Posts Tagged ‘nuclear non-proliferation’

Canada has managed the extraordinary feat of presenting its opening statement to the NPT Review Conference without any substantive reference to “disarmament” – one of the three foundational pillars of the Treaty.

Actually, the statement by Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon did make one, and only one, mention of disarmament – a reference to the DPRK’s “complete disregard for nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament objectives.”

It is fair to describe Canada’s opening speech to the 2010 Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as extraordinary in the sense of it being starkly out of the ordinary – out of sync with the focus and urgency with which other speeches of the opening day (May 3) spoke of disarmament and of the opportunities now before the international community.

For example, the European Union Statement[i] began by pointing out that the NPT is “based on the three mutually reinforcing pillars of non-proliferation, disarmament and the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.” Canada’s 10 paragraph speech devoted 3 paragraphs to pillar one (nonproliferation), one paragraph to pillar three (peaceful uses), and none to pillar two (disarmament). There was one paragraph on North Korea, two on Iran, one on universality (urging the three states outside of the Treaty – India, Israel, and Pakistan – to join the Treaty as non-nuclear-weapon states, but linking that to the resolution of regional security issues). There was one paragraph on Canada’s important NPT institutional reform proposals, and a final paragraph noting that this is a time of challenge and opportunity. To Mr. Cannon’s credit he added a spoken phrase, not included in the written and distributed document, linking challenge and opportunity to “support of the common goal of a world without nuclear weapons.”

But on the substance of disarmament there was nothing.

The European Union welcomed the new US/Russia Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and called for “its swift ratification.” The EU also “encouraged both States concerned to work towards new agreements for further, comprehensive reductions of their nuclear arsenals, including non-strategic weapons.”

The Indonesian Foreign Minister spoke on behalf of NAM states and called for “full implementation of the Treaty in a balanced [all three pillars] manner.” The Minister acknowledged the new START agreement but said that the obligations of nuclear weapon states under the NPT required further “reductions applying the principles of transparency, irreversibility and verifiability at a significantly faster pace.”

The Dutch Foreign Minister raised the issue of US nuclear weapons in Europe and said “American sub strategic nuclear arms in Europe are going to be subject of arms reduction talks between the United States and Russia.[ii] Nonproliferation and disarmament,” he said, “are mutually reinforcing.”

Brazil’s Minister of External Relations said that “Brazil is convinced that the best guarantee for non-proliferation is the total elimination of nuclear weapons. As long as some states possess nuclear arms, other states will be tempted to acquire or develop them. We may deplore this perverse logic, but we cannot deny it.”

Ireland, through its Foreign Minister, addressed the urgency of nuclear disarmament: “The horrors which nuclear weaponry can unleash on mankind and on the planet we inhabit defy description. In addition to death and destruction on a massive scale, the environmental costs are profound and long-lasting. Scientists tell us about the effects on the Earth’s stratosphere of the detonation of nuclear weapons. A ‘nuclear winter’ caused by sunlight being blocked out for months or even years is a nightmare scenario which we must all work to prevent.”

Then he made the key point that perfectly illustrates the failure of vision on the part of the Canadian political leadership: “Selective approaches which stress the urgency of non-proliferation while downplaying the need for progress in relation to disarmament serve merely to weaken the Treaty. The NPT’s enduring role as the foundation of the international disarmament and non-proliferation regime requires that it be implemented inall its aspects.”

All of these and other speeches also spoke urgently about nonproliferation, in much the same vein as Canada, but what they managed to convey was the importance of balance – that disarmament and nonproliferation are mutually reinforcing; that the retention of nuclear weapons by some is not irrelevant to efforts of others to acquire them.

To be fair to Canada, the opening statement to the Review Conference is only a brief summary statement. Officials will make additional statements of substance as the three pillars are addressed in greater detail. Canada has submitted a report[iii] to the Review Conference on its actions in support of implementing the NPT, which includes an extensive account of Canada’s support for Article VI (the disarmament Article) and the 13 practical disarmament steps agreed to in 2000. So Canada’s policy commitment to the elimination of nuclear weapons is not in doubt, and it is confirmed, as the Canadian report points out, by virtue of Canada’s co-sponsorship of, and vote in favour of, the General Assembly resolution on “Renewed determination towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons” (resolution 64/47).

What is in considerable doubt is the level of enthusiasm within the political leadership of the current Government of Canada for any determined push on nuclear weapons states to accelerate their implementation of the disarmament pillar, while also pressing, of course, for strict implementation of the nonproliferation pillar.

Unfortunately, the statement by Foreign Minister Cannon continues the Harper Government’s unsoiled record of silence in the public and political arenas on the subject of nuclear disarmament. If the objective was to sorely annoy non-nuclear-weapon states in the non-aligned movement, whose support is absolutely essential to any strong action on nonproliferation, then this must be judged a successful speech.

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] All statements are available on the UN’s Website at http://www.un.org/en/conf/npt/2010/ and the Website of the NGO Reaching Critical Will at http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/legal/npt/revcon2010/statements.html.

[ii] The Minister failed to note, unfortunately, that on April 22 his own Parliament passed a resolution (tabled by the Socialist and Green Parties) requesting the Netherlands government to inform the US that the Netherlands does not regard the presence of American nuclear weapons as essential to the protection of Europe and regards the withdrawal of these nuclear weapons as desirable. Information provided by email by Socialist Party Researcher Karel Koster.

[iii] “Implementation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear weapons,” Report submitted by Canada, 18 March 2010 (NPT/Conf.2010/9). http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N10/279/58/PDF/N1027958.pdf?OpenElement.

The report includes, in an Annex, the summary of the Project Ploughshares report on NPT Reporting: “Transparency and Accountability.” The full report on reporting is available at  http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries/Abolish/NPTreporting02-09.pdf.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference opened in New York today – a good occasion to recall the size of the nuclear arsenal that the Treaty promises, through Article VI and earlier Review Conferences, to eliminate.

The short answer to the question of how many nuclear warheads actually exist is that it’s a secret. But it’s not really a very well-kept secret – the number is about 22,500, give or take a few hundred (any one of which, if detonated over a major population centre, could alone produce deaths in the millions).

We owe much of the fact that the global nuclear arsenal is a largely open secret to the careful and long-term monitoring work of the US based Natural Resources Defense Council[i] and the Federation of American Scientists,[ii] and to the researchers Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen. Their work is published regularly on their organizational websites, as well as in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists[iii] and theYearbook of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.[iv]

Current numbers can be found in three recent reports:[v] Russia, 12,000; US, 9,500; France, 300; China, 240; UK, 185; Pakistan, 90; Israel, 80; India, 80; North Korea, 10. All are estimates, but based on public disclosures at various times and calculations of production (and dismantlement) rates linked to fissile material inventories, relevant facilities, and so on.

Russian and American nuclear warheads need to be divided into several sub-categories: deployed strategic (US 2,000; Russia 2,600); strategic warheads in stockpiles and available for deployment (US 2,500; Russia 4,600); awaiting dismantlement (US 4,500; Russia 3,000); non-strategic warheads deployed and available for deployment (US 500; Russia 2,000).

In a May 2 posting, Kristensen refers to a new US fact sheet which says US deployed strategic warheads are now down to 1,968, indicating significant progress toward reaching the limits set out in the New START agreement.[vi]

The US will lift part of the veil of secrecy today, according to a New York Times report,[vii] releasing “long-classified statistics about the total size of America’s nuclear arsenal.” If that comes to pass it will be a significant development on the transparency and accountability front.

Non-nuclear weapon states in the NPT have been calling for that kind of reporting since 2000 when a formal reporting provision was included in list of key and practical disarmament steps. The Americans have offered more transparency than other nuclear weapon states, but they have yet to lift the veil of basic secrecy – we’ll say whether that changes today.

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] http://www.nrdc.org/

[ii] http://www.fas.org/

[iii] www.thebulletin.org

[iv] http://books.sipri.org/index_html?c_category_id=1

[v] Status of World Nuclear Forces 2010, Federation of American Scientists. May 3, 2010.http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/nuclearweapons/nukestatus.html

The US Nuclear Arsenal, 2009, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March/April 2009.http://www.thebulletin.org/files/065002008.pdf.

Russian Nuclear Forces, 2010, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January/February 2010.http://thebulletin.metapress.com/content/4337066824700113/fulltext.pdf.

[vi] “United States Moves Rapidly Toward New START Warhead Limit,” 2 May 2010.http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2010/05/downloading.php#more-3065.

[vii] David E. Sanger, “U.S. Releasing Nuclear Data on Its Arsenal,” New York Times, 2 May 2010.http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/world/03weapons.html.

Earlier this week, January 25-26, a group of Canadian NGOs[i] sponsored a conference attended by officials and experts from the United States, Canada, and NATO headquarters to consider and critique a set of recommendations prepared by the sponsoring groups. The recommendations, which focused on issues related to the forthcoming review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the current review of the NATO Strategic Concept, were presented in the conference briefing paper.[ii] The following is my presentation on three disarmament promises made by NATO states which the current NATO strategic doctrine continues to ignore.

This morning’s focus on NATO is obviously a response to the important opportunity that comes via the current review of the NATO Strategic Concept (the review process is described in the briefing paper for this conference: Canadian Action for Zero Nuclear Weapons.

The review is an opportunity for NATO as well – a chance to make some clear changes (both symbolic and practical) to its declaratory policies and the posture and deployments that follow from them. We’ve argued in the paper that in some of the key elements of its nuclear policy NATO is at serious odds with the NPT and with the re-invigorated attention globally to the pursuit of a world without nuclear weapons.

My comments in the next few minutes will highlight some of the recommendations in the briefing paper, and it is worth noting that the paper does not call on NATO to do anything that individual NATO states have not already promised to do. And in that regard I hope Chris Westdal won’t mind me recalling something he said to the Toronto forum last fall. How about, he said, instead of asking states to make more and more new promises, we insist that they start keeping some already made.

So I want to remind you of three unequivocal promises that have been made by all NATO states, but which the current NATO Strategic Concept does not honor:

a) The first is the obvious promise, through the NPT’s Article VI, to disarm. If the wording of Article VI is a bit ambiguous, the unanimous decisions and declarations in 1995 and 2000, by all states parties to the NPT, clarify once and for all what it means – that is, it is an unequivocal commitment to the elimination of nuclear weapons. The World Court added further clarity when it said that the promise to disarm is a legal obligation that requires not only the pursuit of disarmament, but its achievement.

But then we come to paragraph 46 of NATO’s Strategic Concept. It argues that given “the diversity of risks with which the Alliance could be faced…, the Alliance’s conventional forces alone cannot ensure credible deterrence.” So, the threat of nuclear attack is required to “render the risks of aggression against the Alliance incalculable and unacceptable.”  And thus it concludes that nuclear weapons remain “essential to preserve peace.” So in its formal declaration, NATO insists that, rather than pursuing and achieving disarmament, it “will maintain for the foreseeable future an appropriate mix of nuclear and conventional forces based in Europe” (para 46). So the promise is abolition, the commitment is indefinite retention.

b) A second promise is found in the agreement, reached during the NPT review process, that all states party to the NPT will seek to “diminish the role for nuclear weapons in [their] security policies [in order] to minimize the risk that these weapons will ever be used and to facilitate the process of their total elimination.”

Now look at paragraph 62 of the NATO Strategic concept:  It says the purpose of nuclear weapons is broad – it is to “prevent coercion and any kind of war.” And to accomplish that purpose, NATO nuclear forces are given the “essential role” of “ensuring uncertainty in the mind of any aggressor about the nature of the Allies’ response to military aggression” (para 62). In other words, rather than a diminishing role, NATO continues to prescribe an expansive role for nuclear weapons, including their potential use in response to non-nuclear threats, and, by implication, first use. European-based nuclear weapons, it says, are directly linked, also in paragraph 62, to “the supreme guarantee of the security of the Allies,” namely the strategic nuclear forces of Alliance members.

Furthermore, there has in fact been a geographic expansion of the role of nuclear weapons in NATO, rather than a diminishing role, as a result of the post-Cold War expansion of NATO and its nuclear umbrella.

So for NATO to come into full conformity with the commitments made by its individually, the new strategic concept will have to scale back dramatically on the role assigned to nuclear weapons – a no-first-use commitment would be an appropriate case in point.

c) NATO states, in a third promise, have obviously also signed on to NPT Articles I and II, and thus accepted the treaty’s explicit prohibition on the transfer of nuclear weapons – the Treaty requires that nuclear weapon states not supply nuclear weapons to non-nuclear weapon states; and non-nuclear weapon states are not to receive nuclear weapons.[iii]

In European NATO US nuclear weapons have been transferred to non-nucelar weapon states. Paragraph 63 of the current strategic concept insists, in effect, that there is justification for such transfers (despite the NPT’s clear prohibition) from NWS to NNWS in NATO because credible deterrence requires that European NNWS members of the Alliance “be involved in collective defence planning in nuclear roles” and that nuclear forces be maintained on European territory. Furthermore, those weapons on European soil are also said to be necessary to maintain “an essential political and military link between the European and the North American members of the Alliance.” Thus the current Strategic Concept of NATO promises the Alliance will continue to ignore Articles I and II (this arrangement actually goes back to the origins of the Treaty) and NATO will instead “maintain adequate nuclear forces in Europe” in NNWS (para 63).

So, we have at least three basic promises made which are not being honored through the current Strategic Concept. And NATO also says that, as of now, these promises will not be honored in the foreseeable future. The promise to disarm is met with a commitment to indefinite retention. The promise to reduce the role of nuclear weapons is met with a commitment to the continuing threat to be the first to use nuclear weapons, even in response to non-nuclear threats. The promise not to transfer nuclear weapons is met with the continuing deployment of  US nuclear weapons on the territories of non-nuclear weapon states.

The most immediate political repercussion of NATO’s essentially “non-compliant” nuclear posture can be expected to be found in nonproliferation dynamics, rather than in disarmament. After all, if it is legitimate for Canada and other NATO NNWS (all of which reside in the most stable neighborhoods of the world and are backed by the overwhelming conventional military superiority) – if such states can credibly claim that they are so vulnerable that their security requires an ongoing nuclear deterrent (against “any” threat), then it is really hard to think of any states anywhere that could not make a much more credible case for nuclear deterrence. Think especially of Iran and the Arab states in the Middle East who really do live in rather unstable and threatening environments. By what logic can Canada, while insisting that nuclear weapons are essential to its security, appeal to Pakistan, India, and Israel to forego nuclear deterrence and join the NPT as NNWS?

If we are going to insist that all states be subject to the same standards with regard to nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, then NATO has some critically important changes to make (and the paper sets out what some of those changes should be). If we are prepared to make the argument that not all states need to be bound by the same nonproliferation and disarmament standards, then, I’m afraid will also have to be prepared to see the nonproliferation regime unwind.

The briefing paper and its recommendations are proffered as an appeal to the government of Canada to muster the courage of its promises and to insist that NATO, taking advantage of this timely review of its strategic concept, make changes that will honor the promises all NATO states have already made. We have generally summarized the needed change as follows:

Canada should encourage a new NATO Strategic Concept that a) welcomes and affirms the groundswell of calls for a world without nuclear weapons; b) confirms NATO’s commitment to the objectives of the NPT and declares that the intent of Article VI of the NPT, and of the Alliance, is a world free of nuclear weapons; and c) commits NATO to security and arms control policies that conform to Articles I and II (which prohibit transfers of nuclear weapons) of the NPT and that are designed to achieve the nuclear disarmament promised in Article VI.

These are the changes that NATO could make immediately, at no cost to the security of its members – indeed it would be to the security benefit of its members inasmuch as it would contribute to the strengthening of the nuclear disarmament imperative.

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] The Canadian Network to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the Canadian Pugwash Group, Physicians for Global Survival, Project Ploughshares, and World Federalist Movement – Canada.

[ii] Available at: http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries/Abolish/ZeroNukesBriefPapJan2010.pdf.

[iii] Article I: “Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons…”

Article II: “Each non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transferor whatsoever of nuclear weapons…”

Three states with nuclear weapons remain outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Now the Commission on “Eliminating Nuclear Threats” helpfully proposes treating them as if they were nuclear weapon states within the NPT; but only if they agree to “uphold non-proliferation and disarmament norms and practices at least as rigorous as those accepted by nuclear-weapon states under the NPT.”

India, Israel, and Pakistan all have nuclear weapons, yet all are, in the arcane logic of the NPT, non-nuclear weapon states. That’s because all three acquired nuclear weapons after the Treaty’s 1 January 1967 cut-off date for recognizing nuclear powers. That makes them states with nuclear weapons rather than nuclear weapon states (NWS), and under the normative terms of the NPT they are obliged to disarm and join the NPT as non-nuclear weapon states. Indeed, that was the call that was reiterated by the UN Security Council at its special meeting on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, chaired by US President Barak Obama, last September.

But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. The reality, of course, is that the three will not join as non-nuclear weapon states, and for them to join as nuclear weapon states would require an amendment to the Treaty – and that will definitely not happen.

Thus the international community is faced with a nuclear governance status quo that is counterproductive. It keeps three important states permanently outside the global nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament regime. Hence, the international community and, more recently, the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND)[i] have been exploring alternative approaches.

India’s status as a state with nuclear weapons acquired a level of formality, approaching recognition of it as equivalent to a NWS, when the Nuclear Suppliers Group exempted it from its prohibition on civilian nuclear cooperation with any state not under fullscope safeguards – that is, any state that operates nuclear programs not subject to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Pakistan has arguably won a similar 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 was 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 in the NPT – notably the disarmament obligations under Chapter VI. Accepting the same “norms and practices” as those assumed by nuclear weapon states under the NPT does not set a very high bar, but it is nevertheless a standard to be met.

For example, all the NWS in the NPT have signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), while India and Pakistan have not (US and China, as well as Israel, have signed but not ratified). The NWS have all declared moratoria on producing fissile materials for weapons purposes pending the negotiation of an FMCT,[ii] 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 could put pressure on Pakistan to try to do likewise – the phrase for that kind of competition is a nuclear arms race.

Israel obviously also remains outside the constraints and obligations of the NPT – and NPT States have agreed that a remedy to Israel’s violations of nuclear norms 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.

Canada, of course, is actively pursuing a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with India, and we’ll see whether Foreign Affairs is able to attach any nonproliferation conditions.[iii] It should, for example, be clear, at a minimum, that any further test would immediately end all cooperation – the preference, of course, would be that India sign the CTBT.[iv] 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.

While Canada is unlikely to succeed in making these conditions part of the forthcoming deal, in trying it at least has the support of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND). The Commission advocates an end to the long-term formal policy of trying to isolate the non-NPT states and to refuse to recognize the reality of their status as states with nuclear weapons. Instead, said the ICNND, recognize reality and find ways of drawing them into non-proliferation and disarmament arrangements. To that end, the ICNND encourages civilian nuclear cooperation with such states (something that was virtually universally rejected until the US and the Nuclear Suppliers Group cooperated to give India an exemption from that provision). But cooperation says the ICNND should not be without some conditions attached: like satisfying “certain objective criteria showing their general commitment to disarmament and non-proliferation…including ratification of the CTBT, and [a] moratorium on unsafeguarded production of fissile materials pending negotiation of a fissile material production cut-off treaty.”[v]

States with nuclear weapons that are not bound by the NPT constitute a major gap in the nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament regime. It’s a gap that won’t be easily bridged, but the ICNND has got the basic architecture right.

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] ICNND report was issued at the end of 2009: Eliminating Nuclear Threats: A Practical Agenda for Global Policymakers, Report of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, Gareth Evans and Yoriko Kawaguchi, co-Chairs (2009), Section 10-17, p. 99. WWW.ICNND.ORG.

[ii] Fissile Materials Cut-off Treaty (FMCT), or a Fissile Materials Treaty (FMT), which would not only bar further production but would also put existing stockpiles under tight controls.

[iii] 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/.

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

[v] Eliminating Nuclear Threats: A Practical Agenda for Global Policymakers, Report of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, Gareth Evans and Yoriko Kawaguchi, co-Chairs (2009), Section 10-17, p. 99. WWW.ICNND.ORG.

With the international community’s nuclear stand-off with Iran intensifying, a new report on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament calls for a redefinition of the fundamentals of the dispute.

Bringing Iran into full accord with the global nonproliferation regime will require “acceptance by the international community of the reality of Iran’s enrichment program…in exchange for acceptance by Iran of a very intrusive inspections and verification regime.”[i] It is the formula put forward by the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND) in its final report, a formula long advocated in this space,[ii] and it helpfully redefines the Iran confrontation to centre it around the core condition for all successful nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament measures – namely, a high degree of transparency to build confidence in the international community’s capacity to verify implementation of commitments made.

Iran has made the essential commitment – that is, an unqualified commitment not to acquire nuclear weapons and to welcome the international community’s verification of compliance with that commitment. It did so by becoming a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and to safeguards agreements with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Iranian leaders have regularly repeated that commitment, the Supreme leader even issuing a fatwa against nuclear weapons.[iii] Iran has never promised, and no law requires it, not to enrich uranium.[iv] Enriching uranium to produce reactor fuel is not the problem that needs to be solved in the long run; the problem is to ensure that all enrichment is carried out under the full inspection of the IAEA – and today that is happening with regard to all known enrichment.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Iran if it was that simple.[v]

While Iran’s declared enrichment is now fully under IAEA inspections, the IAEA does not have sufficient access to Iran to develop confidence that that there is no undeclared enrichment. Iran’s belated disclosure in 2009 of the construction of an unreported enrichment facility did nothing to bolster that confidence. Thus Iran’s true act of defiance is not its continuing enrichment but is its refusal to heed the transparency demands of the IAEA: Resolution GOV/2006/14  (4 February 2006) calls on Iran to “implement transparency measures…which extend beyond the formal requirements of the Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol, and include such access to individuals, documentation relating to procurement, dual use equipment, certain military-owned workshops and research and development as the Agency may request in support of its ongoing investigations.”[vi]

A potential, and partial, step out of the current impasse was proposed late last year by the IAEA[vii] and discussed here November 30.[viii] It would have seen Iran ship its LEU (low enriched uranium) out of the country for further refining into fuel for its medical research reactor and of course allow Iran to import the fuel. This would have implicitly recognized the legitimacy of Iranian enrichment activity, but also would have removed stocks of LEU from the country and thus prevented a breakout scenario in which Iran could withdraw from the NPT, expel IAEA inspectors, and then use its LEU stocks to produce highly enriched, or weapons grade, uranium.[ix]

It looked for a time as if Iran would accept this arrangement, but Tehran then demanded that the exchange take place within the country and that only about a quarter of its LEU be shipped out initially. 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 if it shipped most of its 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.

Now Iran has given the international community, represented by the negotiating group of the P5 plus one – that is, the permanent five members of the Security Council plus Germany – until the end of January to accept its counter-offer.[x] Iran is demanding a staged removal of its LEU from Iran, with clear guarantees that it will receive the imported fuel. As a consequence Iran would retain a small stockpile of LEU in the country and thus the breakout potential would remain.[xi] In the long this is a scenario that the international community will almost certainly have to accept – Iran will not be prevented from stockpiling what it can legally make, and in the long run it is only continuous inspection and decisive and broadly supported international reaction to any breakout that will be available to the international community.

That is why the international community is now advised by the ICNND to focus on transparency and full disclosure.

This also seems the time for the international community to raise another proposal – not only that Iran abide by the Additional Protocol (a supplemental agreement with the IAEA on enhanced inspections) and the enhanced transparency measures required by the IAEA, but also that it enter discussions toward internationalizing or multilateralizing Iran’s enrichment program through the acceptance of international involvement in its uranium enrichment program. Both of these proposed conditions were also part of the ICNND report.

Iran has given the P5 plus one a deadline for responding to its modified proposal – but don’t expect anything conclusive to happen any time soon.

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] Eliminating Nuclear Threats: A Practical Agenda for Global Policymakers, Report of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, Gareth Evans and Yoriko Kawaguchi, co-Chairs (2009). WWW.ICNND.ORG.

[ii] For example: “Reversing the diplomatic trajectory on Iran” (30 November 2009); “‘Coming Clean’ – where the pressure on Iran belongs” 1 October 2009); “A welcome US shift on Iran” 14 April 2009).http://www.cigionline.org/publications/blogs/disarmingconflict.

[iii] “The Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued the Fatwa that the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who took office just recently, in his inaugural address reiterated that his government is against weapons of mass destruction and will only pursue nuclear activities in the peaceful domain. The leadership of Iran has pledged at the highest level that Iran will remain a non-nuclear-weapon state party to the NPT and has placed the entire scope of its nuclear activities under IAEA safeguards and additional protocol, in addition to undertaking voluntary transparency measures with the agency that have even gone beyond the requirements of the agency’s safeguard system.” “Iran, holder of peaceful nuclear fuel cycle technology,” 8 December 2005. http://mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=302258.

[iv] Both the IAEA [GOV/2006/14  (4 February 2006)] and the UN Security Council [Resolution 1737 (27 December 2006)] require Iran to “suspend” its enrichment activity as a “confidence-building measure” – recognizing the in the long run Iran will be enriching uranium.

[v] Just on the matter of fatwas, the presence of multiple and apparently dueling fatwas on the question of nuclear weapons adds confusion. Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a prominent opposition cleric, was reported in October 2009 as having also issued fatwa against nuclear weapons: “In light of the scope of death and destruction they bring, and in light of the fact that such weapons cannot be used solely against an army of aggression but will invariably sacrifice the lives of innocent people, even if these innocent lives are those of future generations nuclear weapons are not permitted according to reason or Sharia. Anyway, humanity, particularly Muslims who follow the Sharia of the Seal of Prophets, and the Prophet, Praise be Upon Him, must take the lead in banning legally and practically all such weapons for all countries and in soliciting the help of respectable and dependable international organizations in guaranteeing such ban.” (emphasis in original)

http://niacblog.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/ayatollah-montazeri-issues-fatwa-against-nuclear-weapons/. But the UK Telegraph reported in 2006: “In yet another sign of Teheran’s stiffening resolve on the nuclear issue, influential Muslim clerics have for the first time questioned the theocracy’s traditional stance that Sharia law forbade the use of nuclear weapons. One senior mullah has now said it is “only natural” to have nuclear bombs as a “countermeasure” against other nuclear powers, thought to be a reference to America and Israel. The pronouncement is particularly worrying because it has come from Mohsen Gharavian, a disciple of the ultra-conservative Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, who is widely regarded as the cleric closest to Iran’s new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.” Colin Freeman and Philip Sherwell, “Iranian fatwa approves use of nuclear weapons.” The Telegraph, 19 February 2006.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/1510900/Iranian-fatwa-approves-use-of-nuclear-weapons.html.

[vi] IAEA Board Resolution GOV/2006/14  (4 February 2006).http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Board/2006/gov2006-14.pdf.

[vii]IAEA Draft Agreement Circulated at Nuclear Fuel Talks, 21 October 2009.http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/News/2009/talksiran211009.html.

[viii] http://www.cigionline.org/blogs/2009/11/reversing-diplomatic-trajectory-iran

[ix] Of course, if Iran were to be pursuing such an option it would more likely do it in clandestine facilities – and while the IAEA can confirm that no nuclear materials have gone missing, it can’t absolutely guarantee that there aren’t clandestine facilities using undeclared nuclear materials.

[x] “Iran demands West accept counter plan on  nuclear program, CNN.Com. 02 January 2010.http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/01/02/iran.nuclear/.

[xi] The 1,100 kgs of low enriched that would remain in Iran after an initial transfer out of 400 kgs could produce enough high enriched uranium to make at least one crude first generation bomb. See: R. Scott Kemp and Alexander Glaser, “Statement on Iran’s ability to make a nuclear weapon and the significance of the 19 February 2009 IAEA report on Iran’s uranium enrichment program,” Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University, 2 March 2009. http://www.princeton.edu/~aglaser/2009aglaser_iran.pdf.

In meetings last week with civil society representatives in South Korea there was little mistaking where they think responsibility for the current nuclear standoff with North Korea rests – and it’s not primarily with Kim Jong-il.

A visit to the Hwacheon district and a “World Peace Bell Park” and newly-constructed conference centre on the edge of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) north of Seoul did little to lessen pessimism about the short-term prospects for a positive breakthrough in the nuclear stand-off. At the same time, there was much in what civil society representatives were saying to build optimism about the long-term. A Korean peninsula verifiably free of nuclear weapons and a bomb-making infrastructure is not only possible, but would almost be inevitable, they seemed to be saying, if the international community would make diplomacy and engagement their central and uncompromising approach.

The basis for diplomacy, said the South Koreans, must be a much better understanding of how North Korean authorities perceive their own plight. Bereft of foreign exchange, in a perpetual energy crisis, buffeted by natural disasters, and under a constant security threat, North Korea reached first for nuclear energy and then, when it concluded that promises of help would not be kept, the regime made the “logical” step from nuclear energy to nuclear weapons.

The notion that Kim Jong-il’s regime is irrational[i] and thus unlikely to respond rationally or logically to external conditions had little currency in these discussions. Indeed, the opposite was more persuasively put – namely, that the international community was wanting in both logic and foresight in repeatedly advancing tactics that would generate predictable negative reactions in the North.

It’s a point confirmed or at least implied by Mohamed ElBaradei in his farewell speech to the UN General Assembly: “…[S]ixteen years after the IAEA reported the country to the Security Council for non-compliance with its non-proliferation obligations, it has moved from the likely possession of undeclared plutonium to acquiring nuclear weapons. The on-again, off-again nature of the dialogue between the DPRK and the international community has stymied the resolution of the issue….”[ii]

The Nuclear Threat Initiative, in an Issue Brief on North Korea, notes that Kim Jong-il consistently links “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” to a removal of the threat it sees from the US and to “peaceful co-existence.” The NTI concludes: “The North Korean nuclear issue is a complex and multi-dimensional problem that has deeper roots than meets the eye. In order to fundamentally resolve this issue, North Korea’s threat perception must be properly addressed and the United States is in a unique position to do just that. As long as North Korea believes that nuclear weapons are the only means of guaranteeing its survival against the threat it believes to be facing from the United States, there is a very slim chance that it will relinquish its nuclear weapons capability. Therefore, a durable solution to the acute security dilemma on the Korean peninsula can only be achieved when the United States sincerely engages in talks with North Korea to work towards normalizing ties between the two countries and establishing a permanent peace regime on the Korean peninsula. In other words, efforts to permanently strip North Korea of its nuclear weapons capability – past, present, and future – must be pursued in tandem with normalization talks in order to ensure positive results.”[iii]

The view of South Korean civil society voices engaged in north-south issues is also reflected in other proposals from elements of the international “expert” community. Leon Sigal links the elimination of nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula to a formal US commitment “that it has no hostile intent toward Pyongyang” and to a commitment “to signing a peace treaty that ends the Korean War when North Korea is nuclear-free.”[iv] Similarly, Andrei Lankov, who sees no breakthrough in the foreseeable future, insists there is no option but long-term dialogue and negotiations: “As the experience of the Cold War has demonstrated, these exchanges lead to the spread of information, which in turn slowly undermines the power of the regime, whose legitimacy is largely based on false claims. In the long run, these exchanges will probably prove decisive, since they will contribute to the growth of the internal forces that alone can change the North Korean state (and, among other things, bring about de-nuclearization).”[v]

South Koreans at the meeting near the edge of the DMZ made a similar point in response to questions about the obvious fact that while the North Korean regime may very well be highly sensitive to its own security, it has no demonstrable regard for the human security of its people. True, they said, but the way to change that is through engagement and dialogue, not isolation and threats.

Gradually improving economic conditions, through the integration of the North Korean economy into the global economy (the opposite of sanctions), removal of the security threats that drive regime paranoia, and the gradual promotion of people-to-people exchanges with the South and the rest of the world will, together, have an inevitable liberalizing effect in the North, say the South Koreans in these discussions. And it is this gradual change that will also gradually alleviate the desperate economic and political/human rights conditions that the people of North Korea now face.

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] Jacques E.C. Hymans writes of the “problematic…assumption…that North Korea’s actions are rational responses to external incentives.” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Discarding tired assumptions about North Korea,” 28 May 2009.  http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/discarding-tired-assumptions-about-north-korea.

[ii] Mohamed ElBaradei, “Statement to the Sixty-Fourth Regular Session of the United Nations General Assembly,” http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Statements/2009/ebsp2009n017.html.

[iii] NTI Issue Brief: The Six-Party Talks and President Obama’s North Korea Policy.http://www.nti.org/e_research/e3_six_party_obama_north_korea.html.

[iv] Leon V. Sigal, “What Obama should offer North Korea,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 28 January 2009.  http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/what-obama-should-offer-north-korea.

[v] Andrei Lankov, “Beating Kim at His Own Game,” 17 November 2009, The New York Times.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/opinion/17iht-edlankov.html.

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.

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.

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.

A new CIGI study, “From Nuclear Energy to the Bomb,” offers a clear and compelling review of one of the central challenges of disarmament diplomacy.

This study[i] comes out of the Nuclear Energy Futures project of CIGI and provides a clear account of the real and potential links between a state’s peaceful nuclear energy capacity and the capacity to acquire a nuclear weapon. Its conclusions?

The scientific knowledge acquired through a basic nuclear energy program – that is, one that does not involve uranium enrichment or reprocessing of spent fuel – provides the basic foundation of scientific knowledge  and, especially, the core personnel and infrastructure on which a nuclear weapons program can be pursued. But that doesn’t mean that the steps toward weaponization are thereafter simple. Hiding the pursuit of a bomb from inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency is, fortunately, a major challenge, and increasingly so. And mastering the knowledge, technology, and manufacturing capacity to build a warhead is neither simple nor speedy.

But the sobering reality is that, given time and intention, more and more states will be able to do it. Acquiring uranium enrichment or spent fuel reprocessing capacity for energy purposes represents a further and significant step toward bomb-making capacity. Author Justin Alger concludes 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.”

But before coming to that clear conclusion, the paper takes you through a careful review of the proliferation risks and challenges linked to nuclear energy production. Here is Mr. Alger’s own account of the main findings:
• “Nuclear energy and weapons are inextricably linked by the scientific principles that underscore both, but beyond this basic understanding the intricacies of the technical relationship between the two are complex.

• “A once-through nuclear program provides a basic foundation in nuclear science and reactor engineering for a nuclear weapons program, but does not provide knowledge of sensitive fuel cycle technology or bomb design and assembly.

• “A peaceful nuclear energy program does, however, provide a state with much of the expertise, personnel, infrastructure and camouflage it would need to begin work on a weapons program should it chose to do so.

• “Acquiring a peaceful nuclear energy infrastructure does enhance a state’s capacity to develop nuclear weapons, but capacity is only one consideration and of secondary importance to other factors that drive state motivations for the bomb.”

The paper’s final comment is particularly important: “Understanding the technical connection between peaceful nuclear energy and nuclear weapons is important, but it is only one consideration. The motivation of states to acquire nuclear weapons, rather than their technical capacity to do so, is the more important concern.”

In the end, preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons will not be achieved by denying states either the knowledge or the materials to build them. Any state with an emerging industrial capacity and a scientific community will in time be able to gain access to nuclear materials and technical capacity – after that it’s political. It becomes a political and security calculation.

In a recent discussion at George Washington University, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates made the same point with regard to Iran: “…[T]he question is, can we…in a limited period of time bring the Iranians to a conclusion that…Iran is better off without nuclear weapons than with them, and not just in the security sense, but economically and in terms of their isolation in the international community….[T]he only long-term solution to this problem…is the Iranians themselves deciding [that] having nuclear weapons is not in their interest….[M]y hope…has been that…we could, through…both carrots and sticks, persuade them of a smarter direction for Iran.”[ii]

And, of course, that political calculation is influenced by a myriad of considerations, not the least of which is the progress, or lack of it, made by the rest of the international community in pursuit of the now broadly declared objective of a world without any nuclear weapons.

Pursing that goal is, of course, not without its conundrums. A significant number of industrializing states, with even modest regional hegemonic ambitions, will become increasingly reluctant to permanently forswear nuclear weapons if they see other states indefinitely retaining nuclear arsenals and using them to wield added influence within the international community. On the other hand, states that already have nuclear weapons will remain reluctant to disavow and eliminate them if they are convinced that other states are bent on acquiring them.

On the plus side, diplomacy bent on eliminating nuclear weapons is currently on the ascendancy – and this study of the links between nuclear energy and the bomb is a timely contribution to those efforts.

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] 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.

[ii] Transcript, Conversation with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to Discuss American Power and Persuasion Oct. 5, 2009, at George Washington University with Frank Sesno and Christiane Amanpour. Available at:http://www.gwu.edu/staticfile/GW/News%20and%20Events/2.%20This%20Week%20at%20GW/Sidebar/clintongatestranscript.pdf.