the domestic
level as well as internationally on how best to address energy
needs and options.14 A nuclear weapons convention is not just a
disarmament measure.
Done properly, it would give the world much more effective
monitoring capabilities, verification and compliance tools and
enforcement authority than the NPT regime can lay claim to. The
very process of negotiating such a treaty would increase the
credibility and tools that the international community needs to
prevent nuclear insecurity, proliferation and terrorism. In fact,
most significant NPT objectives, including universality, will only
become practically achievable in the context of working towards a
universal nuclear abolition treaty.
This may be one reason why in October 2008, UN Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon called on states to consider negotiating a nuclear
weapons convention as he put forward a five-point plan to
kick-start disarmament. Though he reiterated the need for progress
on many of the familiar issues on the traditional disarmament and
non-proliferation list - such as CTBT entry into force, security
assurances and a fissile material production treaty, the
secretary-general underlined the importance of considering:
"negotiating a nuclear weapons convention, backed by a strong
verification system, as has long been proposed at the UN. I have
circulated to all UN members a draft of such a convention, which
offers a good point of departure."15
Coercive approaches, Security Council pronouncements and
international criticism have signally failed to persuade either
Israel or Iran
to give up their respective nuclear programs. Internationally, the
most salient
measure would be to devalue nuclear weapons and make it unthinkable
to
use them. A major qualitative step would be for the international
community
to start the process towards having the use of nuclear weapons
declared a
crime against humanity. This would need to go together with an
obligation
on all states and people to render all possible assistance to a
state that is
threatened or attacked with nuclear weapons and also to track down
and
bring to justice those responsible for the threat or use of nuclear
weapons, including those responsible for delivery and
decision-making and suppliers or facilitators of the bomb-makers,
materials and attacks.
Declaring nuclear weapons use a crime against humanity would
greatly reinforce deterrence,
denial and non-proliferation and provide non-discriminatory
positive and negative security assurances to all. To build
confidence for nuclear abolition and deter adversaries and
terrorists from using nuclear weapons, the first - and now
necessary - step should be bringing forward the recognition in law
of the widely accepted moral understanding that any use of nuclear
weapons would be a crime against humanity. As nuclear arsenals are
reduced, the real tipping point will come when the nuclear weapon
states understand and demonstrate that there is no role for nuclear
weapons in their doctrines, policies and security equations. Global
security and genuine deterrence would be enhanced if nuclear weapon
possessors, proliferators and suppliers understood that there are
no circumstances in which the use of nuclear weapons would be
morally acceptable or consistent with international humanitarian
law. This would also greatly diminish any perceived military gains
that might be hoped for, while providing legal mechanisms to hold
suppliers and traffickers to account as well as governments and
state and non state leaders.16
Conclusions
In the past three years, the nature of the debate on nuclear
weapons has changed. Whether he is able to deliver the necessary
transformation in U.S. nuclear policy or not, Obama has reinforced
the growing understanding that the realizable security goal is not
just the reduction and management of nuclear arms, but their
abolition. In other words, sustaining even the current
non-proliferation regime now requires that nuclear weapons become
stigmatized as inhumane and unusable for everyone.
The importance of stigmatizing the use of nuclear weapons - by
anyone for any purpose whatsoever - reflects the experience of
controlling and prohibiting other major weapons types and addresses
concerns about nuclear terrorism as well as nuclear war. A growing
number of civil society networks and organizations are now pursuing
strategies to put the objective of a nuclear weapons convention
onto the negotiating agenda. ICAN, for example, has adopted a
near-term strategy to persuade a majority of governments to call
for negotiations on a nuclear weapons convention in their
statements and working papers for the 2010 NPT Review Conference
and get formal recognition of the concept of a NWC into a final NPT
document, as a first step towards establishing a forum for
multilateral negotiations that would engage Israel, India and
Pakistan as well as the NPT states parties.
If leaders say they want peace and security in a nuclear weapons
free world, then they have to start laying the foundations for this
now, by devaluing the weapons, moving towards outlawing their use,
and working out the legal, technical, safety, and verification
requirements necessary to ensure the comprehensive prohibition and
elimination of existing nuclear weapons and creation of the norms,
institutions and controls necessary to build nuclear security and
prevent break-out.
At the very least, governments need to be persuaded to engage in
discussions of what the negotiated framework for sustainable non
proliferation and the prohibition and elimination of nuclear
weapons should entail.
Endnotes
1 George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, Sam Nunn
and others, "A World Free of
Nuclear Weapons," Wall Street Journal, New York, January 4, 2007.
This group is variously called
the Hoover "Gang of Four," the "Quartet," or the "Four Horsemen"
(of the non-apocalypse).
2 Shultz et al., Ibid.
3 Shultz et al., Ibid.
4 George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, Sam Nunn
and others, "Towards a Nuclear-
Free World,", Wall Street Journal, New York, January 15, 2008.
Among those that signed on to
the second op-ed were: General John Abizaid, Graham Allison, Sidney
Drell, General Vladimir
Dvorkin, Bob Einhorn, Rose Gottemoeller and Siegfried Hecker.
5 Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, Speech
at Hradcany Square, Prague,
April 5, 2009.
6 Obama, Ibid.
7 See Gordon Brown, UK prime minister, speech at the Chamber of
Commerce, Delhi, January
21, 2008; Des Browne MP, UK secretary of state for defense,
statement to the Conference on
Disarmament, "Laying the Foundations for Multilateral Disarmament,"
Geneva, February 5, 2008;
"Lifting the Nuclear Shadow: Creating the Conditions for Abolishing
Nuclear Weapons," Foreign
and Commonwealth Office, February 4, 2009; Gordon Brown, speech on
"Nuclear Energy and
Proliferation," Lancaster House, London, March 17, 2009 and Gordon
Brown, speech to the UN
General Assembly, September 23, 2009; and speech to the UN Security
Council, September 24,
2009.
8 Jonas Gahr Støre, statement by the Norwegian foreign
secretary to the CD, March 4, 2008 with
recommendations from Oslo Conference, February 27-28, 2008. See
text in Disarmament
Diplomacy 87 (Spring 2008).
9 Presentation of "Le Terrible," statement by Nicolas Sarkozy,
president of the French Republic,
Cherbourg, March 21, 2008. See text in Disarmament Diplomacy 87
(Spring 2008).
10 See Joint Statement by Gareth Evans and Yoriko Kawaguchi,
co-chairs, New York, September
25, 2008. See also the Report of the International Commission on
Nuclear Non-proliferation
and Disarmament, Eliminating Nuclear Threats: A Practical Agenda
for Global Policymakers,
http://www.icnnd.org/reference/reports/ent/index.html
11 See Security and Survival: The Case for a Nuclear Weapon
Convention, published by the International
Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA), International
Network of Engineers
and Scientists Against Proliferation (INESAP), and the
International Physicians for the Prevention
of Nuclear War (IPPNW) in 1997. The text of the Model Convention on
the Prohibition of the
Development, Testing, Production, Stockpiling, Transfer, Use and
Threat of Nuclear Weapons
and on their Elimination was submitted by Costa Rica to the UN
General Assembly and issued
in the UN languages as A/C.1/52/7.
12 Securing Our Survival (SOS): The Case for a Nuclear Weapons
Convention, edited by Merav
Datan, Felicity Hill, Alyn Ware and Jurgen Scheffran, published by
IPPNW, IALANA and
INESAP, 2007.
13 Recommendation 12, Weapons of Terror: Freeing the World of
Nuclear, Biological and Chemical
Arms, Report of the WMD Commission, 2006,
www.wmdcommission.org
14 See Jozef Goldblat, "Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaties: Benefits
and Deficiencies" in UNIDIR and
League of Arab States (2004), pp 55-56; Merav Datan, "Building
Blocks for a WMD Disarmament
Regime in the Middle East," Disarmament Diplomacy 86 (Autumn 2007);
Rebecca Johnson,
"Rethinking Security Interests for a Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone in
the Middle East," Disarmament
Diplomacy 86 (Autumn 2007).
15 UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Speech to the East-West
Center, New York, October 24,
2008.
16 See Rebecca Johnson, "Security Assurances for Everyone: A New
Approach to Deterring the Use
of Nuclear Weapons," Disarmament Diplomacy 90 (Spring
2009).
<