ROW Episode 38

In this episode we identify the deep flaws in our international nuclear non-proliferation regime and propose ways of fixing them thereby strengthening a key pillar of global peace and security.

Transcript

Sovaida: 0:08

Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode, we identify the deep flaws in our international nuclear nonproliferation regime and propose ways of fixing them, thereby strengthening a key pillar of global peace and security. We all yearn for a world that is peaceful and secure. But to achieve this world, we have to first identify the obstacles that stand in our way and then act resolutely and methodically to remove them. The proliferation of nuclear weapons poses one of the most serious dangers to the peace of the world. In recognition of this danger, in 1968, the international community created something that we call the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, an agreement between many nation states that came into effect in 1970. This treaty is, according to our current Secretary General, Mr. Antonio Guterres, an essential pillar of international peace and security. So what is the NPT, the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty? It's essentially a contract between a whole bunch of states or nations, and it had three main goals. To promote cooperation between them for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, while also preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology. And a key element was to ensure eventual complete nuclear disarmament. Essentially, this is the story: that once the bomb, the atom bomb, came into existence and information about creating it and nuclear technology started to become more readily available, nations recognized that this posed a huge danger and it was likely to lead to a cascade of proliferation. So they decided to come up with some kind of mechanism to arrest this proliferation. Problem was that some nations who had nuclear weapons, five in particular, didn't want to give them up. And others who didn't have them said,"Wait a minute. It's not fair that you should have access to nuclear technology and be able to economically develop. We at least want to have access to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, to create energy, for instance, so that our people can continue to develop. Eventually these two groups struck a deal. The deal was the NPT, the Non Proliferation Treaty, in which the nuclear weapons states got to keep their weapons, while promising that they would work assiduously and in good faith to disarm and to eliminate nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the non nuclear weapons states promised not to try to acquire nuclear weapons in return for having access to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, for civilian purposes. The key principle that they tried, I don't know if they thought about this consciously, but that I believe underpins the system is the principle of fairness: We'll do a deal and each side has to fulfill the conditions." It was a bargain that was hinged on key conditions. Unfortunately, these conditions have not been met. Now, the NPT was signed in 1968, came into force in 1970, and initially it was really successful in checking the spread of nuclear weapons. For instance, it led several states like South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan to abandon their nuclear weapons ambitions. And it made it more difficult for non nuclear weapon states to acquire the material and technology needed to build weapons without detection, while avoiding detection. And then in 1957, another good step was taken to create an agency called the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, whose job was basically to promote the peaceful uses of civilian nuclear energy, while also monitoring that nations were complying with their promises. Unfortunately, right from the start, certain fundamental flaws existed in the system that over the years have become increasingly apparent. If you think of the nuclear non proliferation system as a dam that's been holding back the waters of proliferation, there are so many breaches, severe breaches in it now that it threatens to have the entire dam collapse and result in a nuclear arms race, a tremendous proliferation of nuclear weapons, which would inevitably lead to a nuclear disaster and nuclear war. Let's look at some of the key flaws because it's important that we educate ourselves. And I'm going to make this really simple and easy. This is not hard stuff. The first flaw is that the NPT is not binding on all the members of the international community, believe it or not. States are free to sign on to it or not. Think of it as a contract, just like you can sign on to a contract or not with another party or several other parties, so two states can choose. Now, in a world where the dangers of nuclear proliferation are so great, and the dangers posed by these weapons of mass destruction are so severe, and the peace and security of the entire planet and our existence hinges on keeping us safe from these weapons, and in a world that is so interconnected and interdependent as ours is, and has become essentially a single organism, where the action of the one affects the whole-- this is crazy. Participation ought to be mandatory for all nations on the grounds of international security. Nations talk a lot about national security, but international security should be our primary concern. And once we have that, then the national security will also be guaranteed. The principle that's implicated here, and in this series, we've talked a lot about principles, is the principle of oneness, that we are all interconnected. We need to apply this principle in crafting a reformed system of nonproliferation. Essentially, if you think about it in practical terms, it's ludicrous that currently nuclear weapons states like India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel can be absolved from the requirement of participating like all other nations in the NPT treaty. It's crazy. It's insane. To me, it's like walking into a room where some people have a deadly contagious disease, a handful of people, and then saying to everybody else, you guys have to be masked and wear all this protective gear, but these five people can wander around and breathe on all of us and touch us and their bodily fluid can get everywhere. This just makes no sense. So we're doing things in an upside down fashion. This is another area in which the principle of the curtailment of national sovereignty to a certain extent kicks in, where it's critical in certain narrow spheres of human endeavor, where our collective interests are implicated, like the interest of not eliminating ourselves, annihilating ourselves through nuclear weapons, that we curtail our national sovereignty and cede our right to maintain nuclear weapons for this greater good. Now, the second flaw in the system, in the NPT system, is that states can withdraw, any state can withdraw at any time, and the conditions for withdrawal are very low, and the notice required is minimal. Basically a member state can withdraw with a mere 90 days notice, three months notice to the other parties in the Security Council. And it's easy to do so. All they need to say is that some extraordinary events have happened related to the subject matter of the treaty that have jeopardized the supreme interest of their country. Unfortunately, what a supreme interest is, is not defined in the treaty. So as you can imagine, nations can make up whatever they want. In addition, to add insult to injury, withdrawal carries no consequences with it. Even if a state has been found to have been in violation of its treaty obligations while it was a member, there's nothing that can be done. Have any states withdrawn? Yes, North Korea. It signed onto the NPT treaty. It used it as a means to acquire nuclear technology, supposedly for peaceful purposes. It then used its know how to develop a secret weapons program. And once it had the bomb, it announced it and then announced that it was withdrawing from the NPT. North Korea has set a very dangerous precedent. Unless we act quickly to make sure that there are severe consequences for such actions, other nations are likely to follow suit. Iran has occasionally threatened to withdraw from the NPT. It has not yet. Bottom line, it defies belief that given the dangers of peace and security posed by nuclear weapons that we would even entertain the notion of allowing one state party to withdraw from such a treaty that's so fundamental to the peace of the world. The third flaw in the system of non proliferation in our world is the absence of a reliable and shared system of intelligence coupled with robust monitoring and verification to ensure that states are actually complying with their obligations under the treaty. If you're going to have rules, you've got to be able to monitor that people are complying with the rules. Otherwise, it's just something written on a piece of paper. But wait a minute. We said that there was a system that had been set up, the IAEA, that provided international safeguards and a system for monitoring. So isn't that good enough? The answer is no. Unfortunately, the system is very weak and very broken. First of all, the system is based on states voluntarily entering into a bilateral, meaning a two way, agreement between the state and the IAEA for the IAEA to be able to come and inspect. How crazy is that? You give states nuclear technology and then say,"Oh, do you want to sign a safeguards agreement or not?" If they have any nefarious motives, they're not going to want to do that. Secondly, it's become clear over time that the safeguard systems we do have in place and the scope of the IAEA's authority has been inadequate to bring breaches of the NPT to the attention of the international community in a timely manner. For example, with Iran, we learned about Iran's undeclared nuclear activities from dissidents and not as a result of the safeguard system. The world learned about North Korea's undeclared nuclear activities when it itself decided to divulge its secret and then withdraw from the NPT. We learned about Iraq's clandestine pursuit of a program to develop nuclear weapons after the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and not because of the efficacy of the safeguard system. And on and on. The same with Libya. Same with Syria. The third problem here is that this whole system of safeguards is based on countries declaring their nuclear activities. That's the first thing that happens: states are asked when they enter a safeguards agreement with the IEA to declare their nuclear activities. Well, if you want to hide something, you're going to declare some stuff, and then you're going to hide other stuff. That's a given. So a good example is in 2011, the IAEA board found Syria to be in noncompliance with its obligations under the safeguards agreement, which it had signed. The IAEA board concluded it was likely that a building at the Deir el Zour site destroyed by Israel in 2007 was a nuclear reactor that should have been declared to the IAEA by Syria but hadn't been. Over time we've tried to bolster this system and we created something called the Additional Protocol to tighten the system of safeguards, and states were encouraged to voluntarily sign it. Unfortunately, the additional protocol continues to remain weak. It's not mandatory. It's voluntary. There's also a national security exception that allows a member state to say,"Hey, listen. You know what? You're going to send your nuclear inspectors in. We'll let you inspect these buildings over here, but these buildings over here, there's a national security component, and we can't allow you to look, or this part of the building is okay, but this other part is not okay." It's like child's play. It's crazy that we would have such a system. There's also an inadequacy of the IAEA to go in and have intrusive monitoring of areas where nuclear materials haven't been declared. Nations do research and development in other parts away from their nuclear facilities, where they don't declare those buildings, and the IAEA should be able to go in even though those sites are not on the lists of declared nuclear sites. That kind of power needs to be given to the IAEA or to a similar body. And they also need to be able to conduct far more no notice inspections. Until the additional protocol, you had to give a lot of notice to the country saying,"Hey! We're going to send an inspector." So guess what they do? They play cat and mouse games. We saw this with Iraq. Remember the video footage as the inspectors are arriving through the front door of the building, and out the back door, all these trucks and things being hauled out, files and so on and material. that's driving off in the distance. That's been tightened to a certain extent. There are now provisions that allow for more special inspections with very short notice. However, unfortunately most of the inspections are still routine inspections where you give notice and unfortunately the notice given gives time to a country that wants to hide something to hide it. There's an argument that, the IAEA is very robust because now they use remote cameras and so they can monitor stuff that's going on even if they don't have inspectors on the ground. Well, guess what? Countries that want to hide stuff turn the cameras off. In fact, in the summer of last year, in 2022, Iran announced that it was turning the cameras off and did turn it off until the nuclear deal, the JCPOA, was restored. So again, this is all child's play. We need to have a really robust system of verifications and monitoring. The fourth flaw is the absence of effective penalties to deter member states from flouting the NPT rules and to bring them to heel if they do, and to impose penalties on them if they do. What do we do when a nation like Iran turns off its cameras or fails to provide adequate reasons about why highly enriched uranium was found somewhere where it shouldn't have been found. The best that we've been able to do under the current system is to threaten the breaching party with a referral to the Security Council, but these referrals are not always successful. For instance, there were threats to refer North Korea's activities to the Security Council, but they went nowhere because China threatened to veto it. All the resolutions that the Security Council passed against Iraq went unheeded. So even referrals don't necessarily lead to any good results in a change in behavior. Even if a successful referral is made, at worst what happens is the threat of economic and diplomatic sanctions, rather than what we need, which is coercive measures to enforce the rules and if necessary to replace the recalcitrant government with one that's willing to abide by international rules and to impose penalties that bite for violations that have already taken place. Withdrawing nations should be held responsible for violations they've committed while they were members of the NPT. And they should also be required to give back all the nuclear materials, facilities or technologies that they were given for their peaceful use on the promise that they wouldn't divert them to military use. You can see all the many ways in which we need to tighten our system or create a new and better one. The fifth flaw is that there continues to be an unresolved tension between the need of nations, particularly developing ones, to have access to peaceful nuclear technology to meet their growing energy needs on the one hand, and the need of the international community on the other hand to limit and control the creation of nuclear facilities, for fear that they will be used for military purposes and to create nuclear weapons. The unfortunate result of this tension is that nations who are hell bent on developing nuclear weapons can secretly acquire the materials and expertise to do it under the cover of overt NPT members. And then as they develop their nuclear capabilities in the military sense and develop nuclear weapons, once they're ready to weaponize the technologies, they then say,"Hey, you know what? I want to withdraw." The proposed solution here is one that we spent an entire episode discussing that I would invite you to revisit or visit for the first time if you haven't, and that is in episode 34 of Reimagining Our World. It's the creation of a global energy authority into whose hands are pooled all the nuclear facilities and the material and so on that allows it to keep a careful watch over what is being produced, where it's going, for what purposes, and to ensure the elimination of all nuclear weapons. So I'm not going to spend more time here. Please go back and look at episode 34. The sixth flaw is that the nuclear weapon states, and this is a key point, have failed to make enough progress on nuclear disarmament. It was part of the bargain that they could continue holding on to their nuclear weapons for a while, while they, in good faith and expeditiously, proceeded to eliminate their nuclear weapons. In practice, this process has been very slow. The nuclear weapons states have grudgingly fulfilled their disarmament obligations and reduced their stockpiles. Most of these have come about as a result of bilateral agreements between two nations, especially the U.S. and the former USSR and now the Russian Federation. Unfortunately, even that progress has stagnated now. And the only remaining nuclear arms control treaty has been suspended recently by Mr. Putin, the Russian Federation. This was the START, the New START Treaty, S T A R T. The argument made, which is understandable, is that the whole system, the nuclear proliferation system, is imbalanced and discriminatory. It raises the principles of fairness and oneness that are not being applied. Nations who want access to nuclear technology and weapons say we're being unfairly deprived."You nuclear weapon states get to keep your nuclear weapons and you get to decide whether we get them or not. That's not fair." They want to be treated as equals, and with respect. We saw this especially in the context of Pakistan and its top nuclear scientist basically spending years developing secret nuclear weapons and developing the bomb for Pakistan, because he thought that the whole regime was set up to keep down Islamic countries and stop them from getting the nuclear bomb, and he wanted his country to be the first Islamic state to get one. It's unfortunate that this seeming unfairness, this perceived unfairness is there, and it is unfair. And the bargain has not been made. So we need to actually create an expedited timetable for a phased, verifiable, irreversible, and transparent nuclear disarmament. And we also need to make sure that we deal with eliminating current stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, and make sure that the storage sites around the world are safe. We hear many horror stories about things disappearing and thefts occurring. So that's just way too dangerous. Terrorists can get their hands on these materials and use them to the detriment of all of us. The seventh flaw in the NPT and this is the final one, is the uneven manner in which the NPT has been applied vis a vis different nations. Again, it implicates the principles of oneness and fairness. These are linchpins of any viable, healthy system of international relations. The way the United States dealt with India regarding nuclear issues as compared to its treatment of Iran and North Korea is a good example. Unlike Iran and North Korea, India never signed the NPT, went ahead and developed nuclear weapons on its own, tested them in 1976, and then again in 1998. And even though it snubbed the NPT system for decades, in 2006, the U.S. agreed to provide India with civilian nuclear technology in exchange for India opening only 14 of its 22 facilities to a form of international inspection. The explanation was,"Oh. India needs energy, and that energy needs to include nuclear power." But that's what Iran and North Korea claim they want as well. So why, on what basis is the international community differentiating between India's needs for energy and Iran and North Korea's needs? These are questions that we should all be thinking about and recognizing that if we have rules, they need to be applied even handedly to all nations. Okay, in conclusion, it's clear that the proliferation of nuclear weapons is one of the biggest and most existential threats of our time, right next to climate change. Unfortunately, the flaws that we talked about today, the breaches in the system, have only served to heighten tensions and create suspicion between nations, erode trust, and engender fear and counter reactions. The events have tested the mettle of our world leaders, who've been unable to deal decisively and effectively to tackle the problem. They failed us. They seem to be utterly paralyzed. And this paralysis will continue and the problems will continue of proliferation until we deal with them. The war in Ukraine has exacerbated the desire for nuclear weapons. Many nations feel like,"Oh gosh, maybe if Ukraine had nuclear weapons, it would never have found itself in this situation." That's a bad message. The breakdown of the Iran deal has made some Middle Eastern countries very nervous, and countries like Saudi Arabia are trying to find ways of getting nuclear technology. North Korea's continued experimentation and launching of missiles is making people nervous. And the tensions over Taiwan and the Straits of Taiwan are also making people nervous. The fact that the U.S. military and the Chinese military don't have open channels of communication like they used to, even though live fire drills are taking place close to Taiwan, is a recipe for disaster. And meanwhile, China is trying to build its nuclear capacity, and Russia is, according to the latest news reports, helping it build a fast breed reactor by providing it with highly enriched uranium. This reactor would create plutonium, and there's only one use for plutonium, and that's for nuclear bombs. A lot of countries are starting to agitate for their governments to get nuclear weapons or nuclear technology, which they can then divert to the development of nuclear weapons in this weak system that allows for such things. Our system is broken. We need to fix it. If you found this interesting and want to learn more how we can strengthen our global nuclear nonproliferation regime, pick up your digital copy of the book called Collective Security Within Reach that's available on Amazon wherever you are. If you have any thoughts or comments, please post them on YouTube or on Facebook and let's have a conversation. Please share this video with your friends, and again, do go back and watch episode 34, which is a very concrete solution that's being offered to a bunch of these challenges, global challenges. All right, take care and I'll see you next month. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.