VIENNA – The role of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in the global nuclear security architecture is taking further shape as it inherits the commitments of its member states from the defunct Nuclear Security Summit process and adapts to expectations for a mission expanding beyond its traditional nuclear safeguards and security work.
A series of high-level meetings and technical sessions hosted this week during its second International Conference on Nuclear Security brought to the forefront the role the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog has played in this area and highlighted the changes the agency will be forced to face as it takes a more central role.
Today, the IAEA’s responsibilities include assisting member countries in improving scientific capabilities for peaceful uses of nuclear technology; verifying through technical measures countries’ compliance to international legal obligations on the use of nuclear material; offering advisory services to identify states’ nuclear security needs; and facilitating international cooperation on nuclear security matters.
The Language of Commitment
Ministers from more than 50 countries participated in the high-level Monday session of the conference, which will be convened every three years. Yukiya Amano, IAEA director general, highlighted during the opening ministerial segment the progress that has been made through the agency in recent years. He said the IAEA since 2010 has trained more than 10,000 law enforcement officials in identifying and preventing nuclear smuggling, and has given countries over 3,000 instruments to detect nuclear and radiological materials.
IAEA member states the same day adopted a ministerial declaration that reaffirmed the agency’s role in facilitating international cooperation on nuclear security and recommitted themselves to enhancing their own national regimes for protection of weapon-usable materials. The declaration largely restates commitments to nuclear security enhancements that governments made at the 2013 IAEA conference, with some differences in language and, therefore, potentially scope.
One of these differences involves the mention of military nuclear materials; the 2013 declaration called on states to “maintain effective security of all nuclear material under their control, which includes nuclear material used for military purposes.” The 2016 document repeats this call for “all nuclear and other radioactive material under its control,” but makes no explicit mention of military nuclear material. Eighty-three percent of nuclear material around the world belongs in military stockpiles that fall outside of existing international security standards and accountability mechanisms. The other 17 percent of all weapon-usable material, channeled into civilian applications, remains the focus of international conferences such as this week’s event.
Asked about this difference, Juan Carlos Lentijo, IAEA deputy director general and head of its Department of Nuclear Safety and Security, noted at a Wednesday press conference that the IAEA’s mandate is for nuclear materials used for peaceful purposes. Raja Raja Adnan, director of the Division of Nuclear Security, added, “From an implementation point of view within the agency, we are only mandated to look at the civilian use of nuclear material.” He said the declaration “addresses both the state and the agency, but we are limited by scope to civilian use.”
Joan Rohlfing, president and chief operating officer of the nongovernmental Nuclear Threat Initiative, said in an interview with NS&D Monitor that the declaration language is open to interpretation. She noted that the references to “all” nuclear material invite a reading that this includes military nuclear material. “States have been uncomfortable in making an explicit reference to so-called military materials, so they came up with some compromise language,” Rohlfing said. Otherwise, “I read this as being comprehensive and inclusive,” she said of the 2016 declaration.
The Tension Between Security and Disarmament
The 2016 IAEA ministerial declaration reaffirms “common goals of nuclear non-proliferation, nuclear disarmament and peaceful uses of nuclear energy,” and also says “progress in nuclear disarmament is critically needed and will continue to be addressed in all relevant fora.”
Ambassador Abel Adelakun Ayoko, Nigeria’s representative to international organizations in Vienna and co-chairman of the consultation process for the declaration, said there was no dissent from IAEA member states – including Russia – during the crafting and adoption of the declaration. However, Russian officials this week commented on the need for state sovereignty over nuclear security activities and called for a clear distinction between security of nuclear materials and technologies and nuclear disarmament.
Mikhail Ulyanov, director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department of Nonproliferation and Arms Control, said Tuesday that his nation should base its activities on several principles that include the acknowledgement that the state holds all responsibility to ensure the reliability of its national nuclear security; that international cooperation in this area should be voluntary; and that “any attempt to link nuclear security with nuclear disarmament is counterproductive.”
Vadim Smirnov, deputy director of the same department, reaffirmed Wednesday that the responsibility of securing nuclear material is “borne by those states.” Russia, he noted, participated in three of four Nuclear Security Summits, contributing to the declarations issued at each. “We have no intention of rejecting these decisions of the last summit in Washington,” which Moscow did not join, he said. “Some of them can be considered as reasonable and as fruitful thought.”
However, “We don’t think it is justified to accept recommendations from international organizations as mandatory,” Smirnov said, adding, “We don’t think it is justified when some states link the issues of nuclear security and the issues of nuclear weapons in IAEA,” arguing that combining these issues turns dialogue between member states into a political debate.
These principles reflect recent Russian actions in nuclear security and nonproliferation; for instance, Moscow has phased out the Cooperative Threat Reduction program through which the United States assisted in securing WMD materials in former Soviet territory, saying the country would manage such work within its borders without outside assistance. In addition to withdrawing from this year’s final Nuclear Security Summit, Russian officials remain critical of the United States’ attempts to spur bilateral engagement on nuclear security, nonproliferation, and arms control, while Washington has called this reaction isolating and counterproductive.
Rohlfing agreed that the state should have ultimate control and responsibility over its nuclear materials, and added that institutions like the IAEA should play a leadership role in creating an accountability process. “Russia has been consistently promoting the centrality of the IAEA in nuclear material security, which is important,” she said.
“The reference to disarmament [in this week’s ministerial declaration] is interesting,” Rohlfing said. “There’s been an ongoing tension, first in the summit series, and now in the context of this forum, [on the] relationship between disarmament and nuclear material security.”
One of the reasons behind the success of the summit process, she said, is that it separated the two issues so the meetings could retain focus on nuclear material security without the “controversial nature of disarmament” getting in the way. The reference to disarmament in the latest ministerial declaration “really stood out for me,” Rohlfing said, because it is “an introduction of a concept that has been a divisive concept within the community into this nuclear security forum.”
Rohlfing suspects some developing or nonaligned states pushed this language into the declaration, and Russia’s subsequent comments this week on the distinction between the two concepts were probably references to the debate it was engaged in while crafting the final document.
The IAEA’s Post-Summit Role
Rohlfing’s statement highlights an ongoing debate between nuclear- and non-nuclear weapon states in the United Nations; those with the weapons seek to retain their deterrent capability, while many of the others push for global disarmament. The summits sidestepped this issue by keeping disarmament largely out of the picture.
Thomas Countryman, acting U.S. undersecretary of state for international security and arms control, echoed Rohlfing’s view in a separate interview with NS&D Monitor. “It is difficult to have that [nuclear security] conversation in the context of the IAEA or the U.N. General Assembly without a variety of other topics intruding,” particularly disarmament, he said.
“A ministerial like this . . . is valuable for sharing information. It’s not as valuable for focusing on concrete actions, whereas the summit process – because everybody who came agreed we were talking about nuclear security and not nuclear everything – actually made some progress,” he said.
The Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C., earlier this year, the last of four held under the Obama administration, brought together over 50 heads of state to offer country commitments to prevent nuclear terrorism.
This year’s summit featured the creation of a new multilateral contact group consisting of senior-level experts from more than 30 countries who plan to build upon the summit series’ progress by holding nuclear security discussions at international conferences. The group made plans to convene annually at the General Conference of the IAEA, which was hailed as the primary body that would carry forward these efforts by hosting the group as it discusses emerging nuclear security trends, assesses implementation of nuclear security commitments, and develops and maintains links to nuclear industry.
The effectiveness of the IAEA’s nuclear security conferences has been a matter of discussion this week. Rohlfing, for one, said that there are ways in which the latest ministerial declaration is “less ambitious” than the 2013 document – as well as the summit communiqués. The summit documents highlighted “the importance of accountability and confidence-building, [and] transparency measures that states could undertake to demonstrate their progress in nuclear security,” she said.
Pavel Podvig, an independent researcher who heads the Russian Nuclear Forces project, said in an interview Thursday that he remains skeptical of the tangible impact of both the summit process and the IAEA conferences. The IAEA’s contributions to global nuclear security are limited by the interests pursued by its member states; these high-level conferences could be helpful in highlighting certain topics, but ultimately the relationships between countries are likely to be more impactful, he said.
The concern about nuclear materials used for military purposes is one example that international organizations can do little to address; such initiatives must come from individual states, Podvig said. Even so, the IAEA could play a role in facilitating disarmament, for instance. “You have to create the mechanism for securing and eliminating the material,” he said. “Disarmament will come at some point.”