Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
5/15/2015
As “slightly messy” debates continue at the ongoing Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference (RevCon), experts this week laid out options for a path forward for disarmament at the Arms Control Association’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. This year’s RevCon, which is held every five years at the United Nations in New York, has been dominated by disagreement about the proper fora in which to pursue disarmament, said Andrea Berger, Deputy Director for the Proliferation and Nuclear Policy program at the Royal United Services Institute, who attended the RevCon. Some countries are calling for the discussion to transfer to the UN General Assembly, where it would not face the same veto threat it does in the RevCon. As a consensus-based process, the conference requires all attendees to agree upon any actions before they are established. The New Agenda Coalition is calling for consideration of an “overarching legal instrument to be negotiated in the subsidiary branches underneath it. Meanwhile the Non-Aligned Movement is asserting that regardless of the disarmament discussion, the Conference on Disarmament should negotiate a treaty starting in the next review cycle on negative security assurances,” Berger said at the ACA meeting. “You can see the debate seems still, I would say, slightly messy,” she said.
70 Countries Sign Austrian Pledge
In 2005, the RevCon resulted in no final document. Five years later, diplomats crafted one in the final days of the conference, although the document fell short of outlining penalties for countries that withdraw from the treaty, which was a U.S. goal entering that forum. It is unclear whether this year’s document will articulate related language. Before this year’s RevCon, a new disarmament-based initiative surfaced, as 70 countries signed an Austrian pledge which calls for the disarmament and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. Some countries are calling for this language to be part of the 2020 RevCon agenda, while Iran this week was “curiously” calling for this to move forward in 2022, Berger said.
Former Revcon Ambassador Calls for Alternatives to Full Alert of Nuclear Weapons
Lewis Dunn, the U.S. ambassador to the 1985 RevCon, proposed that parties to this year’s conference should call for the U.S. and Russia to press their defense secretaries to jointly assess alternative actions to maintaining the full alert of nuclear weapons to address commensurate national security concerns. The governments would then report the results back to the conference. “There’s a good timeline that you could have,” Dunn said at the meeting. “OK. You don’t like de-alerting. You tell us that all you’re doing is planning to launch these weapons into the open sea if anything happens. There must be something else that you two could do. Go ahead and assess it and tell us what it is. We want to know what your alternative is.”
During the second week of the RevCon on May 5, Amb. Adam Scheinman, Special Representative of the President for Nuclear Nonproliferation, tweeted a link to a State Department fact sheet that stated U.S. nuclear weapons are not on “hair-trigger alert”—as former U.S. Strategic Command commander Gen. James Cartwright recently claimed— and Scheinman added that all intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles are targeted on open oceans. Throughout this year’s RevCon, U.S. and Russian officials have opposed the idea of fully de-alerting nuclear weapons.
Benchmarks, Yardsticks, Timelines
The UN Main Committee I and subsidiary body are considering an empirical, metrics-based approach to disarmament. During the ACA meeting, Randy Rydell, former Senior Political Affairs Officer at the UN Office of Disarmament Affairs, said any progressive approach to nuclear disarmament should include benchmarks, yardsticks and timelines. “The alternative to [the] comprehensive approach to nuclear disarmament is some kind of step-by-step process, not the deceptive variety practiced today by the nuclear powers of steps toward disarmament, but steps actually in disarmament,” Rydell said. While P5 diplomats have touted their countries’ commitment to disarmament, skeptics have questioned those nations’ dedication to the NPT in recent years, in part, because of ongoing nuclear modernization in at least the United Kingdom, Russia, the United States and China, and increases in China’s warhead stockpile.
Step by Step, or Tumbling Down the Stairs?
U.S. officials have recently called for a “step-by-step,” realistic approach to disarmament. Dunn called for the RevCon to more clearly define parameters of Article 6 of the NPT, which requires each party to the treaty to “undertake to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to the 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.” The NPT was negotiated in 1970. “The nuclear weapon states believe in step by step, but why not hold their feet to the fire and have a continuing discussion about, ‘OK, what does this mean in practice?’” Dunn said. The former diplomat also proposed the NPT nuclear-weapon states develop a P5 Code of Nuclear Conduct, outlining parameters for nuclear security, nuclear safety, changes in nuclear posture, decision-making, modernization and crisis management.
As the nuclear community and the world await the results of the month-long RevCon, which ends next week, Rydell criticized nuclear-weapon states’ level of seriousness about disarmament. He highlighted previous disarmament initiatives that flopped, including the model Nuclear Weapons Convention proposed in 1997 and 2007, that circulated among UN member states before the idea was dropped. Rydell said that step-by-step disarmament as a “mere goal is a dead end and a nonstarter for the vast majority of UN member states. The longer it is touted, the worse will be the prospects, both for the NPT and the future of disarmament. “The road to Global Nuclear Zero will not be paved with toasts and press releases,” he said earlier in his speech.
