Disarmament Diplomacy

Signs of the Times: NPT not WMD

Editorial by Rebecca Johnson

One hand-painted sign in the crowd outside the UK Parliament on March 14 said "NPT not WMD"; several more demanded "Keep the Treaty". Unlike in previous British debates about banning the bomb, legal and treaty issues played as large a part in arguments against renewing Trident as the more traditional moral and security arguments.

As the states parties to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) gather in Vienna on April 30th for the first meeting of the review process leading to 2010, they should draw a lesson from the UK debate on Trident: the NPT is not about diplomatic point scoring, documents or procedures, but human lives and real security choices. People care about treaties, and want them kept strong and true to their intended purposes.

Even as the British government has been bringing in draconian laws to curtail legitimate and traditional kinds of protest at Parliament and a variety of nuclear and military bases (e.g. the 2005 Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA), enacted under the guise of protecting against terrorism), civil society has redoubled its efforts to uphold and strengthen international and humanitarian laws, and hold our governments accountable.

Russia's recent threat to pull out of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty has come as a profound shock. The INF Treaty heralded the end of the cold war. Russia's warning is in protest at US plans to place bases on the territory of new NATO members Poland and the Czech Republic, to provide support for ballistic missile defences. In addition to upgrading radar and tracking capabilities in Poland, the US wants the Czech site for deploying missiles as interceptors. Whilst Russia's concerns about this are widely shared, not least by many Czech citizens, threatening to redeploy intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe is a dangerous and self-defeating over-reaction.

We cannot build global security regimes if binding agreements that have been painstakingly negotiated by one generation are wantonly disregarded or violated when there is a change of government or policy in one of the major powers.

Just weeks before the vote in Parliament, Tony Blair justified getting the next generation of nuclear weapons by making reference to "an independent British nuclear deterrent [as] an essential part of our insurance against the uncertainties and risks of the future". Shockingly, he also misrepresented Britain's treaty obligations in the House of Commons, arguing that the NPT gives the UK the right to have nuclear weapons. Though the Foreign Office has no doubt moved swiftly to fudge Blair's comment as a mistake or slip of the tongue, it is much more serious than this. Unless he was lying, Blair must have thought that the NPT did give the nuclear weapon states the right to have nuclear weapons. This mistaken belief may have influenced his decision to push for Britain to remain in the nuclear business. His confidence in repudiating the concerns raised by the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, no doubt persuaded other MPs that Britain would be in full compliance with the NPT, encouraging them to ignore expert legal advice that renewing Trident would breach the Treaty and undermine the nonproliferation regime.

Over the years, Blair has acquired an unfortunate reputation for skating round the law if he finds it inconvenient, which has lowered Britain's reputation around the world. By contrast, it has been heartening to see that grassroots campaigners and MPs have taken international law to heart in their arguments against Trident. Devaluing and eliminating nuclear weapons are not only moral and security imperatives, they are also legal obligations.

The international diplomats gathering for the NPT meeting need to be aware that their decisions contribute to the meaning and interpretation of the treaty. Similarly, if states parties fail to challenge (and so appear to accept) erroneous interpretations put forward by governments - such as Iran's view of Article IV as conferring an unlimited right to nuclear technology, or the nuclear weapon states' views that indefinitely retaining, renewing, modernising or upgrading their nuclear weapons is compatible with Article VI - they run the risk of allowing such proliferation-justifying interpretations to erode the treaty's legal obligations and force. People at home will be watching carefully to see what NPT parties say about the renewal of Trident and modernisation of other nuclear weapon systems.

Civil society has played a major (and continuing) role in the UK nuclear debate, defining Trident renewal as a betrayal of multilateral commitments and a unilateral move to acquire the next generation of nuclear weapons. Hundreds of protesters from all over Europe and as far away as Japan and Mexico have been arrested since October for upholding international law by preventing nuclear 'business as usual' at the Trident facilities in Scotland. Blair may have won this first vote to start procuring the new nuclear submarines, but he has lost the argument.

Despite the government's apparent triumph, the writing is on the wall: nuclear weapons contribute nothing to security and Trident will have to be scrapped - maybe not today, but soon.

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