Put the brakes on nuke race

Anjali Sharma
The Statesman, 4 December

The UN Disarmament Committee has said nuclear threats have become more dangerous and complex, with the emergence of an illicit trade in nuclear technology. Problems become more complex with the reported interest of extremist groups in acquiring nuclear weapons, greater difficulty in verifying nuclear production and insufficient progress in addressing energy security concerns.

More countries are interested in mastering the full nuclear fuel cycle, "a step that brings them closer to a potential nuclear weapons capability”.

The representative of the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mr Gustavo Zlauvinen said there are a reported 27,000 nuclear warheads in the arsenals of at least nine countries. The cold war "hair trigger" alert deployment status of a significant number of those weapons contribute to the fears. The critical aspects of the nuclear non-proliferation regime need to be strengthened if a cascade of nuclear proliferation is to be avoided, Mr Zlauvinen said.

There is a need for the security of existing nuclear materials and improved controls over the transfer and production of nuclear material as effective control of nuclear material remained the "choking point" for preventing the production of additional nuclear weapons, he said. The second aspect is the need to strengthen the verification authority and capability of IAEA.

The nuclear watchdog agency's safeguards system had evolved from one focused on declared nuclear material and nuclear facilities to a more comprehensive information-driven system, able to provide credible assurance regarding the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities. A third aspect was the need to give disarmament the prominence and priority it deserved.

Executive secretary of the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Mr Tibor Toth, said a nuclear test provided the "final and irreversible proof" of a state's intentions. The CTBT provided the "last and visible barrier between the peaceful legitimate use and the misuse of nuclear energy. The test-ban treaty that was in force was a "logical and necessary" element of the system, if present and future nuclear non-proliferation challenges were to be addressed credibly, Mr Toth said. Nuclear energy production and nuclear capacity were projected to increase in the coming decades and the differentiation between permitted civilian and prohibited activities was a complex challenge. Mr Sergio Duarte, UN representative for disarmament affairs, said the growth of international organisations in the disarmament field devoted to specific types of weapons had reinforced the UN’s role.

The UN was indispensable in creating a synergy among the diverse activities of international organisations at both the global and regional levels, he said. Highly technical work needs to be undertaken, free from political interference. That collective work on global disarmament challenges is coordinated and integrated must be ensured, so that the international community does not find itself mired in duplication of effort, or worse, working at cross purposes, he added.

Personal representative of the secretary-general for the Conference on Disarmament and the UN Director-General’s Office in Geneva, Mr Sergei Ordzhonikidze, and the director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Mr Rogelio Pfirter, were the other panelists. The US representative said his country's emphasis was not on what to do to control and eliminate nuclear weapons, but rather, on how to create an environment under which such an elimination process would be the most stable and realistic policy choice. There must be an environment in which nobody requires nuclear weapons for security. The key issues are adherence to non-proliferation; suppression of trafficking of weapons of mass destruction; elimination of other forms of those weapons; finding other means of deterrence; use of ballistic missiles; and creating a system of detection, deterrence and response.

The Indonesian representative said in the context of implementation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, there was widespread perception that nuclear-weapons states had attempted to avoid their obligations under the treaty. Post-Cold War, the world had seen more failures than successes in nuclear disarmament. It had emerged in the last review of that treaty that the non-nuclear-weapons states believe it is unfair to demand that they comply with their obligations under the NPT, while the nuclear-weapons states failed to live up to their own obligations and commitments.

Failure to deal with that issue ran the risk of rendering the treaty irrelevant. Statements in the thematic debate on nuclear weapons were made by the representatives of Bangladesh, Mexico, Portugal (on behalf of the European Union), Uzbekistan, Japan, Republic of Korea, Switzerland and Syria. The thematic segment was focused on weapons of mass destruction; outer space; conventional weapons; other disarmament measures and international security; regional disarmament and security and disarmament machinery.

Mr Sergei Ordzhonikidze, personal representative for the Conference on Disarmament and UN Director-General’s Office at Geneva, said disarmament had been neglected in international forums, and the Conference on Disarmament was probably the most neglected.

The origins of the impasse were at the end of the Cold War, which changed the international security equilibrium, and led to a re-evaluation of priorities and a changing perception of security.

He said with the possibility of the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by terrorists, international relations had become more complex and unpredictable.

Multilateralism had given way to predominance of a particular national interest, and the Conference on Disarmament had been unable to start negotiations on any item on its agenda. Mr Ordzhonikidze said efforts to break the deadlock had not yielded desired results and the conference had been trying to forge a consensus on disarmament priorities, instead of negotiating multilateral agreements.

Disarmament could liberate resources for development, building confidence and strategic stability. It would also be of use to the development agenda and the Millennium Development Goals. He stressed that the multilateral disarmament machinery must be overhauled and called for joint efforts based on new, imaginative approaches. It was vital to develop a political consensus on priorities, and to go beyond national interest. Mr Ordzhonikidze said that without political decisions at the highest level, even the most determined efforts of the Conference on Disarmament would not succeed. The current impasse could not be broken through procedural means, but only through a new political consensus.