The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

The NPT Review Conference 2005: Acronym Special Coverage

Imagine "a nuclear catastrophe in one of our great cities":
NPT Review Conference Day 1 (May 2)

Rebecca Johnson

As the seventh review conference of the NPT states parties opened in New York on May 2, 2005, two very different attitudes were on display. Though lip-service was paid to the NPT as the "cornerstone" of nonproliferation, the great hall of the General Assembly, which should have been packed with the representatives of nearly 190 states parties, was half empty. By contrast, hundreds of NGOs and representatives of civil society, including elected Mayors and officials from cities and towns around the world, queued for hours to get into the United Nations building because they wanted to bear witness to the vital importance of eliminating nuclear weapons.

On Sunday, thousands of people from some 120 countries had marched through New York to call for a nuclear weapon free world, together with the Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a brave number of 'hibakusha' - atomic bomb survivors. On Monday, the newly-elected President of the Review Conference, Ambassador Sergio de Queiroz Duarte of Brazil, admitted that there was still no agreement on an agenda for the conference. Duarte pushed for the agenda to be agreed by the end of the week and exhorted states to show "genuine cooperation, wisdom and enlightened statesmanship".

Meanwhile, the conference elected various officials by silent acclaim and began its 'General Debate' of national and group statements. Again, there was a marked contrast between the compelling urgency of the speeches delivered by the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, and IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, and the first 12 statements, which can be accessed directly from http://www.un.org/events/npt2005/statements/ These came from a range of different positions and some were delivered by senior Government Ministers. Though many tried to be positive, there was an air of defeatism, as if most delegations were just going through the motions. The salient issues were checked off one by one, with some differences of emphasis or characterisation, but very little was offered that could give hope of the kind of "bold", constructive decisions that Mr Annan had called for.

The Secretary-General's Vision

The most effective speech of the day was that of the UN Secretary-General. To jolt states out of their complacency, he had them imagine "a nuclear catastrophe in one of our great cities": was it terrorism, an act of aggression or an accident? Depicting the impact - not just the obvious annihilation and pain of those directly affected, but the less thought-about implications for hard-won freedoms and human rights, development and trade (such as accompanied the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington) - he posed the question we would have to ask ourselves, "Could I have done more to reduce the risk by strengthening the regime designed to do so?". He acknowledged that the states would view the NPT's challenges and tasks differently, and called on the states to "recognise all these truths... [and] to agree that they are all too important to be held hostage to the politics of the past. And I challenge you to acknowledge that they all impose responsibilities on all states." Secretary-General Annan then identified a number of actions:

i) strengthen confidence in the integrity of the NPT and work out how to address violations and withdrawals.

ii) make compliance measures more effective. In this regard he called for the Model Additional Protocol to be universalised and made the new standard for verifying compliance.

iii) reduce the threat of proliferation not only with regard to states, but also non-state actors, including the "universal obligation on all states to establish effective national controls and enforcement measures".

iv) get to grips with the "Janus-like character of nuclear energy". He commended the IAEA Director-General for working to advance consensus on how to manage the fuel cycle.

The S-G went further, calling for prompt negotiation of an FMCT, reaffirmation of the moratorium on nuclear testing and to early entry into force of the CTBT; dealerting of all nuclear weapons; further irreversible reductions to bring warhead numbers down to hundreds, not thousands... "But you must go further. Many states still live under a nuclear umbrella, whether of their own or an ally. Ways must be found to lessen, and ultimately overcome, their reliance on nuclear deterrence."

Before closing with a quote from Robert Oppenheimer, the S-G concluded "our world will not come close to this vision if you accept only some of the truths that will be uttered during this conference. As custodians of the NPT, you must come to terms with all the nuclear dangers that threaten humanity".

IAEA Priorities

IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei gave a comprehensive and detailed overview of the situation from the point of view of the agency charged both with promoting nuclear energy and overseeing safeguards to prevent nuclear weapons programmes. These included:

i) ridding the world of nuclear weapons; "zero tolerance" for new states developing nuclear weapons; and supporting peaceful uses of nuclear energy;

ii) strengthening the IAEA's verification authority;

iii) "better control over proliferation-sensitive parts of the nuclear fuel cycle: activities that involve uranium enrichment and plutonium separation;

iv) securing and controlling nuclear material;

v) show firm commitment to nuclear disarmament - "as long as some countries place strategic reliance on nuclear weapons as a deterrent, other countries will emulate them... we cannot delude ourselves into thinking otherwise";

vi) verification efforts should be backed by more effective mechanisms for dealing with non-compliance - "the Security Council must consider promptly the implications for international peace and security, and take the appropriate measures";

vii) address the security concerns of all.

NPT Housekeeping

As noted above, Ambassador Sergio de Queiroz Duarte of Brazil was confirmed as President. Also agreed were:

Chair of Main Committee I (nuclear disarmament): Ambassador Sudjadnan Parnohadinigrat of Indonesia;
Chair of MC II (safeguards etc): Ambassador Laszló Mólnár of Hungary;
Chair of MC III (nuclear energy): Ambassador Elisabet Borsiin-Bonnier of Sweden.
Chair of Drafting Committee: Ambassador Doru Costea of Romania.

Jerzy Zaleski replaced Sylvana da Silva as Secretary-General of the Conference, to manage the Secretariat and related functions.

The NPT also adopted the draft rules of procedure agreed in a rush at the 2004 PrepCom. Some of the vice-chairs and vice presidents have also been nominated, but too many to list. Various international organisations were also granted observer status, including: OPANAL, OPCW, PrepCom of CTBTO, NATO Parliamentary Assembly, ICRC, African Union, League of Arab States, Organisation of the Islamic Conference.

Checking off the issues in general statements

Featuring statements from New Zealand on behalf of the New Agenda Coalition (Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa and Sweden); Luxembourg on behalf of the EU and associated states; Malaysia on behalf of the Nonaligned States (NAM); Japan; the United States; Australia; Ireland; Germany; Canada; Uzbekistan; Argentina; and Peru, the afternoon lent itself to a kind of Bridget Jones checklist:

number of exhortations for CTBT entry into force - 11 (not the United States, obviously, which completely ignored the test ban);
number of calls for a fissile materials cut-off treaty (everyone) but
- with (or without) verification? most fudged this salient question. The United States, with breathtaking chutzpah, claimed credit for calling on the Conference on Disarmament to initiate negotiations on a FMCT last year (conveniently ignoring its own role in repudiating verification for the treaty and so reneging on an agreed mandate).
concerns about DPRK withdrawal and development of nuclear weapons (almost everyone), though ideas for what to do about North Korea seemed to consist mostly of encouraging more of the same (exhort resumption of six-party talks) and keeping fingers crossed (a superstitious gesture more in hope than expectation).
concerns about Iran - everyone except the non-aligned statement, for obvious reasons, since Iran is a NAM member;
- leading to concerns about the nuclear fuel cycle - mentioned widely but with significantly different emphases on what to do about it;
- leading also to much underlining of the importance of nuclear energy, portrayed either as an inalienable right or as something to be shared only under strict conditions of compliance with articles I, II and III;
references to the IAEA Additional Protocol for enhanced safeguards and inspections – almost everyone, though there were differences between those who wanted it to be adopted as the safeguards standard for the NPT, those who wanted it made a condition of supply, and those who didn’t really want it but felt obliged to check this box like everyone else (so damned with faint praise, or related to voluntary uptake only);
need for stronger NPT powers - two so far (Ireland and Canada);
universality of the treaty - lip-service almost universally paid, as most statements called on India, Israel and Pakistan to accede to the NPT as non-nuclear weapon states, but the mentions were largely perfunctory, so we should not expect initiatives in that direction.
nuclear weapon free zones (NWFZ) - warmly endorsed by the Latin American speeches, mentioned in passing by most others, with supportive noises for the Central Asian nuclear weapon free zone agreement that has hovered on the edge for several years now.
Libyan deproliferation as a case to emulate (!) - the United States, EU, and a few others.

Then there were the issues that some states underlined heavily, while others ignored or glossed over. These included: the Middle East (with more references to promoting a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East than a nuclear weapon free zone); UNSC resolution 1540 and the proliferation security initiative (PSI); the physical safety and security of nuclear materials; and security assurances to non-nuclear weapon states (NSA). In addition, the A.Q. Khan blackmarket/nuclear smuggling network was generally agreed to be A Bad Thing, at least by those states that mentioned it, but no-one spoke of the responsibility their own nationals might bear.

Though everyone referred in some form to the Article VI obligation to nuclear disarmament, there were significant differences in characterisation. The New Agenda statement reiterated that "nuclear disarmament and nuclear nonproliferation are mutually reinforcing processes". Malaysia, on behalf of the NAM, complained that "the stress is on proliferation, rather than disarmament in good faith" and warned that the "lack of balance in the implementation of the NPT threatens to unravel the NPT regime." Australia called progress on nuclear disarmament a "core NPT obligation" but rejected that "progress in nuclear disarmament should be a precondition for improving the NPT". The EU position, which appeared to reinterpret disarmament as the rationalising elimination of "excess", is illustrated by this sentence: "The EU recognises the importance, from the viewpoint of nuclear disarmament, of programmes for the destruction and elimination of nuclear weapons and fissile materials in excess of defence requirements in the framework of the G8 global partnership." With heavy emphasis on terrorism, compliance by NNWS and non-state threats, very few of the 43 "essential issues" adopted as part of the EU's common position referred to disarmament, though it was heartening that the CTBT was endorsed in a significant paragraph.

The United States focussed on the fact that by the end of 2012 when the Moscow treaty is fully implemented, it will have "reduced the number of strategic nuclear warheads it had deployed in 1990 by about 80%" and "reduced our non-strategic nuclear weapons by 90% since the end of the Cold War, dismantling over 3,000 such weapons pursuant to the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives of 1991 and 1992." Though the New Agenda's statement was at pains to give credit "where credit is due", New Zealand's Minister Marian Hobbs pointed out that one way to assess NPT progress was the sad fact that today there are still around 30,000 nuclear warheads in existence - "almost as high as the estimated number of warheads that existed when the Treaty entered into force in 1970". In relation to the disarmament agreements adopted in 1995 and 2000, the New Agenda gave a few dismal examples of lack of progress in implementation: "The CTBT has not yet entered into force, negotiations for a treaty banning the production of fissile material have not begun, a subsidiary body on nuclear disarmament has not been established, the majority of weapons reductions are not irreversible, transparent or verifiable, and the role of nuclear weapons in security policies has not been diminished." Malaysia in the NAM statement criticised the nuclear-weapon states and those States remaining outside the NPT (i.e. India, Israel and Pakistan) for continuing "to develop and modernize their nuclear arsenal, threatening international peace and security". The Hon. Syed Hamid Albar, Minister Of Foreign Affairs Of Malaysia, continued, "We must all call for an end to this madness and seek the elimination and ban on all forms of nuclear weapons and testing as well as the rejection of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence".

2.5.05

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