Disarmament Diplomacy
Issue No. 43, January - February 2000
Editorial
The Non-Proliferation Dilemma
There are two kinds of opponents to the CTBT in India: those who
don't like the Treaty because they want India to become a fully
paid-up member of the nuclear club; and those who don't like the
Treaty because it doesn't contribute enough to real nuclear
disarmament. In the United States there are also two main camps
among the CTBT's opponents: those who think America should always
maintain a strong lead in the nuclear arms race and not accept any
constraint on its rights and abilities to develop a new generation
of nuclear weapons; and those who worry that if the United States
gives up testing others might take advantage, relying on the fact
that the Treaty cannot guarantee 100 percent verification. There
are worrying parallels with the gun-lobby which refuses to give up
the right to bear arms, even though the conditions under which that
right was established have long gone. So high school kids and even
six-year-olds use guns and kill classmates to settle trivial
scores, barely comprehended by the perpetrators, let alone the
victims. The right to bear nuclear weapons could also degenerate
into a nuclear free-for-all, which would terrifyingly lower the
threshold of accident or use. Is that what we want? Do we imagine
that missile defence can give 'special countries' some vast
bullet-proof vest? What about our heads or the unexpected 'lucky'
shot that somehow (but invariably) gets through?
The point about multilateral treaties, which are a form of
social contract, is that you cannot have it all. If an arms control
treaty does not involve some curbing of the weapons capabilities of
the biggest powers and some restrictions on would-be weaponeers,
what is the good of it? An individual or country accepts the
restrictions because the collective measure contributes to overall
safety. Some governments need to be reminded of this, as the sixth
Review Conference of the NPT in April-May 2000 approaches.
Perhaps UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was thinking of this
when he marked the thirtieth anniversary of the NPT entering into
force (March 5, 1970) by calling on the international community to
"immediately start taking new and effective measures to achieve the
inherently linked goals of nuclear disarmament and
non-proliferation". From some of the statements and actions of the
nuclear weapon states after the NPT was indefinitely extended in
1995, it has become disappointingly clear that they regarded
non-proliferation as an unequal endstate in which other nations
forego nuclear weapons, while the Five get to rely on them "for the
foreseeable future", as Britain's Strategic Defence Review worded
it in 1998. Such an interpretation may have served during the
MADness of the Cold War, but it is counterproductive and even
dangerous now.
The logic at the heart of the NPT was that sustainable
non-proliferation would require nuclear disarmament. Yet most of
the recent opportunities have been ignored, squandered or
sabotaged. National security is a serious matter, touching not only
on military defence, but also on sovereignty and identity. Even in
the 1960s, it was inconceivable that governments would voluntarily
accept exclusion from a privileged clique of countries 'permitted'
to possess a doomsday weapon, except as a temporary, interim stage
towards equal-based security for all nations. In the absence of a
nuclear free-for-all, the fear of which was the prime impetus
behind the NPT, the basis for equal security, as Kofi Annan
stressed, has got to be a world free of nuclear weapons. In the
complex, multifocus world of the 21st century, the necessity to
understand this basic logic is even more urgent than before.
The Acronym Institute has recently published the thirteenth in
the 'redbook' series on the NPT and CTBT. Entitled
"Non-Proliferation Treaty: Challenging Times", ACRONYM 13 analyses the difficult
procedural and substantive issues confronting NPT parties and
non-parties in 2000, providing also a brief history of the NPT, the
1995 decisions and the three PrepComs since 1997. The attempt to
shore up the nuclear apartheid of the past fifty years is putting
the NPT under intolerable strain. This is not a question of whether
or not the Review Conference manages to adopt one, two or any
number of documents or not. It is about whether there is genuine
commitment by all the NPT parties, especially the P-5, to address
the core problems of non-proliferation: universality, violators,
and progressive disarmament by the haves.
REJ
ACRONYM 13, written by Rebecca Johnson, can be found on our
website at www.acronym.org.uk/acro13.htm or
from The Acronym Institute.
© 2000 The Acronym Institute.
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