The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

The NPT Review Conference 2005: Acronym Special Coverage

Day 24: NPT RevCon slides from Bad to Desperate
May 25, 2005

Rebecca Johnson

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The NPT Review Conference closed on Wednesday with a clear indication that there will be no agreed, negotiated text. This was always the likeliest outcome, given the political conditions, the policies of a small number of key NPT Parties, and the lack of any coherent strategy from any group of states sufficiently motivated to take on the challenges facing the regime. Even so, it was important not to predict null agreement for fear of making that a self fulfilling prophecy, since a different and better outcome was also always on the cards, and available to those of good faith. But a constructive outcome would have required the governments to care enough about nonproliferation to accept that the most proliferation prone options need to be closed down for everyone by mutual consent: nuclear testing, new and continuing nuclear weapons programmes, reprocessing, uranium enrichment... Beneath all the rhetoric and procedural games that have been played out in the NPT Review Conference lies a stark and unpalatable fact: defending these privileges is put before protecting people's lives.

Blocked in committee

As noted in yesterday's update, Committee II (safeguards and regional issues) closed without being able to send any of its text - bracketed or not - to the drafting committee and president. Today the same fate awaited MC III (nuclear energy and withdrawal from the treaty). But first, and to the surprise of some who had expected the US to block, MC.I (nuclear disarmament), chaired by Ambassador Sudjadnan of Indonesia, had the only success of the day. MC.I's report was adopted and transmitted to the president. Though there was no agreement to adopt any of the heavily bracketed text from MC. I and its subsidiary body on practical disarmament steps, the committee accepted the annexation of CRP.3 and CRP.4 (the documents containing the two sections on disarmament). The fact that "they did not reflect fully the views of all states parties" was formally noted by the chair. These texts are available on the Acronym website at: http://www.acronym.org.uk/npt/index.htm#texts

MC III endured a long and tedious morning of wrangling that spilled into mid-afternoon. When it came to the decision on adopting the reports of the committee and subsidiary body, Egypt blocked the text of SB.III, reportedly arguing that the chair's revised text on withdrawal from the treaty (Article X) had not been discussed. Though others would have been happy with a compromise along the lines achieved in MC.I, i.e. text sent forward an an annex to the report with the caveat that it had not been agreed, Egypt would not budge. The text on withdrawal was then dropped, following which the United States blocked adoption of MC.III's report in its entirety. According to reports from the red-badge holders permitted into the chamber to watch this circus, the US objection was lodged just a split second before the chair of MC III, Elisabeth Borsiin-Bonnier could bring the gavel down on adoption of the shorn report.

This sorry state of affairs means that the drafting committee in room 4, which was supposed to combine and tidy up the texts - but not negotiate - received only the text from MC.I, which rather defeated its purpose. By this time, conference morale had sunk so low that even the drafting committee had to have its bad-tempered crisis. Remember the decision that enabled the agenda to be adopted on Day 10? With the president's statement of understanding and the NAM statement of understanding linked by an asterix? The secretariat had reflected this by inserting the couple of sentences of both these statements in the technical section of the conference's draft report, which judging from similar cases seen in the past was the normal practice for such understandings. Up popped the UK ambassador to object, whereupon the chair, Ambassador Doru Costea of Romania, reportedly got scared and tried to drop it, so the NAM got angry and the whole issue blew out of proportion. A number of Western group diplomats were reportedly unhappy with the UK decision to challenge the secretariat's characterisation of the agreement on the agenda. The UK later said that it had not made the objection on behalf of the Western group, as many thought because Ambassador Freeman alluded to the Western group's understanding, but the damage had been done.

I have included this vignette, one among many in three weeks of manoeuvring, because it is illustrative of the dynamics of this review conference in two notable ways: one, the pettiness of procedural objections used to mask politics and politicking; and two, the anomalous position of the UK, which for cold war reasons was made coordinator of the Western group in 1975, if I recall correctly. At that time it was because the UK was one of the three nuclear weapon state depositaries of the treaty. Likewise Russia coordinated the Eastern European group. However, when the cold war ended Russia handed its coordinating role on, but Britain did not. While it has to be recognised that coordinating these dysfunctional groups in the out-dated group system can be a thankless task, bound to offend some of the people at least some of the time, criticism of the UK's role at this conference has been unusually strong and frequent. The criticisms were not generally personally directed, but it was perceived - rightly or wrongly - that the UK intentionally enabled the Western group to be used to shelter US positions that everyone else in the Western group disagreed with.

Similar complaints at times have surfaced from the P-5 negotiations. Most recently, the P-5 statement essentially hinges on the CTBT, particularly whether the United States will lift its veto on a call from the P-5 for the entry into force of the CTBT - that all signed in good faith in 1996 and three of the five have ratified. With Washington reportedly holding firm to its refusal to lift its public opposition to the CTBT and time running out for the P-5 statement, the UK was the first to surrender the CTBT; moreover it has reportedly exerted pressure on others to let the Americans have their way if that's what it will take to get a P-5 declaration before the RevCon ends.

But what would be the message conveyed by a P-5 statement with no mention of CTBT entry into force? Too late to help the NPT RevCon, it would merely signal to the world that i) the security interests and objectives of the non nuclear weapon states don't matter because they don't have nuclear weapons; and ii) international laws and treaties might be useful for keeping others in order, but if you are a big power it is okay to negotiate and sign up to agreements one day and then change your mind and reject them the next. (Not, of course, acceptable if you are North Korea or anyone else.)

Those are not sensible signals to send to a world facing so many serious proliferation challenges.

Negotiating tactics - a quick run-through

Many and varied have been the negotiating tactics at this conference, mostly to impede progress and divert attention from the substantive issues. Here are some of those I've observed over the years. First the negative, obstructive tactics.

Delaying tactics:

• Waiting for Godot - insist on waiting for the time to become ripe (while slyly impeding all attempts by others to create more positive conditions)
• Quicksand - bog a proposal or initiative down in questions, objections or demands for definitions, or call for an inquiry or further expert consultations.
• Ping-Pong - have the initiative referred to another committee, forum or authority and, if possible, shunt it back and forth between competing bodies for as long as possible.

Concealment

• Hide and Seek - conceal real objectives in high-minded rhetoric or a mass of technical data and extraneous detail.
• Slipstreaming - conceal your own preferences and coast behind another delegation, allowing it to take the flack.
• Fronting - a form of collaborative slipstreaming, in which one delegation adopts a position that is stronger than its own interests would require, enabling others to benefit by coasting in its wake.
• Two-Faced - pretend to support a proposal that you actually oppose; this may also involve manipulating (or just allowing) another country to oppose openly and then be left carrying the blame. Of course, there is always the risk that your bluff may be called, as happened when the Soviet Union suddenly accepted NATO's zero option in the 1980s (and we got rid of the intermediate nuclear forces from Europe)!

Defection tactics - when a state doesn't really want an agreement

• Moving the Goalposts - whatever is achievable becomes by definition inadequate: the objective or required standards are moved further away to ensure that agreement is rendered more and more inaccessible.
• Best versus Good - rejection of adequate or useful agreements on the grounds that they do not match up with some grander but less accessible ideal.
• All or Nothing - aka 'nothing to be agreed until everything is agreed', which usually results in nothing, often the real preference of those that employ this tactic.

Linkage

• Linkage - tie progress or agreement on one issue with achievement of agreement or gains on another issue (a favourite CD pastime).
• Hostage-taking - coercively present a contested point or outcome in your favour as a make or break issue for the whole negotiations.
• tit for tat - aka 'you've done something to annoy me, so I'll do something to annoy you back'.

Now for some positive tactics that some have tried to employ, but with scant success at this RevCon, though I've seen them work wonders in other situations.

Bridging and Trading

• Concession-trading - a process of trade-off and bargaining with issues that may be directly connected or, in substance terms, unrelated, with players making concessions to win favourable compromises from others.
• Mediation - when a third party or parties help to facilitate agreement by enabling antagonists to address underlying causes of disagreement.
• Third party bridging - aka 'the honest broker', in which a third party or group of middle powers facilitate agreement by exploring solutions midway between the extremes and identifying and fostering concessions that bring antagonistic parties closer together.
• Bridge-building - in which one or more of the antagonistic parties are prepared to concede or modify demands to promote convergence.

Regime-building 'cognitive' tactics

• Norm-shaping - often associated with the strategies of civil society, in which the problem is stigmatised and the pay-off matrix itself is changed or redefined.
• Reframing - in which the problem is recast in more positive, less adversarial terms, offering an integrative solution with mutual gains.
• Step-ladder - deployment of new information (perhaps new technical information or data on consequences) to enable parties to surmount obstacles (or to perceive them from a different vantage point).
• Unpacking - in which a problem is disaggregated or separated into its constituent parts to facilitate incremental agreement or progress.

Even though a negotiated agreement now looks impossible, there are two days left in which those who care about preventing the acquisition, proliferation and use of nuclear weapons could emply some of the constructive tactics to try to pull the conference back from the brink of a complete shambles. Though agreement on the tasks and ways forward may now be out of reach, at the very least, it is important to signal a collective willingness to address the core challenges, risks and threats and work over the next five year period to create a secure future in which nuclear weapons have no place in military or terrorist doctrines. There is still time for that!

25.5.05

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