International | Nuclear weapons

Fractious, divided but still essential

Lack of progress on nuclear disarmament could lead to an ill-tempered non-proliferation treaty review

Looking for lift-off

THE conference of the 191 signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) got under way at the UN headquarters in New York this week. The last such meeting, in 2010, produced agreement over a 64-point action plan. This time it is likely to be a much more divisive affair.

The aim of “RevCon”, as it is known, is to take stock of progress (or otherwise) over the previous five years in strengthening the three pillars on which the NPT’s “grand bargain” rests: the commitment to pursue disarmament by the five “official” nuclear weapons states—America, Russia, Britain, France and China, also known as the P5; action to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons; and promotion of the peaceful use of nuclear energy. RevCons are high both on obscure technical discussion, and on diplomatic grandstanding. And the NPT has often been under stress since it came into force in 1970. But without it the world would be a more dangerous place. Only three countries have never signed up—India, Pakistan and Israel. Only one, North Korea, has ever left.

At least one bit of good news for the four-week conference was the announcement on April 2nd of a framework agreement to overcome the decade-long crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme. If a comprehensive deal can be reached by the end of June and then successfully implemented, it will go a long way towards vindicating the NPT and the tools it provides to bring those who violate its safeguards back into compliance. Mark Fitzpatrick, a non-proliferation analyst at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, believes that the agreement has strengthened two of the NPT’s pillars by upholding the right to a civil nuclear programme and confirming the role of intrusive inspections to ensure that all related activity is indeed peaceful.

Progress in most other areas since 2010 has been modest. The countries that do not have nuclear weapons are most concerned by the failure of the five that do to take further steps to reduce the size of their own nuclear arsenals. The previous RevCon was held in the afterglow of a New START deal between America and Russia to limit the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons to 1,550 on each side, and the inspirational speech in Prague a year earlier by Barack Obama, America’s president, in which he held out the prospect of a world without nuclear weapons.

Since then, despite the establishment in 2009 of the so-called P5 process as a forum for discussing multilateral disarmament, not much has happened. The main reason is the chilling of relations between Russia and the West, which predated Russia’s annexation of Crimea. An offer by Mr Obama in 2013 of new negotiations to reduce each side’s stock of warheads by a third was met with stony silence.

More recently Russia has, according to America, violated both the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty, by testing a banned missile, and the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 that guaranteed Ukraine’s security when it gave up the nuclear weapons it had inherited on the break-up of the Soviet Union. The Russians are also refusing to attend next year’s Nuclear Security Summit, a meeting to prevent fissile material falling into the wrong hands.

Without further cuts in American and Russian nuclear forces (which account for more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons), China, the most opaque of the P5 powers, will block attempts to get multilateral disarmament talks going. However, Rose Gottemoeller, America’s under-secretary of state for arms control, praises China for its leading role in producing a common glossary of nuclear terminology. This may not sound much, but it is seen within the P5 as essential for future negotiations.

Ms Gottemoeller is also keen to stress that, despite the Russian impasse, America has tried to meet its obligations. It is eliminating “excess” warheads at the rate of almost one a day and closing down old bits of nuclear infrastructure. In 2013 it completed the elimination of 500 tonnes of Russian and American fissile material (equivalent to about 20,000 warheads) under a highly enriched uranium purchase agreement. In December it launched a scheme to bring together nuclear and non-nuclear weapons states to develop new approaches to verification.

Explore an interactive version of this graphic here

It is doubtful whether these modest, incremental efforts will cut much ice with the Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons Initiative, a movement supported by civil-society groups and championed by Austria, Norway and Mexico. Faced with what they see as foot-dragging by the P5 (which are modernising their nuclear forces to maintain their long-term effectiveness), the initiative’s backers, some of which want to make nuclear weapons illegal, may question whether working through the NPT serves any purpose.

Britain and America sent representatives to a conference on the humanitarian initiative in Vienna last December attended by 156 other countries, but Russia, France and China stayed away. Nobody disputes the horror of nuclear weapons, but moral fervour is not a policy. Progress on nuclear disarmament must take account of the complex deterrence relationships between the P5.

Another source of friction is the failure to hold the conference on creating a WMD-free zone in the Middle East that was promised in 2010. Israel, an undeclared nuclear-weapons state, has joined preparatory meetings at a high diplomatic level and is attending the RevCon as an observer. But it insists that regional security arrangements must precede any talks on disarmament, whereas Egypt says the first step is for Israel to accede to the NPT—a non-starter. It is possible that Israel’s new chumminess with the Gulf Arabs, the verification measures to ensure the civil nature of Iran’s nuclear programme and the chairing of the conference by an Algerian, Taous Feroukhi, may provide some impetus.

For this RevCon to rediscover the spirit of 2010, what is needed is an outbreak of realism among countries without nuclear weapons—and a willingness by the P5, above all Russia, to demonstrate that they are prepared to pay more than lip-service to the vision of eventual nuclear disarmament. That may be a tall order, but, imperfect though the NPT is, most of its signatories know that keeping it alive is better than any alternative.

This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline "Fractious, divided but still essential"

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