An unusual counting game is underway as the NPT undergoes its periodic
review at the United Nations in New York.
Five nuclear-armed states – China, France, Russia, the UK and USA – are
doing their best to dominate the NPT and uphold the nuclear status quo that
enables them to modernize their nuclear arsenals, while an overwhelming 159
states parties to the NPT have issued a joint “humanitarian disarmament”
statement demanding an end to nuclear business as usual.
Described as the cornerstone of the nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament
regimes, the NPT enshrined a simple bargain at the height of the cold war:
states that don’t have nuclear weapons agree not to acquire them in exchange
for complete disarmament by those who had already (by 1968) acquired them.
Decades since that agreement was sealed, some NPT member states continue
to argue about text, as if this is the main task for non-proliferation. By
contrast, a more ambitious group of 96 states and counting have
been propelled by deep concerns about the unacceptable humanitarian
consequences of nuclear weapons to sign up to an important international pledge
to “fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons”.
Nuclear disarmament, to put it plainly, has suffered from a sort of
diplomatic colonialism, in that the self-important militarist interests of a
few states have been imposed over the rest of the world for nearly 70 years.
Now a host of nuclear free states are claiming back their power to create the
conditions for a much-needed legally binding agreement to prohibit nuclear
weapons.
Nuclear disarmament has not been shaken up like this since developing
states pushed for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in the 1990s. Since
it was concluded and adopted in 1996, the UN’s traditional negotiating body,
the Conference on Disarmament, has signally failed to get a work programme for
talks. At the NPT Conference, however,
the five nuclear-armed states proudly announced that in the past five years
they have kept themselves busy producing a “glossary” of nuclear terms.
The United States has also launched a new
website focusing
on the NPT, with slick videos and a ‘rejuvenated’ presence on social
media. President Putin, meanwhile, has taken to parading Russian nuclear weapons like a playground bully brandishing
a painted wooden sword, desperately hoping that no-one will call his bluff. China,
which used to keep its arsenal smaller than the others, is now causing nuclear headaches by
modernising its missiles with multiple nuclear warheads. France and the UK just
want to stay at the top table, and seem to think that replacing their nuclear
forces is the way to do that. But they’ve been inviting
ridicule by crashing their nuclear submarines into each other, while a recent Royal Navy whistleblower described
the deployment of the UK’s Trident nuclear system as a “disaster
waiting to happen”.
The so-called “step-by-step approach” that these five and a handful of
nuclear sharing allies call “practical” has lost credibility. The significance
of US-Russian reductions, as well as Britain’s promise to slightly reduce the
number of warheads in the planned replacement of Trident, is fatally undermined
by ongoing modernization programmes of deployed nuclear weapons. The US alone
is planning to spend one trillion dollars on nuclear weaponry over the next 30 years.
The nuclear dependent governments’ interminable appeals for pragmatism
no longer inspire or convince. If these five consider their current nuclear
activities to be evidence of a commitment to nuclear disarmament, it is hardly
surprising that the majority of other NPT member states have lost patience and
want now to pursue more substantive, sincere and achievable nuclear disarmament
initiatives.
Humanitarian and environmental concerns, as well as mounting
frustration, are now impelling over half the UN’s member states to take a more
active leadership role to negotiate genuine disarmament steps. These are
challenging nuclear-armed states and their nuclear-sharing allies for their
contradictory actions and lack of vision on how to implement article VI of the
NPT, under which they are required to negotiate in good faith and bring to
conclusion the total elimination of nuclear weapons.
In return, the nuclear five are spending ridiculous amounts of
diplomatic energy to get the NPT parties to substitute the word “severe” for
“catastrophic”, thereby weakening the NPT-related assessments they previously
agreed to in 2000 and 2010. With more than 16,000 nuclear weapons in the
arsenals of nine countries, this attempt to sanitize the risks and threats
would be risible, if it weren’t so foolish and dangerous.
Their position is especially shocking in light of the compelling
evidence presented at the series of International Conferences on the
Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons held in Oslo, Nayarit (Mexico) and Vienna
during 2013-14, where states concluded that the threats and global consequences
of nuclear weapon detonations have remained unacceptably high despite the end
of the Cold War, with human error and cyber threats adding to the continuing
risks of miscalculation and intentional nuclear war.
Since the 2010 NPT Review Conference, the International Campaign to
Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has mobilised civil society to advocate for a global
nuclear ban treaty to fill the legal gap between non-proliferation and
disarmament. By prohibiting the use, deployment, development, production,
stockpiling, and transfer of nuclear weapons the new treaty would reinforce the
NPT and draw in the four nuclear-armed states that have proliferated outside
the current regime.
As has happened with the Mine Ban Treaty and the Cluster Munition
Convention, a treaty banning nuclear weapons would stigmatize their possession
and challenge the notion that nuclear armaments provide any prestige or
security for those who possess them. As
with chemical and biological weapons, which have both been comprehensively
banned, a universally-applicable nuclear ban treaty would unequivocally declare
nuclear weapons to be illegal, closing off the perpetual cycle of their
deployment and modernization.
This treaty will give nations a clear and straightforward choice: those
who believe that nuclear weapons are inhumane and unacceptable would join the
nuclear ban negotiations. Those who believe that nuclear weapons are legitimate
means of defence and warfare, notwithstanding their inhumane effects on people
and the environment, are able to stay out of the negotiations if they choose to
do so. In reality, most will find that
the treaty process creates its own momentum, and even the most resistant
nuclear-dependent states will find that greater domestic and international
pressures help – or push – them to reduce and eliminate their reliance on these
weapons of mass destruction.
If inequality
has dominated past discussions on nuclear weapons,,
as Costa Rica stated during this Review Conference, “Democracy has come to nuclear disarmament.” The humanitarian initiative
has been fully backed by the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States,
who have called for a ban on nuclear weapons on several occasions. Many
African, Middle Eastern and Asian states also strongly support the prohibition
of all nuclear armaments, and some have concluded or continue to push for
treaties to ban nuclear weapons from their own regions. What is clear is that,
as with other successful disarmament processes, the Global South is getting
ready to take the lead.
A process for a treaty to ban nuclear weapons is in the making. The NPT
is being saved from irrelevance by the new Humanitarian Pledge initiated by Austria. And in the halls of the UN headquarters on New York’s First Avenue, even
those opposed to disarmament see this as a very significant
“game-changer”. Like the CTBT twenty
years ago, a nuclear ban treaty should now be recognised as the necessary next step
towards the elimination of nuclear weapons, in fulfilment of the NPT’s core
objectives and obligations.
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whatever the formal outcome of the NPT Review
Conference, banning nuclear weapons is now the name of the game. It will be
revealing to see which governments sign up to invest in the future and be on
the right side of nuclear history.
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