Nuclear Disarmament

It has long been blindingly obvious that the only sure way to prevent the use of nuclear weapons is to eliminate them, but the politics of arms control has never really been drawn to the obvious – until now, that is.

This year could be a turning point for nuclear disarmament. That sounds like the kind of thing that might be said by disarmament enthusiasts each January, but it could not have been credibly uttered by even the most congenital of optimists at the start of any of the last eight years – make that 16.

George Bush the elder, presiding, as he did, over the end of the Cold War, had some genuine turning point opportunities and in fact managed to set in motion, along with Russia’s Michail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, a period of significant decline in US and Russian nuclear arsenals. The Presidency of Bill Clinton supported the momentum, but his failure to get the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty through the Senate and the rapid expansion of NATO were among factors leading to a souring of Russian-American disarmament efforts.[i] Then George Bush the junior, while continuing reductions in nuclear arsenals, embarked on a series of policies and actions designed to re-entrench nuclear weapons in US security policy and to ensure that the United States would not be constrained by any serious or permanent international disarmament laws or obligations.

But at the dawn of 2009 it is a whole new world of possibility.

To begin with, some simple truths are getting harder and harder to avoid:

· As long as some States insist on indefinitely retaining, and brandishing, nuclear weapons, others will insist on acquiring them as well.

· The greater the number of States with nuclear weapons, the greater the likelihood that they will be used.[ii]

· Nuclear knowledge, technology, materials, and weapons will inevitably be accessible to any state with a developing industrial base and advanced educational and scientific institutions – and that’s a long and growing list of potential proliferators. Thus, successful non-proliferation depends on creating a political/legal climate that sees nuclear weapons as sources of insecurity and vigorously eschews them.

· It is impossible to rationally construct a scenario in which the world would be better off if nuclear weapons were used in combat, than if they were not used.

Accordingly, indeed obviously, the consensus in favor of nuclear disarmament down to zero is reaching global proportions. A survey of 21 key states around the world found that 76 percent of people questioned favor a global agreement that “all countries with nuclear weapons would be required to eliminate them according to a timetable” while “all other countries would be required not to develop them.”[iii] Public support for the total elimination of nuclear weapons is higher than the global average in China, France, the UK, and the US, but lower than the average in Russia and India (but still 69 percent and 62 percent respectively). In Pakistan support is only at 46 percent, but even there more favor total nuclear disarmament than oppose it.

Given that overall support, it is not simply a coincidence that as of January 20, 2009 the White House will be occupied by an American Commander in Chief genuinely committed to the pursuit of a world without nuclear weapons. Furthermore, he will have allies among the elites of the American and international security community, ranging from Henry Kissinger to Ban Ki-Moon.[iv]

In December a group of 100-plus political, military, business, religious, and civic leaders met in Paris to mobilize efforts toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. A unique contribution of this group, which Canada’s Simons Foundation was instrumental in assembling, is to insist on a definite timeline, 25 years, in which to accomplish the goal. The group refers to its effort as “Global Zero” and includes an impressive list of major figures among its supporters: former US President Jimmy Carter; former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger; former Defence Secretary Frank Carlucci; former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev; Shaharyar Khan, a former Pakistani foreign minister; retired Air Chief Marshal Shashindra Pal Tyagi of India; and Malcolm Rifkind, a former British foreign secretary.[v]

It’s also worth remembering that under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) all states (except India, Israel, and Pakisatan which have never signed it) are already committed to the elimination of their nuclear arsenals (but without a required timeline) and in the 2000 NPT Review Conference the nuclear weapon states made “an unequivocal undertaking…to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals leading to nuclear disarmament to which all States parties are committed under Article VI.”

There are still plenty of skeptics out there, some of them in high places. But the concrete steps needed for progress toward fulfilling that promise are already known and broadly agreed.

Analyst Gwynne Dyer has it about right: “It sounds like a pipe dream, but in fact the conditions have never been as promising as they are now. If Obama takes the lead, it could happen – and even in the depths of a recession, it wouldn’t cost anything.”[vi] The only thing to add is that this “pipe dream” is now the only realist option in the nonproliferation mission.

Over the course of 2009 there will be many occasions to assess progress, or lack of it, on the specifics, and, of course, to hear further from both the skeptics and the enthusiasts.

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

[i] John Holdren, the newly designated Chief Science Advisor in the Obama Administration, provided a review of the 1990s achievements and failures in advancing nuclear disarmament in an address to Pugwash, 5 August 2000, “The Impasse in Nuclear Disarmament, http://www.pugwash.org/reports/pac/pac256/holdren.htm.

[ii] That is the conclusion of a November 2008 report of the US National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2025:

A Transformed World, available at http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html.

[iii] “Publics around the World favor International Agreement to Eliminate all Nuclear Weapons,” World Public Opinion.Org, 9 December 2008, http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/international_security_bt/577.php?nid=&id=&pnt=577&lb=btis.

[iv] See posting here on 04 August 2008, “McCain, Obama, and the imperative of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” https://www.igloo.org/disarmingconflict/mccainobam.

[v] “World leaders gather in bid to impose a ban on nuclear weapons,” Yahoo News, 7 December 2008, http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/081206/world/nuclear_weapons_1. Visit the Global Zero website at http://www.globalzero.org/.

[vi] Gwynne Dyer, “Conditions favourable for elimination of nuclear weapons,” Kingston Whig Standard, 15 December 2008, http://www.thewhig.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1346088&auth=GWYNNEDYER.

“The nuclear powers could…expand the amount of information they publish about the size of their arsenals, stocks of fissile material and specific disarmament achievements. The lack of an authoritative estimate of the total number of nuclear weapons testifies to the need for greater transparency.” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon[i]

To be sure, it is a modest call to action. Obviously we need nuclear weapon states (NWS) to disarm, not just to provide more information about their arsenals. But, in fact, dramatically improved transparency (linked to verification) will be central to progress in nuclear disarmament, and the UN Security Council must finally rise to the transparency challenge issued by the Secretary-General.

For the spreading and welcome calls for nuclear abolition (most recently Global Zero, http://www.globalzero.org/) to bear fruit the UNSC’s permanent five (P5) will have to embrace with rather more enthusiasm than they have shown to date the principle of openness with regard to their weapons programs and intentions for disarmament. To be fair they have made some progress. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review process has extracted some limited transparency concessions from the P5.

The 1995 agreement to extend indefinitely the NPT rested fundamentally on the principle of “permanence with accountability.” Accountability was to be strengthened through refinements to the review process, and at the 2000 Review Conference a new reporting requirement was added. Step 12 of the Final Document’s “practical steps” to implement the Treaty’s disarmament provisions called for “regular reports.”

The reporting requirement was framed by the demands of three internationally agreed nuclear disarmament decisions:

· “cessation of the nuclear arms race” (Article VI of the NPT);[ii]

· “reduction of nuclear weapons globally, with the ultimate goals of eliminating those weapons” (Paragraph 4[c] of the 1995 Decision on “Principles and Objectives for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament”);[iii] and

· the “obligation to achieve a precise result—nuclear disarmament in all its aspects” (the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice of 8 July 1996).[iv]

The P5 have certainly resisted the idea that they are actually obliged to report on their actions, and progress, in meeting those three objectives. China and Russia are the only ones to have submitted formal reports (once in 2005). The others have refused to submit reports that they specifically identify as being in response to the 2000 agreement on reporting, but, at the same time, all five regularly report generally and informally to NPT review process meetings (including annual preparatory committees) by circulating national statements, working papers, fact sheets, and other background material. And it must be said that such reporting, while it varies considerably, has increased in detail and scope since 2000.

The principle of mutual accountability has been slow in developing within the NPT. The degree to which the reporting obligation is honored by the P5 is the degree to which they actually regard themselves as accountable to other States Parties to the Treaty – and to date it’s clear that the idea that they are beholden to any other state in these matters has clearly not caught on. Non-nuclear weapon States Parties to the Treaty on the other hand see reporting as a formal and essential expression of accountability to other States Parties. They expect reporting to become much more detailed and systematic and to mature into an effective tool by which States Parties can assess each other’s compliance with Treaty obligations.

What the nature and extent of reporting should be has received some discussion[v] in the context of the NPT along the following lines:

1. General assessments of developments and trends relevant to the implementation of the Treaty;

2. Information on details of national nuclear holdings and doctrines, for example:

• transfers or acquisition of nuclear materials,

• holdings of fissile materials,

• nuclear facilities of all kinds (military and civilian),

• holdings and production/dismantling of nuclear weapons (including the numbers, types, and yields of warheads, as well as numbers and types of delivery vehicles),

• operational status of all weapons held, and

• nuclear weapons doctrines (including security assurances) and policies to govern the use of those weapons;

3. descriptions of disarmament policies, initiatives and programs;

4. identification of advocacy and diplomatic priorities;

5. information on agreements reached and commitments undertaken;

6. regular declarations of dompliance – annual public assurances to other signatories, on an article-by-article basis, of their full compliance with the Treaty.

Accountability is the fundamental point of reporting, and reporting even at current minimal levels has at least begun to help States to better understand the approaches and activities of other States in the NPT and to generate a general attitude that each owes the others an accounting of what they are doing to implement and strengthen the disarmament and nonproliferation regime.

Even though the NPT now calls for regular reporting, it lacks the institutional infrastructure to even receive such reports, much less formulate responses to them. That’s where the Security Council could come in.

The Council has on more than one occasion called on all States to meet the requirements of the Treaties they have signed, and reporting is one means of recording and assessing compliance. In the absence of a permanent secretariat for the NPT to receive reports, the “regular reports” of NPT States could and should go directly to the Security Council. The Secretary-General should then be tasked to compile and assess them and then report annually to the Council on the state of progress toward meeting the international community’s agreed nuclear disarmament objectives.

Until resolution 1540[vi] the Security Council had never requested or received reports on nuclear weapons and disarmament, to serve as the basis for an assessment of progress in pursuit of the objectives set by Articles 11 and 26, which mandate the General Assembly and the Security Council to pursue the regulation and reduction of arms (it has, of course, received reports on specific horizontal nonproliferation situations on its agenda, such as that in Iraq).[vii] The Council’s resolution 487, on 19 June 1981, in response to Israel’s attack on Iraq’s nuclear research reactor called on Israel to place its nuclear facilities under safeguards and asked the Secretary-General to inform the Council of implementation of the resolution but was not followed up. Nor has the Council called for any updates on progress in meeting “the need for all Member States to fulfill their obligations in relation to arms control and disarmament,” as its 1992 Summit statement put it.

As the Egyptian diplomat Nabil Elaraby put it in 1996, given that the Council Summit (in 1992) concluded that “the proliferation of all weapons of mass destruction constitutes a threat to international peace and security,” it would be reasonable to “expect the Council to look at that statement, adopted at the highest possible level, and see if it should do something about it.”[viii] Lucy Webster, former political affairs officer with the UN office of disarmament, has proposed the appointment by the Secretary-General of a special rapporteur to investigate and submit regular reports to the Security Council on nuclear weapons proliferation.[ix] Other analysts have proposed that the Security Council elaborate benchmarks to help it to determine, according to objective criteria, “whether to designate a situation one of nuclear proliferation, and therefore a threat to the peace, triggering chapter Nowadays it’s never been more affordable to purchase viagra online order check these guys out from a pharmacist in your locality you can viagra at any authorized online pharmacy. Erectile dysfunction (ED) is nothing but the inability of the person to achieve and sustain male erection for satisfactory viagra generico 5mg http://miamistonecrabs.com/viagra-5382 intercourse. It is a new way to have normalized sexual health and get male-pride back. buy brand viagra It was known that wine had something to do with a blockage of normal blood flow into the penis.This tablets relax the blood vessels in the body) which is caused by heart disease, high cholesterol, and HIV. you can look here rx viagra VII.”[x]

Pierre Goldschmidt, the former deputy director general of the IAEA, calls for horizontal nonproliferation enforcement mechanisms that are objective and consistently applied: “The most effective, unbiased, and feasible way to establish a legal basis for the necessary verification measures in circumstances of non-compliance is for the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to adopt (under Chapter VII of the UN Charter) a generic (i.e. not state -specific) and legally binding resolution stating that if a state is reported by the IAEA to be in non-compliance, a standard set of actions would result” (emphasis in the original).[xi]

A similar mechanism, along with objective benchmarks, is required to assess compliance and define noncompliance regarding Article VI. Goldschmidt points out that resolution 1540 “provides a framework within which nations can question one another about activities that suggest illicit trafficking or other proscribed activity.”[xii] The Security Council could set up a similar mechanism to facilitate the same kind of questioning and accountability for getting first-hand accounts of Article VI compliance efforts. The priority disarmament agenda articulated in the NPT review process essentially defines key current benchmarks for progress and there is no doubt that in the context of the NPT review process, the P5 already have an obligation to outline steps taken toward compliance.

There remains the obvious but critical question of political will. It is true that consensus against horizontal proliferation is well advanced within the P5. But they should also obviously be aware that any moves toward tougher and coercive approaches to horizontal nonproliferation compliance will be increasingly challenged by NNWS members if compliance with Article VI obligations continues to be kept away from multilateral scrutiny.

The Security Council should thus pass a resolution to formalize the understanding that all nuclear proliferation is a threat to international peace and security, and within that to set the framework for regular reports, deliberations on the implications of those reports, and efforts to agree on follow-on undertakings to meet agreed benchmarks.

Transparency is not compliance, but it is a large step toward accountability, which in turn encourages compliance. In the absence of effective legislative, judicial, or enforcement action on disarmament, a Security Council commitment to promoting and formalizing transparency and accountability could still encourage discernable progress toward the “unequivocal undertaking,” agreed by them in 2000, “to accomplish the total elimination of nuclear weapons” as promised in Article VI of the NPT.

[i] UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in and address to the EastWest Institute (EWI), New York. 24 October 2008.

[ii] Non-Proliferation Treaty, Article VI: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

[iii] 1995 NPT Decisions and Resolution, Decision 2: Principles and Objectives for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament: 4 (c) “The determined pursuit by the nuclear-weapon States of systematic and progressive efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally, with the ultimate goals of eliminating those weapons, and by all States of general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

[iv] The Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice of 8 July 1996 [relevant excerpts]: Paragraph 99: “The legal import of the (Article VI) obligation goes beyond that of a mere obligation of conduct [of negotiations in good faith]; the obligation involved here is an obligation to achieve a precise result – nuclear disarmament in all its aspects – by adopting a particular course of conduct, namely the pursuit of negotiations in good faith. Paragraph 100: This two-fold obligation to pursue and to conclude negotiations formally concerns the [then] 18 States parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, or, in other words, the vast majority of the international community.”

[v] See the Ploughshares report, Transparency and Accountability: Reporting: NPT Reporting 2002-2007 (http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries/Abolish/NPTreporting02-07.pdf).

[vi] Resolution 1540 requires States to take extensive measures, including reporting, to prevent the diversion of weapons of mass destruction to non-state actors and to “refrain from providing any form of support to non-State actors that attempt to develop, acquire, manufacture, possess, transport, transfer or use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons and their means of delivery.”

[vii] Early on, after the formation of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1946, the Council received reports from the Commission but simply passed them along to the General Assembly. Kono, p. 83.

[viii] Nabil Elaraby, “The Security Council and Nuclear Weapons,” 28 May 1996 presentation to the NGO Working Group on the Security Council, Global Policy Forum, www.globalpolicy.org/security/docs/elaraby.htm.

[ix] Lucy Webster, “The Security Council and Nuclear Weapons,” 28 May 1996 presentation to the NGO Working Group on the Security Council, Global Policy Forum.

[x] Jack I. Garvey, “A New Architecture for the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” Journal of Conflict and Security Law, Volume 12, Number 3, 2007, 339-357.

[xi] Pierre Goldschmidt, “Priority Steps to Strengthen the Nonproliferation Regime,” Policy Outlook, February 2007, Carnegies Endowment for International Peace, www.carnegieendowment.org/files/goldschmidt_priority_steps_final.pdf.

[xii] Peter van Ham and Olivia Bosch, “Global Non-Proliferation and Counter-Terrorism: The Role of Resolution 1540 and Its Implications,” in Global Non-Proliferation and Counter-Terrorism: The Role of Resolution 1540 and Its Implications, eds., Peter van Ham and Olivia Bosch (Brookings Institution Press, Chatham House and Clingendael Institute 2007), 19-20.

India, Israel, and Pakistan remain outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and all three have nuclear weapons, so the international community still regularly calls on them “to accede to [the NPT] as non-nuclear-weapon States promptly and without conditions.”[i]

For the three states to do that they would obviously first have to disarm, which they are not about to do under the current circumstances. Nevertheless, it remains appropriate for the international community to continue to articulate its understanding of the bottom-line, long-term obligations of the three.

According to the NPT there are only five states that are recognized in international law as Nuclear Weapon States (NWS) – China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States – inasmuch as the NPT acknowledges only those states that had nuclear weapons at the time it was negotiated, 1968. All other states are required to stay disarmed and to make that disavowal of nuclear weapons permanent and legal commitments as signatories to the NPT. So NPT signatory states continue to call on India, Israel, and Pakistan to reverse their nuclear arms programs, as did South Africa, and to join NPT states in the treaty, as non-nuclear weapon states (NNWS).

As defacto nuclear weapon states (DNWS as opposed to NWS) with waxing rather than waning nuclear ambitions, they will continue to turn a deaf ear to disarmament appeals. That is no reason to discontinue challenging them, but it is good reason for the international community to set out some steps the three could take in order to move at least modestly toward ending their nuclear pariah status. In 2000 the Review Conference of the NPT agreed to 13 practical steps that NWS should take toward meeting their disarmament commitments under Chapter VI of the NPT, and there is now an excellent opportunity for the international community to set out some initial steps for the DNWS to follow.

The opportunity is linked to the proposed US-India deal which proposes the normalization of relations with India for the purposes of civilian nuclear cooperation. The danger in that deal is that it could lead to extensive concessions toward India in civilian nuclear cooperation without requiring any significant steps from India linked to reining in its weapons program. There are two basic steps that are most commonly called for by disarmament advocates – ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and ending the production of fissile materials for weapons purposes pending agreement on a fissile materials treaty (FMT).

A recent letter[ii] to Nuclear Supplier Group (NSG) countries, initiated by the Arms Control Association in Washington and signed by a large number of international exports and organizations, raises a number of important flaws in the agreement and makes the point that “before India is granted a waiver from the NSG’s fill-scope safeguards standard, it should join the other original nuclear weapon states by declaring it has stopped fissile material production for weapons purposes and, like the 177 other states that have singed the CTBT, make a legally-binding commitment to permanently end nuclear testing.” An additional requirement should be that, inasmuch as the exemption from the full-scope safeguards rule would essentially treat India as if it were a NWS, India should also be required to issue a national declaration that it understands itself to be bound by the basic Article VI disarmament commitments.

If the above formula were applied to all three non-NPT states, the bottom line requirement would remain the same – requiring the three to ultimately join the NPT as NNWS – but it would be a way of encouraging some positive steps in exchange for some concessions on the rules related to civilian nuclear cooperation.

Some have suggested adding a protocol to the NPT[iii] (so the Treaty itself would not be amended) to cover the situation of these three. It would acknowledge their defacto nuclear weapon status but would limit the further development of their weapons programs and prohibit testing and prohibit or phase out production of fissile material for weapons purposes. It is a constructive idea, but it would be a long, long process that might ultimately probably prove impossible, if for no other reason than Middle East states would be highly unlikely to accept Israel’s nuclear status.

A more immediate prospect for action is through the NSG – that is, to use the carrot of civilian nuclear cooperation to extract some real commitments. India’s intense domestic opposition to any concessions at all on its nuclear weapons program pretty much ensures that such a formula has little chance for success, but the real point here is to ensure that the rules at the NSG will not be changed without getting at least some disarmament/non-proliferation payoff in return.

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[i] This demand continued to be voiced by a number of states, including Canada, at the 2007 NPT PrepCom and 2007 UN First Committee.

[ii] “Fix the Proposal for Renewed Cooperation with India,” Arms Control Association, January 7, 2008 (http://www.armscontrol.org/pressroom/2008/NSGappeal.asp).

[iii] Avner Cohen and Thomas Graham Jr., “An NPT for non-members,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 2004, pp. 40-44 (Vol. 60, No. 03).

Nobel Laureate Al Gore suggested to delegates to the UN climate change conference in Bali this week that they ought to emulate the play-making finesse of Bobby Hull or Wayne Gretzky – recalling Hull’s famous line: “I don’t pass the puck to where they are – I pass the puck to where they’re going to be.” Well, said Gore, “Over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now. You must anticipate that.”

It is an obviously hopeful thought and is relevant to any number of US policy envelopes – not least nuclear disarmament. But is it as realistic as it is desirable? Can we count on the Democrats to take America, and therefore all of us, at least a bit closer to that better disarmament place the world deserves?

On the assumption that Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have the best chances of winning the Democratic Party nomination, and that with either of the them the Democrats stand a solid chance of regaining the White House, it’s worth taking a (very) brief look at their respective positions on four key issues – overall nuclear weapons reductions, management of the current inventory (RRW), a nuclear test ban (CTBT), and a ban on further production of fissile materials for weapons purposes (FissBan). A survey last summer by the Council for a Livable World is one good source for each of the candidates’ respective positions.[i]

Reductions

Democrats generally have aligned themselves[ii]with the by now well-known appeal by Henry Kissinger, and three others, for US leadership in taking the world “to a solid consensus for reversing reliance on nuclear weapons globally as a vital contribution to preventing their proliferation into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world.”[iii]

Clinton advocates substantial reductions in the arsenals of all Nuclear Weapon States (NWS) and calls for an increase in nuclear warning time to reduce dangers of accidental or unauthorized launch.

Obama similarly calls for reductions. Speaking to DePaul University in Chicago, he rejected unilateral disarmament and pledged to “retain a strong nuclear deterrent,” but promised to stay with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty “on the long road towards eliminating nuclear weapons.”[iv] He calls for a reduced role for nuclear weapons and for a scaling back from “outdated postures” of the Cold War.

RRW and Threat Reduction

The Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program of the Bush Administration has become controversial inasmuch it has shifted the focus from one of assuring the reliability of current warheads to the design and building of new warheads. That in turn generates new interest in testing in the US (hence the opposition in some quarters to the CTBT), which in turn threatens to embolden other nuclear weapon states to rebuild, refine, and test their own warhead inventories.[v]

Clinton has been critical of the RRW and says there is a need for a “considered assessment of what we need these weapons for or what the impact of building them would be on our effort to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.” She places high emphasis on the threat of nuclear terrorism, calling it “one of the greatest national security threats the United States faces today.” She has made this one of her top priorities in the Senate with actions that include support for redirecting funds from missile defence to Cooperative Threat Reduction and the introduction of a Bill (the Nuclear Terrorism Prevention Act) that would commit the US to working internationally to “establish and implement a stringent standard for nuclear safety at all facilities worldwide that hold weapons or weapons-usable fissile material.”

Obama’s position on RRW is similar: “Before we consider developing new nuclear weapons we must consider what the role of these weapons should be.” He says the RRW program undermines US leadership in de-emphasizing the role of nuclear weapons. To maintain deterrence, he says, the US doesn’t need a new generation of warheads. He also emphasizes the need to secure all nuclear materials and bombs to prevent terrorist access to them. “As president, I will lead a global effort to secure all nuclear weapons and material at vulnerable sites within four years.” The Lugar-Obama initiative is designed to “help the United States and our allies detect and stop the smuggling of weapons of mass destruction throughout the world.”

CTBT

The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is a priority for both candidates.

Clinton pledges to pursue bi-partisan support for the CTBT and regards its ratification as an early priority. She also promises to maintain the testing moratorium in the meantime and charges that the Bush Administration’s policy on RRW and its refusal to ratify the CTBT have undermined US security. Obama also promises to make CTBT ratification a priority. In the meantime he says the US should pay its full share of the costs of the CTBT Organization, which is not now the case.

FissBan

The long-time objective of ending production of nuclear materials for weapons purposes is currently stymied, as it has been for a decade, in the Geneva Conference on Disarmament. Both Clinton and Obama call for negotiations toward a verifiable ban (the latter being a significant switch from the Bush policy which says that verification would not be possible).

It is of course far from certain that the Democrats will recapture the White House at the end of 2008. Furthermore, the gap between campaign rhetoric and administration action is as wide in the US as anywhere. But, even so, there is still plenty of reason to believe that almost any one of the Democratic contenders would improve on the attitude and energy that the US now brings to the nuclear disarmament table.

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[i] Council for a Livable World, 2008 Presidential Candidates’ Responses to Seven Key National Security Questions, August 16, 2007 (http://www.clw.org/assets/pdfs/2008_presidential_candidates_questionnaire_responses.pdf).

[ii] Zachary Hosford, “News Analysis: The 2008 Presidential Primaries and Arms Control,” Arms Control Today, December 2007 (http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2007_12/NewsAnalysis.asp).

[iii] By George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn.”A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, January 4, 2007; Page A15. Available at (http://www.fcnl.org/issues/item.php?item_id=2252&issue_id=54).

[iv] Jeff Zeleny, “Obama Highlights His War Opposition,” The New York Times, October 2, 2007 (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/us/politics/02cnd-obama.html?adxnnl=1&ref=politics&adxnnlx=1197663073-rNS8Vbu34qn7a69asqr6JA).

[v] Robert W. Nelson, “If it Ain’t Broke: The Already Reliable U.S. Nuclear Arsenal,” Arms Control Today, April 2006 (http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2006_04/reliablefeature.asp).

The US National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear programs (NIE)[i] should decisively rob Washington hawks of any credible rationale for attacking Iran. What the NIE did not do, however, is explain or expose the surfeit of nuclear ambiguities that remain in Iran and that could be widely replicated in the event of the global surge in nuclear power development, dubbed the nuclear renaissance, that some are predicting.

More remarkable than the conclusion that Iran ended its nuclear weapons program four years ago is the NIE’s judgment that “Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so.” That’s not an insight that depends on a global spy network; in fact, the most interesting thing about it is what the NIE left out – namely, that the same conclusion must be reached about a large and growing number of other states.

That is a genuinely worrisome reality because none of those potential nuclear states will be prevented from pursuing nuclear weapons by international efforts to deny them the requisite knowledge, which is what President Bush still keeps describing as the objective with regard to Iran.[ii] In fact, the only way to keep a broad swath of industrializing states from exercising a nuclear weapons option is to build an international security environment that persuades each of them to consistently make the political calculation that their national interests are best advanced by foregoing nuclear weapons.

Creating that kind of nuclear unfriendly environment requires at least two key elements. First, it needs a strict set of non-proliferation rules supported by a reliable system for monitoring national compliance and which imposes an unacceptably high price on any state that violates non-proliferation rules. Second, it requires a global political climate that is both responsive to the security needs of particular states and regions and rejects nuclear weapons as instruments of either prestige or strategic influence – evidence of the latter would be some serious action by the current nuclear weapon states to finally meet their disarmament obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Anyone who has observed nuclear disarmament diplomacy in general, and the UN Conference on Disarmament in particular, knows how far we currently are from fulfilling the second requirement. But the NIE report highlights the first requirement, for clear and enforceable non-proliferation rules, with another rather obvious point about Iran that has a much broader application. If Iran were to decide to produce weapons-usable highly enriched uranium, says the report, it “probably would use covert facilities, rather than its declared nuclear sites.” In other words, as Iran’s extensive clandestine activities prior to 2003 also demonstrate, a reliable inspections regime capable of unearthing secret operations will be essential to meeting the coming challenges.

Building such a regime is the immediate responsibility of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Its last report on Iran[iii] notes some genuine progress in clearing up questions about Iran’s pre 2003 clandestine activity, but it still renders the unequivocal judgment that, given Iran’s gingerly cooperation, “the Agency is not in a position to provide credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran.” The IAEA is in a position to confirm that all of Iran’s declared activity, including uranium enrichment, is accounted for and not being diverted for weapons purposes, but preventing clandestine programs, in Iran or any of other country with relevant technical capabilities is another matter.

That means that the real Iran problem is not its declared and inspected uranium enrichment program, rather it is that, “since early 2006, the [IAEA] has not received the type of information that Iran had previously been providing, pursuant to the Additional Protocol and as a transparency measure. As a result, the Agency’s knowledge about Iran’s current nuclear programme is diminishing.” This is therefore not the time for the international community, including the UN Security Council, to ease the pressure on Iran,[iv] but the ongoing pressure needs to be focused directly on overall transparency, not on monitored enrichment.

The international community cannot yet be confident that Iran is and will be a reliable custodian of nuclear technology, so the number one task now is to give the IAEA the political, legal, and technical resources needed to render confident judgments about Iran and all other nascent nuclear states.

As the NIE notes, one key resource is the Additional Protocol, special provisions that states are encouraged to add to their IAEA safeguards agreements to facilitate more intrusive inspections. It should be compulsory, as Canada and other states have been arguing for some time,[v] and the Security Council should make it an immediate requirement for Iran.[vi]

Not only is confidence in the lawfulness of Iran’s programs at stake, but so too is confidence that the predicted nuclear renaissance will not overwhelm international monitoring capacity.

The focus on transparency and inspections, however, should not be taken to imply indifference to Iran’s enrichment of uranium. Currently Iran is in early and still experimental stages of producing reactor grade fuel, but the technology it is refining is also capable of producing weapons grade material. The international community, therefore, has an obvious and urgent interest in restricting national enrichment programs and other weapons sensitive elements of the nuclear fuel cycle. But such restrictions will not be achieved through an Iran only policy. Selective non-proliferation strategies are inappropriate in principle and do not work in practice.

The objective must be, and is already under thorough study at the IAEA and elsewhere, an international regime that takes the weapons sensitive elements of the nuclear fuel cycle out of the hands of individual states and puts them under international control. That is ultimately the only way to ensure that any civilian nuclear renaissance does not proliferate the technology for building nuclear weapons.

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[i] “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities,” National Intelligence Estimate, National Intelligence Council, November 2007 (http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf).

[ii]In response to the NIE report on Iran, Mr. Bush told a press conference: “Look, Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous, and Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” Whitehous transcript, December 4, 2007 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/12/20071204-4.html).

[iii]“Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement and relevant provisions of Security Council resolutions 1737 (2006) and 1747 (2007) in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” IAEA, Report by the Director General, November 15, 2007,GOV/2007/58 (http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Board/2007/gov2007-58.pdf).

[iv]IAEA INFCIRC/711, August 27, 2007 which describes the agreement between Iran and the IAEA for a program of work to address and resolve the all outstanding issues between them and thus outlines “the Modalities of Resolution of the Outstanding Issues” (http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Infcircs/2007/infcirc711.pdf).

[v]For example, Canada urged the 2005 NPT Review Conference tomake “theAdditional Protocol, together with a comprehensive safeguards agreement, the verification standard pursuant to Article III.1” for fulfilling “the obligations of that section of the Treaty.” Canadian statement to the 2004 NPT PrepCom on “Implementation of the Provisions of the Treaty Relating to the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Safeguards and Nuclear Weapon Free Zones Issues” (http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/arms/2004nptcluster2-en.asp).

[vi] UN Security Council Resolution 1737 (2006) “calls upon Iran to ratify promptly the Additional Protocal,” but does not demand it in the same way that it demands that Iran suspend proliferation sensitive nuclear activities, including uranium enrichment. (http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N06/681/42/PDF/N0668142.pdf?OpenElement)

Rumors of an American war on Iran continue unabated,[i] even while any case for such a war grows progressively weaker, and as a result US Vice President Dick Cheney has been making what is for him a familiar move.

Mr. Cheney is reportedly putting pressure on intelligence analysts to modify their reporting on Iran’s nuclear program to better serve the attack scenarios of Administration hawks. The refusal by some in the intelligence community to sign on to a national intelligence assessment claiming an imminent Iranian nuclear weapons capacity has held up a key intelligence report, and it may also have contributed to the removal of John Negroponte as director of national intelligence.[ii]

Obviously the international community, including Iran’s neighbors, still harbors a deep concern about Iran’s nuclear intentions, but the urgency of that concern is clearly mitigated by the conclusion of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran is now providing sufficient reporting, as well as allowing sufficient access by IAEA inspectors, to enable the IAEA “to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran.”[iii]

That assurance doesn’t address the possibility of undeclared or clandestine programs, but here too the IAEA is making progress on a work plan[iv] that was put in place in August to resolve all the outstanding verification issues by April 2008, with a progress report due from the IAEA Director General to the IAEA Board next week.

The Bush Administration has thus been increasingly de-linking its war plans from Iran’s nuclear program, focusing instead on Iran’s alleged support for groups fighting the Americans in Iraq, a move that is making others in the Security Council more reluctant to pursue aggressive sanctions for fear of conflating the two issues (nuclear and Iraq).[v]

That reluctance is reinforced by the inescapable ambiguity of the one major Iranian nuclear controversy that remains, And it is an ambiguity that will remain even after a satisfactory completion of the Iran/IAEA work plan – namely, the uncertain legality of Iran’s ongoing enrichment of uranium.

Iran’s uranium enrichment program is no longer clandestine, it is open to inspection and verification, and it is legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and its related verification requirements, but it does violate UN Security Council Resolution 1737 of December 23, 2006,[vi] which requires, among other things, the suspension of “all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development.”

Suspension is not itself the ultimate objective of the Security Council and Iran rightly argues that it has a right to pursue any nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. The suspension demand is put forward as a confidence-showing measure – that is, through the suspension Iran would demonstrate its goodwill and willingness to help the IAEA establish that there are no ongoing clandestine nuclear programs in Iran and that all declared programs are for peaceful purposes.

While the Security Council agreed on the demand that Iran suspend uranium enrichment, the international community broadly and the six states[vii] giving leadership on the Iran issues in particular are not of a single mind on what the ultimate objective should be. President George Bush is unequivocal: “Listen, the first thing that has to happen diplomatically for anything to be effective is that we all agree on the goal. And we’ve agreed on the goal, and that is the Iranians should not have a nuclear weapon, the capacity to make a nuclear weapon, or the knowledge as to how to make a nuclear weapon.”[viii]

But the American attempt to deny Iran the knowledge or even the capacity to build a nuclear weapon, rather than to ensure its full compliance with the inspections regime to confirm that Iran is not actually building a nuclear weapon, makes it easy for Iran to claim that its rights under the NPT are being violated. President Bush in the meantime repeatedly conflates the “knowledge” needed to build a nuclear weapon with the possession of one: “If you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”[ix]

In fact, there is no reasonable prospect over the long term of preventing Iran from gaining such knowledge, and there are indications that Washington’s European and Security Council partners in dealing with Iran may now be moving on to focus on the real issue – preventing Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon through a meticulously applied inspections program, rather than trying to restrict the knowledge.

That change was implied earlier this fall when the Security Council refused to authorize more sanctions in the face of Iran’s continuing uranium enrichment. Instead, the European focus was on monitoring progress in Iranian cooperation with the IAEA on clearing up questions related to its past clandestine work.[x] If the IAEA report due next week is positive and shows Iran to be genuinely cooperating on the core issue of full transparency, the uranium enrichment issue will continue to decline in importance as long as the IAEA is given access to inspect the process and confirm that it is producing only low enriched uranium for civilian reactors, and not high enriched uranium suitable for weapons production.

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[i] See “War With Iran?” in this space (warwithi). Time Magazine’s October 26, 2007 issue declared, “Iran War Drumbeat Grows Louder” (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1676826,00.html).

[ii] Gareth Porter, “Cheney Tried to Stifle Dissent in Iran NIE,” Interpress Service, November 9, 2007 (http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39978).

[iii] Statement by IAYA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei to the 62 ^nd Regular Session of the UN General Assembly, October 29, 2007 (http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Statements/2007/ebsp2007n018.html).

[iv] The work plan is available at the IAEA website (http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Infcircs/2007/infcirc711.pdf), and Sharon Squassoni of the Carnegie Endowment has provided a graphic depiction of the timeline for resolving outstanding issues that grew out of Iran’s clandestine nuclear activities (http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=19553&prog=zgp&proj=znpp).

[v] Robin Wright, “Divisions in Europe May Thwart U.S. Objectives on Iran,” Washington Post, October 18, 2007 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/17/AR2007101702211.html).

[vi] http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N06/681/42/PDF/N0668142.pdf?OpenElement.

[vii] The Permanent Five of the Security Council plus Germany.

[viii] President George W. Bush, “Iran’s Nuclear Activities,”The White House, Washington, DC, April 28, 2006 (http://www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/rm/2006/65479.htm).

[ix] Paul Koring, Bush steps up rhetoric on Iran: Warns of possible ‘World War III’, The Globe and Mail, October 18, 2007 (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20071018.BUSH18/TPStory/TPInternational/America/).

[x] Sophie Walker, “World powers push ahead with Iran sanctions,” Reuters, November 2, 2007 (http://ca.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2007-11-02T203718Z_01_L30131658_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-IRAN-NUCLEAR-COL.XML).

Warnings of the disaster that would come of an American attack on Iran are plentiful, increasingly urgent, and persuasive[i] – but it is not at all clear that they are working on the one vote that matters. The NewsHour on PBS television ran a short feature on the growing irrelevance of George Bush, but on security matters he’s still very much in charge, and when it comes to Iran he still likes to say that all options remain on the table.

Iraq and Afghanistan notwithstanding, Pentagon planners and presidential advisors seem to have an inexplicable capacity to infuse their attack scenarios with an irrepressible optimism. In their computerized simulations, otherwise intractable problems, like Iran’s nuclear programs, are swept aside like so much hi tech chaff once the missiles start flying. The Christian Science Monitor recently observed that “perhaps the most egregious error policy planners make is their assumption that once wars are started, their outcome is predictable.”[ii]

It is true that some outcomes are predictable enough. No one could have doubted that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would lead to the overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Nor could anyone doubt that if the United States attacked Iran it could manage to destroy, at least for a time, its nuclear programs, set its economic infrastructure back a generation, or overthrow its government. Regime destruction can be accomplished with dispatch – but after that all bets are off.

Paul Rogers of the University of Bradford has offered a careful and cautious account[iii] of the consequences of a concentrated air attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and defence infrastructure. He rules out a ground offensive and a regime overthrow by the United states as unfeasible given American commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He says “an air attack would involve the systematic destruction of research, development, support and training centres for nuclear and missile programmes and the killing of as many technically competent people as possible.” In addition, the attack would “involve comprehensive destruction of Iranian air defence capabilities and attacks designed to pre-empt Iranian retaliation. This would require destruction of Iranian Revolutionary Guard facilities close to Iraq and of regular or irregular naval forces that could disrupt Gulf oil transit routes.”

Civilian and military casualties would be difficult to monitor, but would be in the many thousands, given that much of the technical infrastructure in support of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs is located in urban areas.

After the attack, he says, “Iran would have many methods of responding in the months and years that followed.” He includes disruption of Gulf oil supplies and support for insurgents and anti-Israel forces in the region. Rather than end Iranian nuclear programs, an attack would ignite Iranian nuclear weapons ambitions. Iran would emerge united and determined to build a bomb and withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That would presumably occasion further attacks and propel long-term and widening confrontation in the region.

After that come the unpredictable consequences, including the environmental impact of exploding nuclear facilities – at this point with limited quantities of nuclear materials present – and various political fallout possibilities. President Bush and his army of upbeat advisors and analysts obviously did not anticipate that their 2003 attack on Iraq would be a major boon to Iran. But, says the former Ambassador and current Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control, Peter W. Galbraith, “of all the unintended consequences of the Iraq war, Iran’s strategic victory is the most far-reaching.”[iv] Similar unintended consequences would also ensue from an attack on Iran.

Mr. Bush seems rather more aware of folly when the issue is the military action of others. It is almost touching to hear his kindly reprimand of Turkey for having the temerity to threaten attacks on northern Iraq in an effort to deny rebel Turkish Kurds sanctuary there. “There is a lot of dialogue going on,” he explained to reporters at the White House, “and that is positive.”[v]

To measure his own actions he uses a different calculus. There may, after all, be a lot of dialogue going on with Iran as well, but in this case he finds nothing positive in it. Talking to Iran, whether it is the Russians or the International Atomic Energy Agency, only emboldens it in its wicked ways.

Left to his own devices, and bolstered by the authors of triumphalist attack scenarios, President Bush is eminently capable of crowning his disastrous presidency with another military misadventure – this time in Iran. In other words, he shouldn’t be left to his own devices.

The Parliament of Canada would perform a worthy service in support of international stability through a unanimous and two-fold call: for the United States to unequivocally reject military action against Iran and for Iran to unambiguously resolve all outstanding issues with the IAEA and provide it ongoing and unencumbered access to all Iranian nuclear facilities and programs.

As an emergency statement onIranby a group of concerned Canadians puts it, “an aerial assault on Iran would be an environmental and human catastrophe that our already damaged world cannot afford.”[vi]

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[i] Dan Plesch and Martin Butcher, “Considering a war with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East,” The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, September 2007 (http://www.rawstory.com/images/other/IranStudy082807a.pdf).

Barnett Rubin, “Thesis on Policy toward Iran,” Informed Comment: Global Affairs, September 5, 2007 (http://icga.blogspot.com/2007/09/theses-on-policy-toward-iran.html).

Seymour M. Hersh, “The Iran Plans: Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?” The New Yorker, April 17, 2007 (http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/17/060417fa_fact).

[ii] Walter Rodgers, “The folly of war with Iran,” The Christian Science Monitor,” October 16, 2007 ()

[iii] Paul Rogers, Iran: Consequences of a War, Briefing Paper, Oxford Research Group, February 2006 (http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/briefing_papers/pdf/IranConsequences.pdf), 16 pp.

[iv]Peter W. Galbraith, “The Victor?,” The New York Review of Books, October 11, 2007 Volume 54, Number 15 (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20651).

[v]By Paula Wolfson, “Bush Urges Turkey to Refrain From Cross-Border Operations in Iraq,” Voice of America, October 17, 2007 (http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-10-17-voa49.cfm).

[vi] From an “emergency statement” of concerned Canadians. The statement remains open for signature through Jillian Skeet of Vancouver who can be reached at jillianskeet@telus.net.

Some 80 percent of Americans think that nuclear weapons make the world a more dangerous place. Only 10 percent think the world is safer because of nuclear weapons. But when the same Americans were asked how they felt about their own country’s nuclear weapons, 47 percent said they made them feel safer and 32 percent said they made them feel less safe.

That is just one of the revealing findings of an extraordinary survey of six states (five NATO states: Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and United States; plus Israel) conducted by Angus Reid Strategies on behalf of The Simons Foundation of Vancouver.[i]

Israel is where this nuclear ambivalence is most pronounced. There 87 percent say nuclear weapons make the world a more dangerous place, but at the same time 73 percent say they would feel safer knowing that Israel has nuclear weapons.[ii]

It is tempting to call these contradictory views, but of course it is logically possible to believe that nuclear weapons make the world more dangerous and that the world would be better off without them, but then still believe that as long as any state has them, one’s own state should too. That at least seems to be the logic followed by people in states with nuclear weapons, which in turn may go some way to explaining why it is so difficult to advance nuclear disarmament even though that is what the world overwhelmingly wants.

In Britain and France respondents also said that nukes make the world more dangerous (73 percent and 77 percent respectively), but in their own case they felt safer knowing their country had them (in Britain 46 percent felt safer compared to 37 percent who felt less safe; in France 48 percent felt safer while only 24 percent felt less safe).

In states that do not possess nuclear weapons of their own (German and Italy[iii]), respondents also felt overwhelmingly that nuclear weapons make the world more dangerous (92 percent and 90 percent respectively), but they also said they felt safer knowing that their own country does not possess nuclear weapons (60 percent and 45 percent respectively). In each case a smaller minority felt that the absence of nuclear weapons rendered them less safe (21 percent and 34 percent respectively).

In countries without nuclear weapons, people find all nuclear weapons threatening; in countries with nuclear weapons, people find all nuclear weapons threatening but their own.

But that only confirms the basic truth that the overwhelming majority of people, in states with nuclear weapons as well as in states without them, think the world is made more dangerous by nuclear weapons and that such weapons should be eliminated. When the survey respondents were asked whether they would favour “eliminating all nuclear weapons in the world through an enforceable agreement,” huge majorities in all the countries surveyed answered in the affirmative – Britain, 85 percent; France, 87; Italy, 95; Germany 95; United States, 84; and Israel, 78 percent.

It is interesting that this strong support for a treaty or agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons is maintained by respondents who at the same time have a rather dim view of the effectiveness of the current and central nuclear disarmament treaty, namely the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which, by virtue of Article VI, requires all states to disarm (though without setting a timetable). Americans are least persuaded of the effectiveness of the NPT (only 16 percent thought it to be effective). In Germany, which registered the highest confidence in the effectiveness of the NPT (38 percent), more respondents still regard the NPT as ineffective (42 percent). In Israel 63 percent regard the NPT as ineffective while only 18 percent regard it as effective.

Even so, support for a new international agreement is strong across the board and reflected in the responses to a question regarding appropriate national policy goals. Here respondents showed strong combined preference for policies aimed at reducing and eliminating arsenals (Britain, 91 percent; France, 84; Italy, 93; Germany, 96; United States, 82; and Israel, 74 percent). In each case there was greater support for elimination than simply reductions, except in France and Israel where there is stronger support for reductions than elimination.

Dr. Jennifer Allen Simons, President of The Simons Foundation, said the survey results come at a critical point of mounting nuclear tensions and growing interest in nuclear technology. She notes that even though respondents in nuclear weapon states regarded nuclear weapons as a source of protection from aggression, the overwhelming weight of opinion in all the countries surveyed, including in the nuclear weapon states, supports nuclear disarmament.

It is a revealing survey that highlights both the challenges and possibilities for nuclear disarmament and touches on a range of additional issues, including nuclear testing, diversion to non-state groups, moral attitudes, and views on nuclear use.

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[i] The full report is available at The Simons Foundation website (www.thesimonsfoundation.ca) or the Angus Reid Strategies website (www.angusreidstrategies.com/global).

[ii] While Israel is widely understood to have several dozen nuclear weapons, it maintains a policy of “strategic ambiguity” by which it refuses to publicly confirm that it has a nuclear arsenal.

[iii] German and Italy actually have US/NATO weapons on their soil, but are not themselves states in “possession” of nuclear weapons, nor do their governments have control over those weapons – the Simons/Angus Reid survey also surveyed public attitudes toward this practice.

While American news media and University Presidents were trying to decide whether Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be best characterized as the devil incarnate, a petty dictator, or just plain mad, he managed to deliver himself of at least one truth during his New York visit – “the nuclear bomb is of no use,” he said. Whether Iran will honor that truth is of course another matter.

When Ahmadinejad was asked on 60 minutes for a firm answer to the question of Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear bomb, his first response was to equivocate: “Well, you have to appreciate we don’t need a nuclear bomb What needs do we have for a bomb?” Then when pressed for a firm answer, he said: “It is a firm ‘No.’ I’m going to be much firmer now, in political relations right now, the nuclear bomb is of no use; if it was useful it would have prevented the downfall of the Soviet Union; if it was useful it would resolved the problem the Americans have in Iraq. The time of the bomb is passed.”[i]

Nuclear diehards, in places like Washington, Beijing, and Delhi, among others, may beg to differ, but world opinion and witnesses from Henry Kissinger[ii] to the Dalai Lama know that Ahmadinejad is right on that particular score – indeed, Ronald Reagan made the same point, describing nuclear weapons as “totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization.”[iii]

Ahmadinejad may have something else in common with Reagan – that is, a public disavowal of nuclear weapons is not necessarily what guides his country’s action. By now a reasonable interpretation of Iran’s nuclear programs is that it is intent on using the pursuit of civilian nuclear power to acquire a nuclear weapons capability or option, as distinct from an actual weapon. And there is little doubt that Iran will eventually attain that capability. But there is a genuine difference between “capability” and “possession” – Japan being the best example of a country with the capability together with a firm policy not to convert that capability into a weapon. It is at this line of distinction that the international community and the non-proliferation regime do and must make their stand.

One can understand the desire to prevent any regime linked to the kind of world view offered by Ahmadinejad in New York, even if the tone was somewhat muted, from getting near any kind of advanced nuclear technology. But non-proliferation is a rules based endeavor and it is to our collective benefit if Iran develops its nuclear fuel cycle technologies[iv] within the non-proliferation regime and under the watchful eye of IAEA safeguards (essentially the current situation, once the IAEA’s outstanding issues are all dealt with) rather than have it withdraw from the NPT and resume its clandestine activities.

The Bush Administration has been trying to draw the line before capability, and that would be a far superior approach were it not pursued as an Iran-specific strategy – or an enemies-only approach. Nuclear non-proliferation would be genuinely aided by universal restrictions on uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing, but that will be possible only if the rules apply equally to all and reactor fuel production is brought under multilateral control that guarantees all states in good standing within the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) equal access.

Furthermore, limiting Iran’s pursuit of nuclear fuel cycle technology, and the implicit weapons capability that goes along with it, will by definition have to be regional. Indeed, that has been the focus of multilateral nonproliferation efforts, especially since 1995 when NPT states defined the collective objective of establishing the Middle East as a nuclear weapon free zone in the context of a zone free of all weapons of mass destruction.

A nuclear armed Iran can and must be averted, but it will require the even-handed application of multilaterally agreed non-proliferation principles and won’t be achieved through narrowly-targeted, Iran-specific prohibitions.

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[i]“Ahmadinejad: Iran Not Walking Toward War; Iranian Leader Tells Scott Pelley His Country Does Not Need Nuclear Weapons,” 60 Minutes, CBS News, September 23, 2007 (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/20/60minutes/main3282230.shtml).

[ii]George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, “A World Free Of Nuclear Weapons,” TheWall Street Journal, January 4, 2007 (http://psaonline.org/downloads/nuclear.pdf).

[iii] Quoted by Kissinger, et al above.

[iv] Technologies with immediate civilian but also potential weapons applications.

On August 3, 2007 the United States and India set out the details of their proposed Agreement for Cooperation on Peaceful uses of Nuclear Energy. This “123 agreement”[i] would bring significantly more of India’s civilian nuclear facilities under an international inspections regime, but it also in effect calls for the international community to embrace India as a de facto nuclear weapon state without requiring in return that India accept even the most basic disarmament obligations of nuclear weapon states. In the process, rather than bringing constraints to India’s nuclear weapons activities, the proposed deal would actually facilitate a significant expansion of India’s nuclear arsenal.

Despite the new agreement between the US Administration and India, it remains a proposed deal which will take effect only if it receives the unanimous approval of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG – of which Canada is a member)[ii] and after India negotiates appropriate safeguards agreements with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). NSG approval would mean specifically that civilian nuclear cooperation with India would be exempted from the current provision that, with the exception of the five nuclear weapon state (NWS) signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT),[iii] civilian nuclear cooperation is acceptable only with countries under full-scope safeguards. Full-scope safeguards in turn mean that all of a particular country’s nuclear facilities are subject to IAEA inspections.

In other words, India would then have the same access to nuclear materials for civilian systems as do NWS, but India is not a party to the NPT and thus is not directly bound by the Treaty’s Article VI disarmament provisions, nor is it bound by the significant additional obligations that the NWS agreed to in the context of the 1995 and 2000 NPT Review Conferences.[iv] Without requiring India to formally assume any of the disarmament obligations of the NWS, and without receiving any concrete undertakings from India regarding a permanent halt to nuclear testing and the production of fissile materials for weapons purposes, the US-India deal as it now stands imposes severe costs on the global nuclear non-proliferation regime and should not receive the approval of the NSG (because the NSG operates by consensus, a Canadian vote against the ccurrent deal would ensure that).

This is not an argument for the status quo. Under current arrangements nuclear cooperation with India is eschewed in favour of regular entreaties (including through UN Security Council Resolution 1172) for it to end all its nuclear weapons programs, place all its remaining nuclear programs under IAEA safeguards, and join the NPT as a non-nuclear weapon state. Under these arrangements India has with impunity tested nuclear weapons, refuses to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and thus ensures that it will not enter into force,[v] continues to produce fissile materials for weapons purposes, and gradually builds up its inventory of nuclear warheads.

Clearly, some change is needed. The prospects for Indian (or Pakistani or Israeli) disarmament outside of the context of general nuclear disarmament and significantly altered regional security conditions are not promising, to put it mildly, and without some internationally agreed changes, India will continue to expand its arsenal and there will be inevitable erosion from the current consensus against civilian nuclear cooperation. Already Russia has signaled a move toward large-scale nuclear cooperation,[vi] Australia has said it will sell uranium to India,[vii] and the French are in talks toward a deal similar to the US-India deal.[viii] If civilian nuclear cooperation with India (and ultimately with Pakistan and Israel) is inevitable, it should at a minimum be through a multilateral, coordinated policy that gains concrete disarmament commitments from these three de facto nuclear weapon states that are outside the NPT.

The outlines of a compromise policy have gradually emerged out of the debate over the US-India deal. In exchange for recognizing the reality of India’s situation as a de facto nuclear weapon state, including a nuclear arsenal in accord with India’s minimum deterrence doctrine, the international community would no longer demand immediate nuclear disarmament as a condition of civilian nuclear cooperation but would require, a) a moratorium on nuclear testing and ratification of the CTBT to facilitate its entry into force in accordance with the unanimous view expressed in 1995 and 2000 by all signatories to the NPT, including all the NWS, and b) it would require assurances that civilian nuclear cooperation will not facilitate expansion of its nuclear arsenal.

The 123 agreement fails to meet the terms of such a compromise.

In the first instance, civilian nuclear cooperation is not made contingent on a halt to testing. In the event of another Indian test, US legislation authorizing the deal currently would prohibit continued US nuclear cooperation (for example the supply of reactor fuel), but in a slightly bizarre move, in the 123 agreement the US promises that it would advocate on behalf of India to assure it of continuing nuclear supplies from other sources even while it bans such supplies from the US.[ix]

Secondly, the deal facilitates the expansion of India’s ongoing production of fissile materials for weapons purposes. Without an Indian moratorium on the production of such materials (all five NWS currently adhere to such a moratorium), its access to foreign uranium for its civilian programs would allow it to use all its domestic uranium for an expanded weapons program.

If, as seems inevitable, India is now to be treated as if it were a nuclear weapon state, India needs to be moved to accept that new status within the context of a series of clear and binding disarmament obligations by making civilian nuclear cooperation with India contingent on at least the following undertakings:

• A declaration by India that it regards Article VI of the NPT as the expression of a global norm requiring the elimination of nuclear weapons, and that it regards itself and other non-signatories to the NPT as legally bound by that norm;
• An immediate moratorium on nuclear testing along with an undertaking to work with Pakistanso that both sign and ratify the CTBT within a reasonable timeframe; and
• A moratorium on the production of fissile materials for weapons purposes and an undertaking to support the immediate commencement of negotiations toward a Fissile Materials Cut-off Treaty (FMCT).

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[i] Section 123 of the US Atomic Energy Act requires that any nuclear cooperation between the United States and any other country be defined through an agreement submitted to the President that sets out the “terms, conditions, duration, nature, and scope of cooperation.” Section 123 of the act also outlines some essential elements of those terms and conditions that must be included in the agreement. The text of the AEA is available at http://epw.senate.gov/atomic54.pdf.

[ii] The Nuclear Suppliers Group is a 45 nation group of suppliers that sets guidelines for trade in nuclear materials.

[iii] China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States.

[iv] India’s approach toward disarmament obligations agreed to by NWS is explored in a forthcoming Ploughshare Working Paper, “India and the disarmament obligations of nuclear weapon states.”

[v] CTBT requires ratification by all states with nuclear programs or capabilities before it can enter into force.

[vi] Vladimir Radyuhin, “Russia vows strong support in NSG,” The Hindu, August 15, 2007 (http://www.hindu.com/2007/08/15/stories/2007081561711600.htm).

[vii] “Australia will sell uranium to India,” The Times of Indiam August 16, 2007 (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Australia_will_sell_uranium_to_India/rssarticleshow/2283648.cms).

[viii] “France and India in nuclear deal,” BBC news, February 20, 2006 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4731244.stm); “France and India hold nuclear cooperation talks,” Energy Daily, New Delhi, July 30, 2007 (http://www.energy-daily.com/reports/France_And_India_Hold_Nuclear_Cooperation_Talks_999.html).

[ix] The 123 agreement says (Article 5.6.b.iv: “If a disruption of fuel supplies [from the US] to India occurs [say, in the aftermath of an Indian test], the United States and India would jointly convene a group of friendly supplier countries to include countries such as Russia, France and the United Kingdom to pursue such measures as would restore fuel supply to India.” (http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2007/aug/90050.htm