Archive for April, 2007

Pushing a stalled nuclear disarmament agenda

Posted on: April 27th, 2007 by Ernie Regehr

No statement or commentary about this NPT PrepCom, which runs through to May 11, begins without a reminder that the NPT is in serious trouble. And so it is.

And therein lies a disturbing irony. While the reasons behind the trouble are well-known – indeed, they can be summed up in a series of place names: Washington, Delhi, Tehran, London, Pyongyang, and many more – the nuclear disarmament agenda is actually very detailed, well-known, and very widely agreed. And it is also very stalled.

The agreed disarmament agenda

Of course, it is in those details where the devil will hold sway in the next two weeks, but, for the record, let’s at least acknowledge that at the general level, the nuclear disarmament agenda enjoys broad global support and the priorities that should engage Canada also seem clear.

That broad support is owed to the fact that the agenda has been painstakingly (or at least painfully) constructed through the consensus decision-making processes of the NPT review conferences, and the results are set out in the agreements reached at the 1995 and 2000 conferences. The agenda is confirmed and elaborated in the Blix Commission report[i] and it can be viewed as working toward three fundamental objectives: 1) preventing the use of existing arsenals, 2) preventing the expansion or enhancement of existing arsenals and making progress toward their elimination, and 3) preventing horizontal proliferation.

1. Preventing use

a) Abolition is the agreed aim, because the only way to finally prevent the use of nuclear weapons is to eliminate them.

b) Negative security assurances are commitments by Nuclear Weapon States (NWS) not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against Non-Nuclear Weapon States (NNWS) party to the NPT – and what is now required is that such assurances be made legally binding.

c) To prevent accidental use, the US and Russia are required to de-alert (eliminate the possibility of them being launched within minutes of a warning – a warning that could turn out to be false).

2. Preventing and reversing vertical proliferation

a) Ratification of the already negotiated Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) to prohibit any further testing of nuclear warheads.

b) Preventing the expansion of stockpiles of fissile materials for weapons purposes requires the negotiation of a fissile materials cut-off treaty (FMCT) and preventing the use of existing stockpiles for weapons by progressively placing them under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards.

c) Make all nuclear weapon reductions irreversible and verifiable.

d) Promote transparency and accountability by regular reporting to NPT meetings or conferences on progress made in implementing the disarmament agenda.

3. Preventing and reversing horizontal proliferation

a) Make the Additional Protocol to safeguards agreements, which allows for more intrusive and effective inspections, the minimum standard for national safeguard agreements with the IAEA.

b) Deal with the legacy of the unrestrained Cold War nuclear arms race through the global partnership to control and clean-up nuclear materials, especially in the former Soviet Union.

c) Maintain effective export controls over nuclear materials.

d) Explore means of exercising international and non-discriminatory control over the proliferation sensitive elements in the manufacture of nuclear fuel for civilian reactors.

There is much more that needs doing, but these elements at least have met virtually universal support, in principle.

Priorities for Canada

Canada must obviously be active in pursuing implementation of all those elements of the global disarmament agenda, but it is also important give priority to particular issues that it is in a good position to influence.

The basic commitment to abolition is central. In 1999, through the official response to a report of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the Government of Canada declared that “Canada ‘s objective has been and remains the complete elimination of nuclear weapons.”[ii] This position has been held through successive changes in Government and enjoys support across the political spectrum. Each new Canadian Government should, as a matter of course and at the highest level, reaffirm Canada ‘s fundamental commitment to the elimination of nuclear weapons.

From time to time there will necessarily be some shifts in priorities according to changing circumstances, but currently at least four of issues deserve the focused attention of Canada.

1. The disarmament machinery: Nuclear disarmament depends first and foremost on the political will of states to simply do it, but the institutional mechanisms through which they pursue that fundamental and urgent agenda are critically important. The mechanisms can themselves become obstacles to effective progress, and it is clear that in the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament and the NPT Review Process there are institutional arrangements and practices that serve to impede the disarmament progress. These impediments require urgent attention and Canada , having developed significant proposals to address the “institutional deficit” within the disarmament system, is well placed to work with likeminded states to press for constructive change.

2. The internationalization of the nuclear fuel cycle: The conflict regarding Iran ‘s uranium enrichment program raises important issues about the spread of sensitive civilian technologies – to which all states in compliance with non-proliferation obligations are legally entitled – that have immediate relevance for the pursuit of nuclear weapons. It is in the interests of nuclear disarmament that these technologies be severely restricted, but such restrictions must obviously be nondiscriminatory. Canada should take an active role in investigating and promoting international mechanisms toward that end.

3. Nuclear Suppliers Group guidelines for civilian nuclear cooperation with de facto nuclear weapon states: The US-India civilian nuclear cooperation deal has led to proposals to exempt India from the current guidelines of the NSG, and Canadian technology and interests are directly engaged. Canada must be at the fore of international efforts to universalize the NPT and to bring India, Israel, and Pakistan under the rules and discipline of the nuclear nonproliferation system, ensuring that nonproliferation objectives are not only uncompromised but strengthened through any NSG action to modify its guidelines.

4. Resolving the NATO/NPT contradiction: As a NATO country Canada is juggling two conflicting commitments. Through NATO Canada insists that nuclear weapons are essential to its security and are thus to be retained for the foreseeable future; through the NPT and related disarmament forums Canada promotes the elimination of nuclear weapons at the earliest possible date. This conflict must be resolved in favour of the second commitment.


[i] Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission. 2006. Weapons of Terror: Freeing the World of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms. Stockholm. http://www.wmdcommission.org.

[ii] Government of Canada. 1999. Nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation: Advancing Canadian objectives. Government statement. April.

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Myth-making, peace-making, and sacrifice in Afghanistan

Posted on: April 16th, 2007 by Ernie Regehr

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor explained the decision to extend Canada’s military commitment in Afghanistan to 2009, the tone they set was one of hard-nosed defence of the Canadian interest.”Our rationale for being in Afghanistan is clear,” Mr. Harper told the House of Commons in the May 17/06 that preceded the extension vote. “It is in the interests of this country.”

Mr. O’Connor put it this way in the same debate: “The bottom line is that the mission in Afghanistan supports one of the enduring goals of Canada’s foreign and defence policy: to protect Canada ‘s national interest. We must commit to seeing our mission through. Our national interest is straightforward: to ensure the security and prosperity of the Canadian people. This government has summed it up in two words: Canada first.”

It was a very practical kind of talk, but when we receive home the bodies of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, the language of self-interest fails us. In these moments we quite properly reach for a larger and more ennobling purpose. When the ultimate sacrifice is asked and courageously given we are drawn to the more fundamental values of freedom and a common global humanity. In that same May 2006 debate, when Mr Harper spoke of sacrifice, he said ” Canadians accept risks when those risks are in the service of a greater good.” Some Canadian interests may well be included in that greater good, but they certainly don’t define it. And when, from the recent Vimy anniversary event in France, Mr. Harper announced the deaths of more Canadian soldiers, he said that “when the cause is just, Canada will always be there to defend our values and our fellow human beings.”[i]

The inadequacy of appeals to self interest when thinking about Canadian peace-making efforts abroad is also highlighted in the opening entries of a compelling on-line debate on peace support operations currently hosted by the Canadian Peacebuilding Coordinating Committee (CPCC).[ii]

Doug Bland, Chair of Defence Management Studies at Queen’s University, and Peggy Mason, Chair of the Canadian Peacebuilding Coordinating Committee and a former Canadian Ambassador for Disarmament, both agree that the current ISAF operation in the south is “war.” Mr. Bland calls it a “stability campaign” by means of “warfare” and argues that Canada should join such campaigns/wars when the fight is in “our interests and those of our close allies.” But I find it interesting that when he makes a strong statement in support of Canada’s role in Afghanistan he calls it a “war of liberation” consistent with Canadian “traditions,” not interests.

There is no question that Canadian interests are involved, inasmuch as it is broadly within our interests to promote a rules-based international order that serves the well-being and safety of people, but when we ask our fellow citizens to make the extraordinary sacrifices that await them in Afghanistan, we quite rightly find we can’t bring ourselves to do it on the basis of the national interest. Instead, we appeal to more enduring values, all of which, we should be proud to acknowledge, find resonance within Canadian traditions.

That these traditions live within a national story of constructed mythologies is not in doubt, but the point of creating a national story is the expectation that it will help shape our action when it matters most. Collectively, we sometimes honor and frequently betray our myths, but it is still our aspiration and responsibility in particular circumstances like Afghanistan to muster the conviction and especially the skills to effectively serve the ideals of protecting fundamental rights and peacemaking that our national story invokes.

And that’s where Mason’s detailed attention, in the CPCC hosted debate, to peace processes comes in – to define the kind of intervention that is needed if we are to have any chance of meeting those ideals. Bland includes a description of continuous warfare, and it really proves Mason’s point that you don’t win the peace by entering one side of an ongoing civil war and fighting it out. Her argument and the lessons of peacebuilding make it clear that winning the peace is a political, social, economic, military enterprise – and the most immediate problem in Afghanistan is that the political component has fallen apart, and the social and economic components have fallen seriously short of expectations.

The Afghan Government that the ISAF operation supports has for a variety of reasons – some self-inflicted, some owing to the failure of the international community – lost the confidence of Afghans to such an extent that the essential ingredient of “a credible peace implementation process” is no longer present, certainly not in the south. Hence, the military operation has become an effort to militarily impose order – as Bland puts it, “to create ‚Äòharmonious law-based conditions'” – but it is predictably proving to be impossible because too many Afghans, especially in the south, believe that the particular Governing order that the foreign military intervention supports will lead neither to harmony nor the fair rule of law.

So, how to restore a credible peace process? Well, there are some good ideas around. Increasingly the talk about negotiating with the Taliban is getting serious [iii] and needs international support to generate a political culture of inclusion, rather than sticking to a strategy of exclusion. The lessons of the Dutch are also gaining credence – that is, focusing less on fighting the spoilers and more on making their cause irrelevant. The ongoing need to generate economic opportunity is well understood and needs to be well funded.

All this has to happen in a dangerous environment, reminding us that the resort to lethal force will remain a part of the reality for some time to come. Calling for a switch from a military to a diplomatic/humanitarian strategy, or focusing debate on military withdrawal deadlines, will not yield the strategy and insight needed to integrate the political, social, economic, and military elements of peacemaking in Afghanistan. But you can do what Peggy Mason counsels, and that is to “find the proper balance between coercion and consent” – recognizing that producing consent is a political process.

The key in peace operations is to ensure that the resort to military force is a support to the peace process rather than a substitute for it.


[i] Bruce Cheadle, “Harper breaks sombre news of deaths in Afghanistan on eve of Vimy anniversary” (http://www.brooksbulletin.com/news/world_news.asp?itemid=61829), Sunday, April 08, 2007.

[ii] http://forum.peacebuild.ca/content/view/13/27/

[iii] Afghan President Hamid Karzai has now asked a group of former Taliban to mediate with rebel Taliban. Terry Friel, “Only peace talks can save Afghanistan – former rebel,” Reuters, April 12, 2007 [http://today.reuters.com/news/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=SP206760].

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Canada, India, and changing the non-proliferation rules

Posted on: April 10th, 2007 by Ernie Regehr

Canada has figured prominently, if unwillingly, in five decades of Indian nuclear weapons development. Now that Washington has proposed changing the rules of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) – rules that currently preclude nuclear cooperation with India – Canada has an opportunity to channel its historical involvement to support for multilateral rules that constrain India ‘s nuclear ambitions and promote non-proliferation objectives.

Canada supplied India its first heavy water nuclear reactor, the CIRUS, during the 1950s, exclusively for “peaceful purposes.” The CIRUS, over the protestations of Canada, nevertheless became the source of the weapons grade plutonium used to build India ‘s first nuclear warhead, which was detonated in 1974. Since then the CIRUS and the larger Indian-built Dhruva reactor, based on the CIRUS design, have supplied most of the weapons grade plutonium for India’s current arsenal of about 50 warheads and plutonium for another 50.

Through the NSG, established largely in response to India’s diversion of civilian technology and materials to military purposes, states agreed to refuse nuclear cooperation (e.g. trade) with non-nuclear weapon states party to Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or states outside the NPT that are not under full-scope safeguards – that is, states that maintain nuclear programs and facilities that are not subject to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections and are thus presumed to be used for military purposes.

But later this month the NSG will informally begin to explore an India-only exemption to the full-scope safeguards rule in order to accommodate the US-India nuclear cooperation deal reached in 2005.[i]

The proposed exemption is controversial partly because Pakistan and Israel, also states outside the NPT with nuclear weapons programs, will demand the same deal, and partly because it will embolden states within the NPT and suspected of harboring nuclear weapons ambitions, notably Iran, to defy the obvious double standard inherent in the accommodation to India’s nuclear arsenal while demanding Iran terminate uranium enrichment even for peaceful purposes. But even more controversial is the likelihood, indeed the certainty, that the proposed Indian exemption would, in the name of civilian cooperation, facilitate the accelerated expansion of India ‘s nuclear arsenal.

A 2006 report of the International Panel on Fissile Materials[ii], based at Princeton University , makes that very point. Currently India’s civilian and military programs are both constrained by their reliance on its own limited domestic uranium, so if India were to gain access to the foreign sources of uranium that the deal would open up for its civilian programs, it could then funnel all its domestic supplies into an expanded military program.

The CIRUS reactor, set to run until 2010, could then generate enough plutonium for another 10 warheads. The Dhruva reactor could deliver weapons-grade plutonium sufficient to build another five or six warheads per year. The new breeder reactor that India plans to bring on stream in 2010, could produce weapons grade plutonium from the spent-fuel of India ‘s other unsafeguarded CANDU-style reactors.

All told, under the changed rules, India could accumulate enough plutonium for an arsenal of more than 300 nuclear warheads within a decade – an arsenal to rival or exceed those of the UK, France, or China. The US-India deal will lead to more of India ‘s civilian facilities being brought under IAEA safeguards, but the CIRUS and several of the plutonium producing reactors built on the Canadian model are to be kept out of the IAEA inspections regime, which means that their spent fuel could ultimately be made available for producing fissile material for weapons purposes.

The opportunity for Canada to be a key player owes to its membership in the NSG, the fact that the NSG decision-making is by consensus – essentially giving each member a veto – and Canada ‘s recognized stake in ending the use of Canadian-origin technology for building nuclear weapons.

But there are risks to exercising that de facto veto without any acknowledgement of the unique situation of the three states outside the NPT. The nuclear status quo with regard to India, Israel, and Pakistan is not a compelling one. Refusing them civilian nuclear cooperation has obviously not prevented them from acquiring nuclear weapons, and keeping them out of the formal nuclear non-proliferation regime means they are subject to few legal constraints. The challenge is to create a place for these three de facto nuclear weapons states (North Korea is not a parallel case) inside the nuclear non-proliferation system and to require them in return to accept the same obligation to disarm as applies to those states bound by Article VI of the NPT, and to accept certain obligations and commitments consistent with the overall objectives of non-proliferation (which all three claim to support).

Two important places to start are the entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and a freeze on the production of fissile material for weapons purposes, pending the negotiation of a treaty to make the ban permanent (generally referred to as the fissile material cut-off treaty – FMCT).

The CTBT has been agreed to but won’t come into force until it is ratified by all the nuclear weapons states and all states with nuclear reactors – a list that obviously includes India, Israel, and Pakistan (of the three, only Israel has signed and none has ratified it). The US-India deal stipulates that US bilateral cooperation will end if India tests another nuclear device, and at a minimum this commitment should be extended and multilaterialized to make CTBT ratification a precondition for civilian nuclear cooperation and to ensure any NSG exemption would be voided in the event of a weapons test.

Even though India already has enough fissile material to meet any requirements of its declared “minimum deterrence” doctrine, and even though it has declared its support for negotiations toward an FMCT, India appears determined to increase and accelerate fissile material production for weapons purposes while the Treaty negotiations drag on (assuming they ever get started), and for India the NSG exemption is essential to meeting that goal.

Canada has already signaled its opposition. In December 2005 Canada told US officials that while it welcomed efforts to deal constructively with states, like India, outside the NPT, it said “the deal would have been more positive if the United States had obtained an Indian commitment to freeze production of fissile material for nuclear weapons.”[iii] It is a mild statement that nevertheless embodies a principle that the NSG should make its own – that is, civilian nuclear cooperation with India or any de facto nuclear weapon state outside the NPT should also be conditional on them imposing a verifiable freeze on the production of fissile material for weapons purposes until their adherence to an FMCT that converts the freeze into a permanent ban.

Canada is in a position to insist on these conditions, and with forthright leadership others will follow.

[i]Regehr, Ernie. 2005. US-India Nuclear Cooperation Agreement: A further threat to nuclear non-proliferation. Project Ploughshares Briefing 05/3.

http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries/Briefings/Briefingslist.html.

[ii] Mian, Zia, AH Nayyar, R Rajaraman & MV Ramana. 2006. Fissile Materials in South Asia : The Implications of the U.S.-India Nuclear Deal. International Panel on Fissile Materials, September. www.fissilematerials.org.

[iii] Squassoni, Sharon. 2006. U.S.Nuclear Cooperation With India : Issues for Congress. CRS Report for Congress, Congressional Research Service, updated 12 January. http://fpc.state.gov/fpc/c16427.htm.

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