Archive for November, 2009

Reversing the diplomatic trajectory on Iran

Posted on: November 30th, 2009 by Ernie Regehr

Iran’s announcement of another 10 uranium enrichment plants[i] is sufficiently out there to be neither very alarming nor of much predictive value in considering the long-term development of Iran’s nuclear programs.

While not exactly alarming, the move is depressingly indicative of a failing process and as such seems to be lifting the spirits of the hardliners, whether they be in Tehran or Washington. The Wall Street Journal sounded almost gleeful in raising the spectre of “500,000 Iranian centrifuges.”[ii] Seizing it as one more opportunity to invoke the need for “punitive sanctions or military strikes” as the only credible options for resolving the dispute, the WSJ insists it is only the US and the Europeans that need to share its view.

Russia and China may not enter the political calculus of the WSJ, but they do figure rather prominently in the remarkable level of agreement the international community reached in its most recent call on Iran to suspend uranium enrichment, ratify the Additional Protocol to strengthen its IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) safeguards agreements, and to confirm that it has no other undeclared nuclear facilities.[iii] The West, Russia, China, and the outgoing IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei acted in concert, but there is no chance that this unanimity will translate into either the collective punitive sanctions or support for the military strikes that the WSJ wants. We can only hope that the world will be saved from yet another reckless military adventure, if not by good sense then at least by a host of conflicting interests.

When Iran was first found (in 2003) to be pursuing an undeclared nuclear program in violation of its safeguards and NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) commitments, there was no direct evidence of a nuclear weapons program – nor has direct evidence of one emerged since then. Iran’s actions have certainly raised many legitimate suspicions inasmuch as its pursuit of civilian technology, namely enrichment, is doggedly focused on the production of reactor fuel which is not yet needed but which gives Iran access to the option of pursuing nuclear weapons. Iran’s strategy is now routinely understood to be the “Japan option” – that is, the pursuit of civilian technology that creates competence in weapons-related technologies and creates the opportunity for fairly rapid break-out, in pursuit of a weapon when a hard decision to that end is taken.

In response to Iran’s protestations that its pursuit of weapons-relevant technology is rooted in a commitment to peaceful purposes, the rest of the world has in effect said, “OK, but do something to make us believe. We need to see you act in ways to restore confidence that your declared peaceful intentions are genuine.” And the particular action proposed, or demanded, by the international community was and is suspension of uranium enrichment. The demand includes the explicit acknowledgment that Iran has the right, under Article IV of the NPT, to enrich uranium for peaceful or civilian purposes, and thus suspension is to be a temporary interruption, with the clear implication that enrichment could resume once Iran had dealt satisfactorily with all the questions raised by the IAEA – questions about those activities which suggest an explicit interest in weapons technology.

The point is that suspension of enrichment is to be a goodwill gesture, it is not the solution. Iran has, and by all accounts will retain, the capacity to enrich – and with that it will ultimately acquire the capacity to build a bomb. But the capacity to build one and actually building one are not the same thing. Preventing that capacity from being acted upon is where the line finally has to be drawn and where the international community’s efforts and safeguards must ultimately be focused. That means unfettered monitoring – access to all declared and suspected facilities whenever international inspectors want that access. That in turn means Iran ratifying and acting on the Additional Protocol – the legal instrument that provides such access.

Confidence building measures are good, and Iran is obliged to restore the confidence that was shattered when its clandestine program was discovered. The fact that Iran has a plausible explanation for its clandestine actions – namely, that it was prevented from openly acquiring legitimate technology on the open market by those out to frustrate Iran’s development and its revolutionary regime – does not detract from the fact that clandestine activity was in violation of firm commitments made.

A more recent confidence building proposal has been for Iran to ship its LEU (low enriched uranium) out of the country for further refining into fuel rods for its medical research reactor. It looked for a time as if Iran would accept this. After all, exchanging Iranian LEU on the international market for manufactured fuel would clearly signal acceptance of Iranian enrichment. But in its last move, Iran demanded that the exchange take place within the country. That is, Iran in effect, and somewhat understandably, said the international community would also have to build some confidence with Iran because of the latter’s fear that after it shipped the LEU out of the country, it might not receive the promised fuel in return. So Iran proposed that there be an exchange inside Iran – linking the shipment out of LEU to the shipment in of reactor fuel. The West took this as a refusal and so a new resolution was drafted.

But confidence building measures are gestures, not solutions. The solution is to continuously verify that Iran’s nuclear activity is not diverted to military purposes. There is no once-and-for-all solution. It is a day-to-day requirement in the same way that a bank’s stores of cash must be verified on an all day every day, 24-7, basis.

Iran is not about to build 10 uranium enrichment plants. Of that the international community can be quite confident. But Iran’s announcement of such a plan certainly confirms that the diplomatic effort is once again on a starkly negative trajectory. So now it’s back to the diplomats to once again try to reverse that trajectory. Talk of “punitive sanctions or military strikes” will be increasingly tempting, but it is a temptation that will be resisted by those serious about a constructive outcome.

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] Daniel Dombey and Najmeh Bozorgmehr, “Iran’s nuclear move puzzles west,” Financial Times, 29 November 2009.  http://www.iranian.com/main/news/2009/11/29/iran-s-nuclear-move-puzzles-west.

[ii] Opinion page, 30 November 2009.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574565802447685802.html#printMode.

[iii] IAEA Resolution on Iran, GOV/2009/82, 27 November 2009.http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Board/2009/gov2009-82.pdf.

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Canadian priorities for surmounting the obstacles to nuclear disarmament

Posted on: November 23rd, 2009 by Ernie Regehr

A November 13-14 public forum at Toronto City Hall looked at the opportunities and obstacles to nuclear disarmament. The program and details are available athttp://zeronuclearweapons.com/. The following notes are part 2 of my comments, focusing on Canadian disarmament diplomacy priorities.

The first, and really most urgent, priority is for Canada to rediscover its traditional of disarmament diplomacy.

Canada has an important history of active support for nuclear disarmament. Later today you’ll be hearing from two terrific former Canadian Ambassadors for Disarmament – they and many other Canadian diplomats and officials have been deeply engaged in bringing constructive Canadian influence to bear upon the NPT Review Process and other multilateral disarmament forums.

Of course, there has always been a strong element of ambivalence in Canadian disarmament policy. Remember that, when Canada joined the newly-negotiated NPT in 1968 as a non-nuclear weapon State, some 250-450 nuclear weapons[i] were deployed with Canadian forces in Canada and Europe. Put another way, in numbers of warheads, Canada’s arsenal was a lot bigger than is China’s today. While all nuclear weapons had been withdrawn from Canadian territory or deployment with Canadian forces by the early 1980s,[ii] direct participation in nuclear weapons-related operations continued, and remains today, through membership in NATO and NORAD.[iii]

In recent years, certainly at the highest levels of Government, ambivalence seems to have turned to indifference. The Harper Government has not rejected Canadian policy in support of the elimination of nuclear weapons, but neither has it championed it. The first priority now needs to be a clear decision to re-assert Canadian disarmament diplomacy. It is urgent that the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, as should every Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, find early and prominent opportunities to publicly address nuclear disarmament and reaffirm Canada’s commitment to a world without nuclear weapons.

A second priority is to recognize that an important impediment to disarmament is a seriously flawed set of disarmament institutions.

The Conference on Disarmament has been famously deadlocked for more than a decade – and recent reports of a breakthrough turned out to be premature. Multilateral disarmament will continue to founder in the absence of disarmament machinery that is effective and trusted.

Canada has prominently advanced proposals for shoring up the disarmament institutional infrastructure. An innovative proposal to take key issues out of the CD and pursue them in specially created working groups mandated by the General Assembly, was a case in point a few years back. Canada’s effort to strengthen the NPT’s institutional and accountability mechanisms is an important initiative that Canada has persisted in throughout the current NPT review process. Some of the most energetic opponents of that effort are members of the G8 – which suggests using the forthcoming G8-G20 meeting in Canada to try to shore up support. To make headway will require Canadian leadership that has the courage of its formal policy declarations, supplemented by a coherent strategy and a diplomatic offensive to gather a credible supporting coalition of like-minded States.

A sub-element of institution building is the need to enhance and regularize the role of civil society in the NPT review process.

The research and public engagement work of disarmament NGOs and think tanks is widely recognized as an important element of developing the political will to act on the particulars of the disarmament agenda. In 2003 Canada submitted a working paper to the NPT to encourage a more prominent role for civil society and diplomats actively pursued support for the initiative. The Harper Government has not only given up on advocacy on the matter, but has ended the long-standing practice of including civil society representatives on its delegations to the NPT Review Conferences.

Canada has also championed Transparency and Reporting in the nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation regime.

Institutional fixing and transparency regulations definitely lack an air of the heroic – these are not causes likely to enflame public passions. But this is a case of the mundane being not only important, but essential. These are foundational questions of accountability and of the ending of nuclear impunity. In 2000 the NPT Review Conference agreed on a provision for “regular reports” on progress made in implementing Article VI. The nuclear weapon States have actively resisted the idea that there is actually any actual multilateral transparency obligation involved (as distinct from bilateral transparency/verification), but the degree to which nuclear weapon States are prepared to report reflects the degree to which they regard themselves as accountable to other States Parties to the Treaty.

It is a principle that Canada has championed and needs to continue to press with some vigor.

Ultimately, disarmament will require a nuclear weapons convention.

Finally, we need the Government to acknowledge that while progress toward a world without nuclear weapons will obviously involve a broad range of incremental measures and agreements, ultimately, all such measures must be brought together in a single umbrella or framework convention. Thus, Canadian policy should explicitly call for, and work toward, a nuclear weapons convention that sets a clear timeline for irreversible and verifiable nuclear disarmament.[iv]

The nuclear threat is an eminently solvable problem. Compare it with all the other perils this troubled planet faces:  from the economic crisis, to climate change, energy deficits, burgeoning pollution, acute water shortages, unrelenting hunger, grossly inadequate health services, and chronic armed conflict. Solving these problems requires a vast array of complex social and behavioral transformations. But nuclear disarmament really only needs only a few clear decisions by a relatively small cadre of leaders. A very small number of leaders can decide to take weapons of high-alert and immediately make the world a much safer place. Similarly, it takes only a small number of leaders, most of whom have now declared their commitment to a world without nuclear weapons, to make the decisions needed to progressively remove weapons from deployment and into the dismantling shops.

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] John Clearwater is the leader in documenting the history of nuclear weapons in Canada. In his 1998 book,Canadian Nuclear Weapons: The Untold Story of Canada’s Cold War Arsenal (Dundurn Press) he concludes that “at the height of the Canadian nuclear deployments, the greatest number of weapons which could have been available to Canada would have been between 250 (low estimate) and 450 (high estimate),” p. 23. The November/December 1999 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported (by Rpbert S. Norris, William M. Arkin, and William Burr, pp. 26-35) on a Pentagon document received through the Freedom of Information Act entitled: History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons:  July 1945 through September 1977. One graph shows a peak of just over 300 nuclear weapons in Canada in the late 1960s. The Clearwater upper end estimate is higher because his totals include the weapons with Canadian forces in Europe, while the Pentagon report would show those as being in Germany.

[ii] It was also under Trudeau’s watch that all the nuclear weapons within Canadian territory and deployed with Canadian forces in Europe were withdrawn – a development that was primarily a function of technological advances in fighter-interceptor aircraft and conventional air-to-air missiles.

[iii] The North American Aerospace Defence Agreement — While the NORAD air defence role declined significantly when the main Soviet threat switched to intercontinental ballistic missiles from bombers, NORAD was also the primary ballistic missile early warning agency.

[iv] What could Canada constructively contribute if it were to embrace the immediate pursuit of a nuclear weapons convention? Canada could and should institute informal international consultations involving a core group of like-minded states and representatives of civil society to thoroughly explore the focus, scope, verification, and other elements relevant to a nuclear weapons convention. One outcome of this consultation could be an informal international Contact Group or Nuclear Weapons Convention Action Group to systematically press the issue on the international stage. In the meantime Canada should be thinking about the particular contribution it could make to the international process. The UK, sometimes working with Norway, has been focusing on verification measures linked to a nuclear weapons convention.4 Canada was once active in this area, and still is involved in CTBT seismic verification. Consideration could be given to reviving some of this work to bolster the UK-Norwegian initiative.

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Surmounting the Obstacles to Nuclear Disarmament

Posted on: November 16th, 2009 by Ernie Regehr

A November 13-14 public forum at Toronto City Hall looked at the opportunities and obstacles to nuclear disarmament. The program and details are available athttp://zeronuclearweapons.com/. The following notes are my comments on some of the obstacles.

The current possibilities for finally locking in some significant gains in the slow movement toward zero nuclear weapons are truly unprecedented. The path toward a world without nuclear weapons is already well marked – many of the steps to be taken have been developed and agreed to in the multilateral review process linked to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons – the NPT. To a surprising extent, we know who has to do what.

But the focus is not on what has to be done, rather, it’s on the obstacles to doing what must still be done. Four such challenges are identified. They are not necessarily the biggest obstacles – like the complex of military, industrial, scientific, and security constituencies that endure as complex centres of nuclear retentionism – but they are issues that need serious and sustained attention.

The first challenge is that posed by the real and potential proliferators within the NPT. As you know, the NPT is the core global law on nuclear weapons. The five states that had them when the Treaty was signed in 1968 are required to disarm; all other states must never acquire nuclear weapons. In one sense it has worked extremely well; of all the non-nuclear weapon states that signed the Treaty, only North Korea explicitly violated that commitment – pursuing a weapons capability while part of the treaty, then withdrawing and acquiring weapons. Some, like South Africa, pursued nuclear weapons, but then signed and moved into full compliance with the Treaty. Iran, as a Treaty member, has certainly not acquired nuclear weapons, but it is pursuing technologies, for a time it did it clandestinely, that raise serious questions as to its intentions.

So, out of 183 non-nuclear signatories, only two (North Korea and Iran) are now in formal noncompliance with their Treaty-related obligations.

The disarmament part of the Treaty has, of course, not worked nearly so well – but that shouldn’t detract from the new developments that indicate the disarmament agenda is finally starting to get some serious traction.

Now, disarmament advocates get justifiably impatient when nuclear weapon states keep changing the subject, away from disarmament and to nonproliferation. But, in the context of the priority objective of disarmament, we still need to affirm the central importance of getting the nonproliferation issue right. Few developments would be as durably devastating to disarmament hopes as would a pervasive and deep-seated suspicion that the nuclear nonproliferation regime is ultimately not reliable – that it is not up to the task of stopping or reversing the proliferators.

Disarmament requires a nuclear nonproliferation regime that earns the overwhelming confidence of the international community. In a world in which all nuclear weapons are finally banned, the system of monitoring and inspections will be the primary barrier to nuclear breakout and resumed arms competition. Nuclear technology, materials, and knowledge will continue to be present throughout much of the world via civilian programs, and more and more states will develop capacity, and there will also always be some who are tempted to convert that knowledge and material into weapons.

So, we need a detection and verification system that is continuously and indefinitely effective and has the confidence of the international community – and the successful resolution of the DPRK and Iran cases is essential to building that confidence.

During the course of the discussion there was a question as to the implications of Iran acquiring a weapon – but the ongoing dispute has serious repercussions even if Iran does not acquire a weapon. For the longer the IAEA has to say that Iran is not fully cooperating or that unresolved issues remain, the more the nonproliferation regime is undermined. Both the DPRK and Iran cases have benefited from a new infusion of more sensitive diplomacy and creative proposals, but they both continue to be very difficult problems, and as long as they fester, confidence in the nonproliferation regime continues to suffer. And already the fierce opponents of global zero in the US are bolstering their arguments against CTBT ratification, for example, on grounds that America should not lower its nuclear guard at a time when the nonproliferation regime is proving to be powerless to stop the spread of nuclear weapons to determined proliferators.

A second challenge is represented by the states with nuclear weapons that are outside the NPT. Threede facto nuclear weapon states have always been and still are outside the NPT (India, Israel, and Pakistan).

India’s status as a state with nuclear weapons was granted a level of formality when it was exempted from the Nuclear Suppliers Group prohibition on civilian nuclear cooperation with any state not under fullscope safeguards. Pakistan has really won the same recognition by default. The UN Security Council Resolution (#1172 of 1998) that required India and Pakistan, in the wake of their 1998 nuclear tests, to end their nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, was never heeded and then rendered irrelevant by the Nuclear Suppliers Group action.

So we now have a situation in which India and Pakistan are essentially accepted as nuclear weapon states, but without being formally bound by any of the obligations that accrue to Nuclear Weapon States – notably Chapter VI (the disarmament chapter) of the NPT. Furthermore, while NWS in the NPT have signed the CTBT, India and Pakistan have not (US and China have signed but not ratified). And while NWS have put a moratorium on producing fissile materials for weapons purposes pending the negotiation of an FMCT, India and Pakistan have not (indeed, India is positioned to accelerate production when it imports uranium – possibly from Canada – for civilian purposes because then its domestic supply can be more fully dedicated to military purposes). That in turn puts pressure on Pakistan – and before you know it you’ve got a real nuclear arms race.

Canada, of course, is actively pursuing a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with India, and we’ll see whether Foreign Affairs is able to attach some nonproliferation conditions.[i] It should, for example, be clear, at a minimum, that any further test of a nuclear warhead by India would immediately end all cooperation (the preference, of course, would be that India sign the CTBT).[ii] In particular India should be pressed to offer credible assurances that it has joined the five officially recognized nuclear weapon states in halting all production of fissile material for weapons purposes.

Israel obviously also remains outside the constraints and obligations of the NPT – and it is clear that a remedy will have to be pursued in the context of efforts toward establishing the Middle East as a nuclear weapons free zone and a zone free of all weapons of mass destruction – that will be a difficult process, to put it mildly, but at least discussions have begun about appointing a special envoy, or about holding a special conference to give some energy to that agenda.

A third major challenge to nuclear disarmament is the steep imbalance in global conventional military forces. Current levels of US conventional military spending, along with the posture of NATO, will not incline Russia toward zero nuclear weapons. Look at the statistics (2007 military spending):[iii] The US spent (in its basic defence budget) $552 Billion, or 43% of world total. Russia was at $32 Billion, or 2.5% of the world total. Russia, India, and China combined made up 8% of world military spending, while NATO’s share was 67%. At an almost 20:1 disadvantage, Russia, justified or not, will obviously continue to look to nuclear weapons as the way to level the strategic playing field.

The point here is not that general and complete disarmament is a prerequisite to nuclear disarmament – not at all. But it does suggest that nuclear disarmament requires the pursuit of cooperative security rather than competitive security, and it requires a fundamental rebuilding of security relations between the West and Russia, and China. The overall security objective needs to shift from mutual deterrence, to mutual, and demonstrable, reassurance.[iv]

Fourth, NATO nuclear doctrine persists as another impediment to disarmament. There isn’t time to expand on this, except to say that nowhere is the need for reassurance as an alternative to deterrence greater than in NATO. And, of course, the current review of NATO’s Strategic Concept is the place to begin. Both the rationale and the language for a new approach to nuclear weapons are available in the growing anthology of nuclear abolition statements that has emerged in the last few years from figures like Mikhail Gorbachev, Henry Kissinger, Barack Obama, and many others.

Nuclear weapons, far from being “essential to preserve peace”, as the current NATO doctrine has it, are in the logic of the NPT an unacceptable risk to humanity; which means that it is their elimination, not their retention, that is essential to security.

Next, some Canadian policy priorities.

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] John Ibbotson, “Why Harper needs a nuclear deal with India,” 12 November 2009.http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/why-harper-needs-a-nuclear-deal-with-india/article1360161/.

[ii] CTBT Annex II Signatories/Ratifications still required: NNWS in NPT: Egypt, Indonesia, Iran (has signed);NWS in NPT: China (has signed), US (has signed). Non-NPT: India, Israel (has signed), Pakistan.

[iii] The Military Balance 2009, The International Institute for Strategic Studies (Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2009), pp. 447-452, re 2007 military spending: US ($552 Billion – 43% of world total); Russia ($32Billion – 2.5%); China ($46Billion); India ($27Billion); Russia, India, China combined (8%); NATO: $863Billion (67%); CSTO: $36Billion (Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan  (the Collective Security Treaty Organization); World Total: $1,280Billion.

[iv] Point forcefully made in, Steinbruner, John. 2009. Engaging with Russia: Managing risks, repairing rifts.Arms Control Today. January/February. http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2009_01-02/Steinbruner.

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Can civil society help to verify nuclear disarmament?

Posted on: November 5th, 2009 by Ernie Regehr

Transparency and verification are central to sustainable nuclear disarmament and a compelling new report on nuclear weapons materials includes a look at ways in which “societal verification” can contribute to a more effective nonproliferation regime.

The just released 2009 report of the International Panel on Fissile Materials[i] (IPFM) examines, in addition to its main focus on global stocks of nuclear weapon materials, the verification challenges for nuclear disarmament pursued in a world where nuclear materials and knowledge are widely disseminated through civilian nuclear power programs. The report confirms the basic conclusion of the recent CIGI study,[ii] From Nuclear Energy to the Bomb – namely, that scientific knowledge acquired through a nuclear energy program provides the basic foundation of expertise and, especially, the core personnel and infrastructure on which a nuclear weapons program can be built. Justin Alger points out in his CIGI paper that “a state’s capacity to make the leap from power production to assembling a nuclear device is typically considered a matter of time rather than ability.”[iii]

The Global Fissile Material Report 2009 from the IPFM sets out the link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons rather starkly in the opening paragraph of Chapter 8:  “A civilian nuclear power program provides a state a foundation to produce fissile materials for nuclear weapons. It allows a country to train scientists and engineers, to build research facilities, to construct and operate nuclear reactors, and possibly also to learn techniques of reprocessing and enrichment that could later be turned to producing weapons materials. Even small civilian nuclear energy programs can involve large stocks and flows of nuclear-weapon-usable materials.”

Nuclear power has serious proliferation risks, but regardless of those risks, and whatever its economic and environmental merits, existing and already planned nuclear power operations mean it will remain a prominent feature of the global energy and, by default, security landscape for a long time to come. That in turn obviously means that transparency and verification are of over-riding importance. The transparency objective, as the IPFM puts it, is to lengthen the time between a country’s decision to pursue a nuclear weapon and the achievement of the same. Legally mandated inspections are designed to detect a weapons program early on so as to give the international community maximum time to mount an effective preventive response. But the presence of a civilian nuclear program reduces that time – because it develops expertise and makes it easier to disguise a weapons program behind ostensibly legitimate civilian research and development.

The ninth chapter of the IPFM report then considers whether the inspections regime, and the time-lag between decision and fruition in a weapons program, can be enhanced and extended through societal verification. Can “non-governmental organizations and individual scientists and technologists” be encouraged and offered mechanisms through which to provide information related to national violations of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguard commitments? The IAEA is the agency mandated to inspect civilian nuclear energy programs and verify that no nuclear materials or technology are being diverted to weapons programs.

The IPFM report documents Joseph Rotblat’s promotion of this idea. Rotblat, the Nobel Laureate who resigned in protest from the Manhattan Project and was instrumental in starting the international Pugwash movement,[iv] argued that societal verification is needed to complement formal detection measures. Such reporting, or whistle blowing, he said, should be recognized as the right and duty of all citizens, and that scientists in particular should be, and generally are, committed to methods and ethics that transcend national loyalties and recognize a loyalty to all humanity. Indeed, he even argued that any global treaty or nuclear weapons convention[v] should include a clause mandating states to enact laws guaranteeing the individual’s the right and duty to report violations of safeguards to the IAEA.

As to NGO reporting, the IPFM acknowledges that many don’t have the technical capacity for such informal monitoring, but they do nevertheless frequently have relevant information. Over time, community based groups linked to particular nuclear sites, for example, “become very expert in understanding activities at the site they contest.” Other groups and institutes do develop technical capacities, for example, to measure radiation levels, and, “moreover, technological developments may significantly increase those capabilities. The cost of satellite imagery, for example, has declined considerably in recent years while its spatial resolution has increased” (p. 121).

Societal verification is certainly not new or unprecedented. The Landmines Treaty[vi] includes references to the implementation responsibilities of non-governmental organizations, and the Landmine Monitor[vii] is published annually through the non-governmental International Campaign to Ban Landmines and monitors a broad range of details related to implementation of the Treaty.

Of course, societal verification and links between nuclear power and nuclear weapons are but one small part of the Global Fissile Material Report 2009. The bulk of this year’s report focuses on documenting current stocks of fissile material, that is, weapons usable highly enriched uranium and plutonium, and their control and management in support of nuclear disarmament. Chapter headings, beyond the two discussed here, are: Nuclear Weapon and Fissile Material Stocks and Production, Fissile Materials and Nuclear Disarmament, Declarations of Fissile Material Stocks and Production, Nuclear Archaeology, Verified Warhead Dismantlement, Disposition of Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium, Verified Cutoff of Fissile Material Production for Weapons.

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] Global Fissile Material Report 2009, the fourth annual report of the International Panel on Fissile Materials.http://www.fissilematerials.org/ipfm/site_down/gfmr09.pdf.

The International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), experts from seventeen nuclear weapon and non-nuclear weapon states, was founded in January 2006. The Panel examines and proposes technical requirements for securing, consolidating, and reducing stockpiles of highly enriched uranium and plutonium – these being the key ingredients in nuclear weapons. Control of these materials, says the Panel, “is critical to nuclear disarmament, halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and ensuring that terrorists do not acquire nuclear weapons.” It is housed at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security.

[ii] Justin Alger, From Nuclear Energy to the Bomb: The Proliferation Potential of New Nuclear Energy Programs, Nuclear Energy Futures Paper No. 6, September 2009, Centre for International Governance Innovation. Available at: http://www.cigionline.org/sites/default/files/Nuclear_Energy_Futures%206.pdf.

[iii] See the recent posting here, “Does nuclear energy lead to the bomb?”http://www.cigionline.org/blogs/2009/10/does-nuclear-energy-lead-bomb.

[iv] Both Rotblat and Pugwash are celebrated in the current National Film Board film, “The Strangest Dream.”http://beta.nfb.ca/film/strangest-dream-trailer/.

[v] See the recent posting here, “Canada and a nuclear weapons convention,” 5 September 2009. http://www.cigionline.org/blogs/2009/9/canada-and-nuclear-weapons-convention.

[vi] Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction. http://www.icbl.org/index.php/icbl/Treaties/MBT/Treaty-Text-in-Many-Languages/English.

[vii] http://www.lm.icbl.org/index.php/LM/Our-Research-Products/Landmine-Monitor.

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