non-proliferation treaty | ukwatch.net

Twilight of the NPT?

tim — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 22:19:57 +0000

The nuclear non-proliferation treaty belongs to that venerable tradition in the Atlantic world of unequal agreements: those which—in their very texts, rather than just in their effects—give extraordinary benefits and liberties to one set of states while constraining the freedom of action and rights of others. Yet it has been remarkably successful since 1970 in attracting the adherence of the overwhelming majority of countries. Most surprisingly, the one that has benefited most from its terms—the United States—has been most vigorously attempting to undermine the npt regime over the last eight years, generating a major crisis in the efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons through international cooperation.

As Norman Dombey’s essay in this issue so vividly demonstrates, the NPT was constructed through US–Soviet negotiations in the 1960s to prevent non-weapon states from acquiring an arsenal, while leaving existing weapon states a free hand to develop and deploy—indeed, use—nuclear weapons as they saw fit. [1] Beyond a purely rhetorical commitment to negotiate disarmament, no restraints were put on them at all. By 1992, once the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—all nuclear powers—had joined, formidable instruments became available to enforce these unequal provisions. Any other country seeking to acquire nuclear weapons could now be referred for judgement before the UNSC, on the charge of posing a threat to peace under Chapter Seven of the Charter. This also allows the Permanent Five to legally bind all un member states to action—up to and including military attack—against the state in question. This threat would be particularly potent against states that had ratified the NPT, and thus submitted their nuclear facilities to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. A weapons programme would be a direct violation of their obligations under the Treaty; thus referral to the UNSC would become a predictable institutional outcome of the NPT regime.

Policing the South

The Treaty was signed and ratified only after the Permanent Five had acquired their nuclear weapons—in the case of Britain and France, to preserve their great-power status; in the case of the Soviet Union and then China, to acquire a nuclear-deterrent capacity against the United States. The NPT was designed to lock the rest of the world into accepting the Permanent Five’s special rights. Why, in such circumstances, was the npt regime able to persist, enlarge its membership and fulfil so many of its inequitable goals, not only during the Cold War, but even after? One answer would be that most of the states who had the industrial and technological capacity to build both a nuclear bomb, and the vehicle to transmit it, were already offered protection from nuclear or conventional attack by one of the two superpowers during the Cold War.

States that persisted in their efforts to achieve nuclear-weapon status were those that faced security challenges but could not expect guaranteed protection from a superpower: Israel, in its struggle with the Arab states in the 1950s and 1960s, before the US decisively committed itself to Israeli military security; apartheid South Africa, repeatedly at war in Africa (and indeed, suffering defeats at the hands of Cuban forces in Angola in the 1970s); India, after its defeat by China in the border war of 1962; followed by Pakistan, in response to the threat from India. This explanation for the rarity of moves to circumvent or flout the NPT would also cover the cases of North Korea and Iraq. The former was neither a Russian nor a Chinese satellite, and could not rely on them for ultimate security even during the Cold War, when it faced aggression from both South Korea and the us. Iraq under the Ba’ath also faced grave military threats, not only from the Western powers but also from Israel and Iran, and could not count on superpower protection. But it had the financial resources for a nuclear-weapons programme. Conversely, the majority of states have not perceived themselves to be facing such dire military threats as to warrant the acquisition of nuclear arms. Even those with strong traditions of retaining complete autonomy over their security, such as Sweden or Brazil, have refrained from adopting such a course.

Yet absence of military threat may not fully explain the apparent achievements of the npt regime. Another element of the explanation may be that its success has been much more partial than it seems. The Treaty contains a grey zone between a state being an industrial nuclear power, in the civilian field, and being a nuclear-weapon state. It treats these two statuses as polar opposites: industrial proliferation is actually encouraged, while the cross-over to armaments is outlawed. In practice, no such gulf exists between the two: civilian nuclear power is the necessary threshold for acquiring nuclear-weapon capabilities. This has no doubt ensured that countries such as Germany and Japan—though deeply critical of aspects of the asymmetrical NPT regime—have been prepared to go along with it, for they cannot be described simply as non-weapon states. They would be better termed ‘threshold’ states, which remain within the terms of the Treaty but could, like a number of other formally non-weapon states, transform very swiftly indeed into full-fledged nuclear powers.

This grey zone is combined with the Treaty’s blinkered focus exclusively upon the industrial side of nuclear arms: it has nothing to say about delivery vehicles—that is, missile capabilities. Thus, threshold states can proceed under the terms of the Treaty to develop even intercontinental ballistic missiles without sanction. Nor does the so-called Missile Technology Control Regime serve to block them doing so. The MTCR is an informal club, established in 1987, to prevent diffusion of technology for missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads—specifically, those able to carry a payload of 500kg at least 300 kilometres. The club’s founders consisted precisely of those developed states which possessed such technologies, namely Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, France and the United States. The first four names are indicative: formally non-nuclear powers, but in reality threshold states with advanced missile technologies. The list of members has now grown to 34, of which 19 are in the European Union. Another 10 are US allies; Russia joined the club in 1995. Not a single country from the global South holds membership.

In short, beneath the headline picture of the npt anchoring the monopoly of nuclear-weapon states, we find a second layer of reality: a regime, including the MTCR, which has enabled a substantial number of rich countries, allied to the US, to become threshold states with advanced missile technologies. Alongside these there is a third reality: a sustained effort by the North, plus Russia, to block the possibility of states in the global South acquiring deterrence capability. This pattern is replicated by other organizations that form part of the overall counter-proliferation regime, such as the Nuclear Suppliers Group. This was created in 1975 on US initiative, in the face of India’s nuclear-weapons programme.

We are still left with two substantial puzzles: first, why have states in the global South that have bad relations with the United States still tended to adhere to the npt regime? Secondly, why has the us itself, in the post-Cold War period, shown such hostility to the rules of a regime that gives it such inordinate privileges? The most striking examples of states remaining in the npt, apparently against their own interests, are North Korea and Iran. American hostility towards them has been long-standing and deep: there is no doubt that the United States has been programmatically committed to overthrowing both regimes, even if its tactics towards each have varied across time. Yet both have continued to declare their respect for the npt and iaea. One reason lies in the enthusiasm for civilian nuclear power embedded in the foundations of the IAEA and the NPT. It is worth pointing out that when the iaea was created in the 1950s and the npt established at the end of the 1960s, few could envisage any state from the global South acquiring the indigenous know-how to construct their own civilian nuclear-power industry. North Korea and Iran have committed themselves to achieving just that and have been able to legitimate their efforts through the iaea–npt framework. Today many others have the technological and financial resources, if they wish, to follow suit. Far from precluding the emergence of threshold states in the South, the regime’s rules actually facilitate it.

Furthermore, the NPT does allow states to acquire a nuclear-deterrent capability: under Article X, if a state faces ‘extraordinary events’ that ‘have jeopardized’ its ‘supreme interests’, it may withdraw from the restraints of the Treaty with three months’ notice. This was exactly the course taken by North Korea in the face of blunt threats of pre-emptive attack—preventive war—made by the US. Pyongyang gave notice, withdrew and carried out a successful nuclear-weapon test. After the Bush Administration’s subsequent retreat, North Korea began to return to the npt regime.

Persian smokescreen

The confrontation between Iran and the US and EU over the former’s nuclear programme is paradigmatic of the current contradictions of the npt regime. Although there are some indications that Iran conducted research relevant to nuclear-weapon production between 1989 and 1993 (in a period when neighbouring Iraq did have a secret crash nuclear programme), there has been no significant evidence since then of clandestine weapon development. [2] Since the 1990s Iran has instead sought to establish civilian nuclear energy and substantial missile capacity. By pursuing both these paths, Iran could hope to become a threshold state in the same sense as Germany and Japan, and it could do so quite legally under the NPT, to which it has continued to adhere under the Islamic Republic. Meanwhile, the US—supported by the EU—has been attempting to prevent Iran from exercising its legal rights to enrich uranium for civilian uses.

This campaign under Bush has been in many ways continuous with Clinton’s policy in the mid-1990s. His Administration had dubbed Iran—with which the US had no diplomatic relations—a rogue terrorist state secretly seeking ‘weapons of mass destruction’, and imposed sweeping sanctions centred on an embargo of Iranian oil. [3] Until 2002, Western Europe rejected both the embargo and Washington’s accusations against Tehran. Trade was growing between Iran and the eu, with Germany its main trading partner. By 2000 the EU was preparing the way for a trade agreement with Iran; European oil companies, including British ones, were discussing new investments. The Russian government was pursuing a similar course and had committed itself to a contract to build a nuclear-power station at Bushehr, on the Gulf coast. Iranian foreign policy was geared towards using these links as a vector to integrate the country into the international institutional and trading order.

Against this background, and in the context of American preparations to attack Iraq, Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union address denounced the Islamic Republic as part of the ‘Axis of Evil’ and claimed the right to engage in a pre-emptive war to overthrow it. This did not initially alter the eu’s course: it proceeded to sign a new commercial agreement with Iran. Following discussions with Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Ahani—less than a week after the Bush speech—Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Piqué, speaking for the presidency of the eu, told a news conference in Madrid that the 15-country bloc would seek ‘maximum cooperation’ with Iran on trade, the fight against terrorism and human rights. [4]US pressure, however, soon swung the West European states towards joining its campaign to deny Iran’s right to organize the full nuclear-fuel cycle, and support Washington’s demand that Iran stop enriching uranium on its own territory. The British and French sought to justify this by parroting the charges routinely made against Iran by the Clinton and Bush Administrations, which they had themselves previously ignored. The German government, more squeamish about Bush-style big-lie propaganda, said Tehran should give up its rights as a necessary step towards easing tensions between Iran and the US.

The problem facing the US–British–French approach was that the iaea inspectorate, under Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, was not prepared to participate in spreading unsubstantiated allegations. In December 2002 the Bush Administration therefore tried to whip up a melodramatic media campaign in the hope of railroading the iaea Board into taking action against Iran. The trick was to present the news that Iran had been constructing nuclear facilities in Natanz and Arak as a shocking revelation of secret and presumably illegal activity. The us published satellite images of the two sites under construction as proof. This supposedly shocking revelation was nothing of the kind. The Natanz complex was for fuel fabrication; the Arak facility was a heavy-water reactor. NPT safeguards require Iran to inform the iaea of such facilities only six months before they go into operation. The pilot plant at Natanz was not operational until early 2006 while the one in Arak is not due to start until 2014. [5] The fact that Iran did not inform the Agency of their construction until February 2003 did not constitute any breach of the NPT, and thus the inspectorate refused to treat the us exposé as evidence of this. [6]

During 2003 and 2004 the Bush Administration worked to get rid of ElBaradei and gain control of the iaea inspectorate. They tapped all his phone calls and engaged in what the Washington Post later called an ‘orchestrated campaign’ to spread anonymous accusations that he was a secret supporter of Iran, had capitulated to pressure and was deliberately concealing damning details about Iran’s programme from the Board. ‘The plan is to keep the spotlight on ElBaradei and raise the heat’, a us official said. [7] These kinds of tactics had succeeded earlier in 2002 with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a UN body based in The Hague. Its head, José Bustani, had infuriated Washington by attempting to involve the OPCW in the search for suspected chemical weapons in Iraq; the White House successfully undermined and removed him. This had caused little stir internationally because of the OPCW’s fairly low profile, but also because its members wanted to avoid being drawn into the diplomatic row leading up to the Iraq war. The aim now was to unseat ElBaradei when he came up for re-election in December 2004. The US State Department sought alternative candidates such as Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, Brazilian disarmament expert Sergio Duarte and two South Korean officials. [8] Downer was not prepared to stand against ElBaradei, while the latter three represented countries under iaea investigation for suspect nuclear work.

The drive to remove ElBaradei ultimately failed because a sufficient number of states on the iaea Board continued to back him. As a result, the us was left with only a few technicalities dating back to the 1990s on which to accuse Iran: it had twice neglected to report enrichment facilities, and there were six instances of ‘failure to provide design information or updated design information’ for certain installations. [9]iaea officials did not consider these omissions to be actual breaches of the NPT, and by autumn 2005 they had in any case been cleared up. ElBaradei certified that ‘all the declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for and, therefore, such material is not diverted to prohibited activities.’

To put these technical violations in perspective, between 2002 and 2005 the Agency found discrepancies in the utilization of nuclear material in as many as 15 countries including Taiwan, Egypt and South Korea. In 2002 and 2003, for example, the latter refused to let inspectors visit facilities connected to its laser-enrichment programme. Subsequently, Seoul confessed to having secretly enriched uranium to a 77 per cent concentration of U-235—sufficient for weapons-grade fissile material. Neither the US nor EU suggested referring the matter to the unsc. [10] In contrast, there is no evidence whatsoever that Iran has produced weapons-grade uranium. Despite intrusive inspections, no facility or plan to do so has been discovered, nor have any weapon designs surfaced. ElBaradei’s September 2005 report concluded that Iranian concealment had been effectively rectified and was no longer a significant problem. [11] With the deepening crisis in Iraq, the Bush Administration eventually split over its own confrontation with Iran: its intelligence apparatus—backed by a powerful segment of the military—sabotaged the drive against Iran within the unsc and iaea by declaring that there did not, in fact, seem to be a secret nuclear-weapon programme. For face-saving reasons, the report suggested that Iran may have had one before 2003 but had abandoned it.

Primacy and proliferation

The fate of the NPT since the end of the Cold War has been linked to that of the American drive for global primacy in the military–political field. If that drive had been successful, the Treaty would have become irrelevant and the iaea inspectorate would have been reduced to a technical and political support system for Washington. The technological core of the US effort has focused on rendering obsolete other states’ attempts to furnish themselves with a nuclear deterrent against American attack. This could be achieved through the development of anti-missile systems within the Star Wars tradition: powerful radar and precision guidance systems could enable the US to destroy missiles on launch. At the same time, the US has been attempting to develop immensely powerful bunker-buster bombs capable of destroying underground nuclear and other military facilities. The political core, meanwhile, has been the doctrine of so-called pre-emptive war, entitling the us to attack regimes that it opposes, and to do so without the support of any multilateral institution such as the IAEA or the UN. A corollary of this is that the us is also free unilaterally to decide which states it allows to acquire nuclear weapons, without bothering with the rules of the NPT regime. This, indeed, has been the premise of the long-standing us policy towards Israel and its current approach to India.

Yet the us campaign seems doomed to failure. In the first place, the technological and military–political capacities it requires do not seem within reach. This is partly the result of drawbacks inherent in anti-missile defence systems: even if the technology works it could be overwhelmed, at least in the case of large countries such as Russia and China, by the opponent’s capacity to enlarge its stock of missiles and launch sites. More importantly, hostile states also frequently possess other, non-nuclear forms of deterrence which can lead to a loss of American nerve. This is the lesson of the confrontation with both North Korea and Iran. In each case, Washington blinked. The advanced capitalist world’s acceptance of American claims to primacy over it does not seem to extend to allowing the devastation of parts of that zone itself, such as South Korea; nor to tolerating a catastrophic interruption of its main oil supplies. Even where the us succeeds in confining destruction to an excluded state such as Iraq, it lacks the capacity to produce new regimes to its own liking.

For all of these reasons, the us campaign for global primacy and its doctrine of unilateral pre-emptive attack have not constituted a persuasive counter-proliferation regime. The other side of its strategy—promoting nuclear proliferation on the part of friendly states—has also thrown up problems, as in the Israeli, Indian and Pakistani cases. When India and Pakistan demonstrated in the 1990s that they had become nuclear-weapon states, the Clinton Administration imposed sanctions on both, at least formally respecting the spirit of the NPT. Bush, however, lifted those sanctions and then went on to negotiate and sign an agreement legitimating India’s nuclear-weapon status and inaugurating cooperation in the nuclear-energy sphere. [12] This policy not only undermines the cornerstone of the non-proliferation regime and contradicts the central purpose of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, it also demonstrates America’s political weakness: the accord will leave India largely independent in the nuclear field, unlike the British, for example, whose deterrent capacity remains deeply dependent on the us.

The Bush–Singh deal would allow India to import fissile material from the us for its civilian nuclear industry while, in return, voluntarily accepting the npt safeguards regime (including the Additional Protocol), but only for its civilian industry. India would have a free hand to develop and expand its military programme, just as the us has. Indeed the deal would free Indian resources from the civilian industry for military use. [13] India has, of course, promised within the terms of the proposed deal that it will subsequently negotiate a test ban, but this can scarcely be taken seriously since the us itself has not been prepared to ratify the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty. In these circumstances India will have gained a great prize—the Bush Administration’s endorsement of it as a legitimate nuclear-weapon state—while paying nothing in return, in this domain at least. It will have succeeded in damaging both of the main pillars of the NPT regime: to prevent proliferation and to preserve the five-state nuclear-weapons cartel, possessing the untrammelled right to maintain and enhance their arsenals.

Nuclear bonanza

The Bush Administration’s record on nuclear-weapons proliferation, then, is unremittingly negative from the standpoint of its own interests and those of its allies. The priority for rich capitalist non-weapon countries is to maintain their threshold status, while blocking states in the South from gaining it by tightening controls on their development of civilian nuclear industries and missile capabilities. The most obvious way to do this would be for Northern states to try to persuade those in the South to give up the NPT right to carry out their own uranium enrichment; but few would be ready to accept such a restriction on existing prerogatives, particularly when the five-state cartel has ignored all the phraseology in and around the Treaty on taking their own arms-control, test-ban and disarmament measures. On the contrary, the us over the last eight years has been brushing aside all restraints on its own massive rearmament in nuclear, missile and other strategic weapons.

Simultaneously, the us’s efforts to turn itself into an aggressive alternative to any rule-based non-proliferation regime have proved woefully ineffective. Its bombastic rhetoric about unilateral preventive war was combined with a volte-face on North Korea and Iran. Meanwhile North Korea has been able to cross the civilian–military boundary and thereby gain the prospect of a better deal than it received from the Clinton Administration, without moving outside the international legal framework. Iran shows every sign of being able to acquire threshold status within NPT provisions. America’s readiness to trample upon the rules of the non-proliferation regime and the norms of the UN Charter resulted in a dramatic loss of diplomatic influence: Washington was not even able to unseat the Director General of the iaea and subordinate that apparatus to the us National Security Council. Its diplomacy towards India has been a spectacular example of wishful thinking and incompetence, producing a deal which does not even give Washington the kind of leverage it has over the British. In short the Bush legacy is one of lamentable failure.

The rational solution to the crisis of the non-proliferation regime would be for threshold states in the North, such as Germany and Japan, to link up with non-nuclear states in the South to demand that the weapon states adopt serious disarmament measures—above all the us but also Israel—as the basis for reviving the NPT in the post-Bush period. This, however, seems remote, not least because there is no sign of a will to submit to such pressure within the United States itself, and in such circumstances Washington’s allies tend to shut up. Moreover, the nuclear industries of the Atlantic world and, of course, Russia are looking forward to a bonanza of new business for nuclear-energy investment, especially in the South. In their competitive battles to gain contracts they are unlikely to impose new restrictions on uranium enrichment and reprocessing amongst their prospective customers. In the main zones where military–political incentives for weapons proliferation are greatest—the ‘Greater Middle East’ and East Asia—there are no indications that the United States is interested in replacing its confrontationist policies, of backing Israel in one theatre and containing China in the other, with a more cooperative approach to regional security. Thus, in this area as in so many others, the days when the United States and its Atlantic allies could credibly present themselves as a leading force on global issues seem to lie in the past.

Notes:

[1] Norman Dombey, ‘The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: Aims, Limitations and Achievements’, nlr 52, July–August 2008.

[2] The Tehran Research Reactor (trr) had carried out experiments on bismuth irradiation to extract polonium, which, when combined with beryllium, may be used for nuclear-weapon construction. Iran was not, in fact, required to inform the iaea about such research. The iaea has declared there is no evidence that Iran ever imported beryllium. Experiment details were in the trr logbook, safeguarded by the iaea for 30 years.

[3] See, for example, ‘Findings’ in the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996.

[4] Suzanne Daley, ‘French Minister Calls us Policy “Simplistic”’, New York Times, 7 February 2002. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw publicly dismissed the Bush speech as designed for domestic consumption, saying it was ‘best understood by the fact that there are mid-term congressional elections in November.’ Of course, he quickly changed his tune.

[5] Siddharth Varadarajan, ‘The Persian Puzzle I: Iran and the invention of a nuclear crisis’, The Hindu, 21 September 2005.

[6] Under the IAEA’s ‘Additional Protocol’ drafted in the late 1990s, Iran would have had to inform it of plans six months before the start of construction (rather than before becoming operational). By 2002 Iran, like many others, had not yet ratified the Protocol.

[7] Varadarajan, ‘The Persian Puzzle II: What the IAEA really found in Iran’, The Hindu, 22 September 2005; Dafna Linzer, ‘iaea Leader’s Phone Tapped’, Washington Post, 12 December 2004.

[8] Linzer, ‘iaea Leader’s Phone Tapped’.

[9] Varadarajan, ‘Persian Puzzle II’. A further issue concerned import of uranium from China in 1991.

[10] Varadarajan, ‘Persian Puzzle I’.

[11] Varadarajan, ‘Persian Puzzle II’. Some of the centrifuges assembled in Natanz showed traces of enriched uranium, but inspectors concluded that these were of Pakistani origin.

[12] The Indo-us Civilian Nuclear Agreement was revealed on 18 July 2005 by Prime Minister Singh and President Bush as part of a ‘global partnership’ to promote ‘stability, democracy, prosperity and peace’.

[13] See Arms Control Association, ‘Experts Call on Congress to Take Harder Look at US–India Nuclear Deal’, 23 November 2005.

Nuking the Treaty

Ellie Keen — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

What is the Iranian government up to? For once the imperial coalition, overstretched in Iraq and unpopular at home, is proposing jaw, not war. The UN Security Council’s offer was a good one: if Iran suspended its uranium enrichment programme, it would be entitled to legally guaranteed supplies of fuel for nuclear power, assistance in building a light water reactor, foreign aid, technology transfer and the beginning of the end of economic sanctions(1). The United States seems prepared, for the first time since the revolution, to open a diplomatic office in Tehran(2). But in Geneva ten days ago, the Iranians filibustered until the negotiations ended(3). On Saturday President Ahmadinejad announced that Iran has now doubled the number of centrifuges it uses to enrich uranium(4). A fourth round of sanctions looks inevitable.

The unequivocal statements Barack Obama and Gordon Brown made in Israel last week about Iran’s nuclear weapons programme cannot yet be justified(5,6). Nor can the unequivocal statements by some anti-war campaigners that Iran does not intend to build the bomb. Why would a country with such reserves of natural gas and so great a potential for solar power suffer sanctions and the threat of bombing to make fuel it could buy from other states, if it accepted the UN’s terms?

Those who maintain that Iran’s purposes are peaceful clutch at the National Intelligence Estimate published by the US government in November(7). While it judged that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003, it saw the country’s civilian uranium programme as a means of developing “technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so.” The latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency notes that no fissile material has been diverted from Iran’s stocks, but raises grave questions about some of the documents it has found, which suggest research into bomb-making (Iran says the papers are forgeries)(8). Those of us who oppose an attack on Iran are under no obligation to accept Ahmadinejad’s claims of peaceful intent.

Nor do we have to accept the fictions of our own representatives. The Security Council’s offer to Iran claimed that resolving this enrichment issue would help to bring about a “Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction”(9). But like every other such document, it made no mention of the principal owner of these weapons in the region: Israel. According to a leaked briefing by the US Defense Intelligence Agency, Israel possesses between 60 and 80 nuclear bombs(10). But none of the countries demanding that Iran scraps the weapons it doesn’t yet possess are demanding that Israel destroys the weapons it does possess.

This subject is the great political taboo. Neither Brown nor Obama mentioned it last week. The US intelligence agencies provide a biannual report to Congress on the weapons of mass destruction developed by foreign states, which covers Iran, North Korea, India, Pakistan and others, but not Israel(11). During a parliamentary debate in March the British defence minister Bob Ainsworth was asked whether he thought that Israel’s nuclear weapons are “a destabilising factor” in the Middle East. “My understanding,” he replied, “is that Israel does not acknowledge that it has nuclear weapons.”(12) Does Mr Ainsworth really buy this nonsense? If so, can we have a new minister? If Iran builds a bomb, it will do so for one reason: that there is already a nuclear-armed state in the Middle East, by which it feels threatened.

But we make the rules and we break them. The non-proliferation treaty (NPT) obliges the five official nuclear states, of which the United Kingdom is one, to work towards “general and complete disarmament”(13). On Friday the Guardian published the notes for a speech made last year by a senior civil servant, which suggested that the decision to replace the UK’s nuclear missiles had already been made, in secret and without parliamentary scrutiny(14,15). Since then defence ministers have told the Commons on five occasions that the decision has not yet been made(16,17,18,19,20). They appear to have misled the House.

At the Geneva conference on disarmament in February, one delegate pointed out that the “chances of eliminating nuclear weapons will be enhanced immeasurably” if non-nuclear states can see “planning, commitment and action toward multilateral nuclear disarmament by nuclear weapon states” like the UK. If the nuclear states “are failing to fulfil their disarmament obligations”, other nations would use this as an excuse for maintaining their weapons(21). Who was this firebrand? Des Browne, the Secretary of State for Defence. A man of the same name is failing to fulfil our disarmament obligations.

Browne claims that Britain must maintain its arsenal because of proliferation elsewhere, just as those proliferating elsewhere say that they must develop their arsenals because the official nuclear nations aren’t disarming. With the exception of France, none of the other European states feels the need to deploy nukes. But the UK keeps preparing for the last war. Of course, no one is refusing to disarm; it’s just that the task keeps getting pushed into the indefinite future. Opponents of British nuclear weapons maintain that a new generation of warheads would survive until 2055(22).

The permanent members of the UN Security Council draw a distinction between their “responsible” ownership of nuclear weapons and that of the aspirant powers. But over the past six years, the UK, US, France and Russia have all announced that they are prepared to use their nukes pre-emptively against a presumed threat, even from states that do not possess nuclear weapons(23,24,25,26). In some ways the current nuclear stand-off is more dangerous than the tetchy détente of the Cold War.

The danger has been heightened by the US government’s current offensive. Condoleeza Rice, the secretary of state, is demanding that other countries accept her plans to destroy the last remaining incentive for states to abide by the NPT. The treaty grants countries which conform to it materials for nuclear power on favourable terms. It’s a flawed incentive – as the spread of civil nuclear programmes makes the proliferation of military material more likely(29) – but an incentive nonetheless. Now Rice insists that India should have special access to US nuclear materials despite the fact that it has not signed the NPT and has illegally developed nuclear weapons.

If she is successful, this effort – and the concomitant US demand that India is recognised as an official nuclear power – will blow the NPT to kingdom come. The treaty which survived the Cold War, and which remains the most important of the wilting guarantees against global annihilation, is being nuked for the sake of a few billion dollars of export orders.

Here’s where it gets really depressing. The Bush administration’s proposal has been supported by both John McCain and Barack Obama(30). The contrast between Obama’s position on India and his statements on Iran could not be greater, or more destructive of the inflated hopes now vested in him.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s insistence that Iran enriches its own fissile material, and the guessing game he is playing with Israel, the atomic energy agency and the UN Security Council is irresponsible and staggeringly dangerous. But if I were in his position I might be tempted to do the same.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. UN Security Council, 12th June 2008. Letter to the Islamic Republic of Iran. http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Infcircs/2008/infcirc730.pdf

2. Ewen MacAskill, 18th July 2008. Iran: US will seek green light to open base in Tehran. The Guardian.

3. Julian Borger, 20th July 2008. Iran given two-week deadline to end the nuclear impasse. The Observer.

4. No author given, 27th July 2008. Iran: Nuclear centrifuge total has doubled. The Observer.

5. Barack Obama, 23rd July 2008. Speech in Sderot. http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hqblog#top

6. Gordon Brown, 21st July 2008. Speech to the Knesset. http://www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page16003.asp

7. National Intelligence Council, November 2007. National Intelligence Estimate. http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf

8. IAEA, 26th May 2008. Implementation of the NPT SafeguardsAgreement and relevant provisions of SecurityCouncil resolutions 1737 (2006), 1747 (2007) and 1803 (2008) in the Islamic Republic of Iran. http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Board/2008/gov2008-15.pdf

9. UN Security Council, ibid.

10. US DIA, July 1999. The Decades Ahead, 1999-202. Extracted at: http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/index.html

11. Joseph Cirincione, 11th March 2005. Iran and Israel’s Nuclear Weapons.
http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=3217

12. Bob Ainsworth, 26th March 2008. http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/c…

13. Article VI. http://www.un.org/events/npt2005/npttreaty.html

14. Matthew Taylor, 25th July 2008. Britain plans to spend £3bn on new nuclear warheads. The Guardian.

15. You can see the document here: http://www.cnduk.org/index.php/press-releases/trident/secret-plan-to-rep…

16. Bob Ainsworth, 26th March 2008.

17. Des Browne, 7th January 2008.

18. Des Browne, 28th November 2007.

19. Des Browne, 19th November 2007.

20. Des Browne, 12 September 2007.

21. Des Browne, 5th February 2008. ‘Laying the Foundations for Multilateral Disarmament’. Geneva Conference on Disarmament. http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/AboutDefence/People/Speeches/SofS/2008…

22. Matthew Taylor, ibid.

23. This was first mentioned by Geoff Hoon, 24th March 2002 on The Jonathan Dimbleby Show, ITV 1, and has been reiterated several times since.

24. http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/files/pdfs/migrated/MultimediaFiles/Live/Fu…

25. No author given, 19th January 2008. Pre-Emptive Nuclear Threat Issued By Russian General Yuri Baluyevsky. Sky News. http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Sky-News-Archive/Article/20082851301432

26. Jacques Chirac, quoted by John Thornhill and Peter Spiegel, 20th January 2006. The Financial Times.

27. No author give, 26th July 2008. Condoleezza Rice Paks a proliferation punch. The Economic Times. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/PoliticsNation/Condoleezza_Rice…

28. Sue Pleming, 24th July 2008. Rice says will push Congress hard on India deal. Reuters.

29. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/09/21/proliferation-treaty/

30. Elana Schor, 22nd July 2008. Q&A: India’s stalled nuclear deal with the US. The Guardian.

Two Steps to Zero

Ellie Keen — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It may be apocryphal but it still says a lot. An inner-cabinet group of Clement Attlee's post-1945 Labour government was discussing whether, in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Britain should develop its own nuclear weapons. Why not instead rely merely on close cooperation with the United States? The ebullient foreign secretary and former trade unionist, Ernest Bevin, was emphatic: "I don't care what sort of bomb it is, as long as it has a bloody Union Jack on top of it" (see Brian Cathcart, "Britain and the atomic bomb", 5 August 2005).

Ever since then, Britain's nuclear forces have had at least as much to do with national status as with the perceived requirements of security. This is as much true for the decision to replace the Trident-missile system as it was for its predecessors (see "Britain's nuclear-weapons fix", 29 June 2006). Yet even as the initial design work is done on a new generation of ballistic-missile submarines, the international climate is changing.

In part this is due to the proliferation of nuclear weapons across south Asia, together with the claims that Iran has nuclear-arms ambitions (see Jan De Pauw, "Iran, the United States and Europe: the nuclear complex", 5 December 2007). But one result of the fears over proliferation is that some surprising voices have begun to stress the need not just to control proliferation but even to move towards a post-nuclear world. In the United States, senior politicians from across the political divide (such as Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn) have advanced these arguments, as have figures (such as Douglas Hurd, Malcolm Rifkind, David Owen, and George Robertson) from centre-right and centre-left in the United Kingdom (see Rebecca Johnson, "Britain's new nuclear abolitionists", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 15 July 2008).

A last-ditch strategy

The British government, too, has spoken of the crucial need to make progress in countering proliferation, with the national-security strategy making this one of the priorities: "Our approach to proliferation reflects our commitment to act early to reduce future threats, our commitment to multilateralism and the rules-based international system, and our willingness to work with partners beyond government" (see Cabinet Office, National Security Strategy, 19 March 2008). In this climate, the 2010 five-year review of the non-proliferation treaty (NPT) – which was signed in 1968, and came into force in 1970 – looms large; though many arms-control
analysts are cautious as to whether there is scope for real progress (see Richard Falk & David Krieger, "After the nuclear non-proliferation treaty", 27 April 2006).

For Britain to have any role in getting what the government wants – "achieving a positive outcome to the 2010 NPT Review Conference", according to the national security strategy – one of the major problems is that non-nuclear states simply cannot take Britain seriously. It may point to a planned 20% reduction in warhead numbers for the Trident replacement system, but that will still leave an arsenal of around 160 weapons, most of them very much larger than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Trident white paper also made clear that Britain would retain its current option of a willingness to use nuclear weapons first, implying that Britain's nuclear-targeting options go very much beyond the idea of a last-ditch deterrence against a threat to the United Kingdom.

The British people as a whole do not share the nuclear complex of their leaders, though if anything there is more broad-based opposition to nuclear weapons in Scotland (where the nuclear-submarine fleet is based). But there does remain a feeling that nukes both are part of the country's status and do provide some kind of insurance policy against attack. Whatever the validity of this argument, it is a political fact of life at present, but it still means that there is scope for innovative moves that could help kick-start real progress at the 2010 review of the NPT.

One option would have six elements:

Cancel plans to build four large ballistic-missile submarines to replace the current Vanguard-class boats
Cancel plans for a new generation of nuclear warheads
Scale down warhead numbers from 200 to just thirty (an 85% reduction); and have modified warheads available to deploy, if ever thought necessary, with cruise missiles on attack submarines (which already deploy such missiles with conventional warheads)
Phase out the entire Trident system as soon as this much-reduced force is available – certainly within a maximum of five years, and probably fewer
Adopt an openly stated policy of "no first use" of nuclear weapons

Aspire to the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons in Britain when international progress allows

These are actually quite modest proposals. South Africa, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan all went non-nuclear in the 1990s; this followed the example of Brazil and Argentina, which gave up their competitive nuclear-weapons aspirations a decade earlier.

A farewell to arms?

The last of the United States nuclear weapons based on British soil have now – after fifty-four years, spanning the decades from the cold war to the "war on terror" – been withdrawn from the Lakenheath air-base in Suffolk, southeast England. In the 1980s especially their presence engendered huge political dispute, but their removal caused scarcely a whisper of debate controversy or even acknowledgment (see Hans Kristensen, "U.S. Nuclear Weapons Withdrawn From the United Kingdom", Federation of American Scientists [Strategic Security Blog], 26 June 2008).

Even so, if Britain really is addicted to nuclear weapons as part of its perception of international status, then retaining a minimal force should answer that, a least for the time being, while enabling the Foreign & Commonwealth Office to play a serious high-profile role in the NPT review for the first time ever (see Patricia Lewis, "The NPT review conference: no bargains in the UN basement", 1 June 2005).

There would no doubt be opposition to any such move in some political circles (although all-party support is certainly not out of the question, given the views of the Conservative statesmen Rifkind and Hurd) and there would certainly be major opposition from the armaments lobby because of the loss of some particularly large contracts. Across the armed forces, though, the opposition would be minimal. Both the army and Royal Air Force are facing major funding problems and even in the Royal Navy there are many mid-career and senior officers who regard Trident replacement as an unnecessarily expensive sacred cow (or another kind of animal; see "Gordon Brown's white elephants", 26 July 2007).

Whether the current government has the political courage to drive such a change through is open to question, but one thing is certain – it has no chance of paying an effective role in controlling proliferation without such action. On the other hand, if it does so, then it would be the one state among the so-called "big five" nuclear powers (along with Russia, China, France and the United States) – also therefore among the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – that could claim it was really serious about preventing a slide to a more dangerously proliferating world.

Britain to spend £3bn on new nuclear warheads

Ellie Keen — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 22:59:00 +0000

The UK is to replace its stockpile of nuclear warheads at an estimated cost of more than £3bn, according to documents seen by the Guardian.

Ministers have repeatedly denied there are any plans to replace the warheads as part of the upgrade of the Trident nuclear system, insisting no decision will be taken until the next parliament, probably sometime after 2010.

However, previously unpublished papers released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal one of the MoD’s senior officials told a private gathering of arms manufacturers that the decision had already been taken.

“This afternoon we are going to outline our plan to maintain the UK’s nuclear deterrent,” David Gould, then the chief operating officer at the Defence Equipment and Support Organisation, told a future deterrent industry day event. “The intention is to replace the entire Vanguard class submarine system. Including the warhead and missile.”

According to the government’s 2006 white paper, it would cost at least £3bn to replace the warheads, and opponents say the move would commit the UK to a nuclear weapons system for the next four decades.

Last night, peace campaigners said the new warheads would change the weapons’ capabilities and may allow more targeted strikes, potentially making their use more likely.

“This document destroys any credibility in the government’s claim that it has not yet made a decision on new nuclear warheads,” said Kate Hudson, chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. “It is a disgrace that the MoD is secretly telling the defence industry one thing, whilst ministers are saying quite the opposite to parliament.”

The plans came to light after the MoD was forced to release Gould’s “speaking notes” following a request under freedom of information legislation. In the initial release, defence officials blanked out the final sentence, referring to the warheads, because “the notes were incomplete information and therefore potentially misleading”. That decision was overturned on appeal and the pivotal sentence was reinstated.

Yesterday, the Liberal Democrat defence spokesman, Nick Harvey, called on ministers to come clean about the government’s plans for the country’s nuclear deterrent. “Des Browne [the defence secretary] needs to urgently explain how the extract from this speech could so clearly contradict stated government policy on a new warhead … This government promised an open and transparent debate about replacing Trident, but this feels more like the cloak and dagger days of the cold war.”

A spokesman for the MoD said the document was a “speaking note” rather than a transcript of Gould’s speech, which was delivered in June last year, adding that it did not reflect government policy.

“[The] decisions on whether and how to refurbish or replace our existing nuclear warhead are likely to be necessary in the next parliament … No decisions have yet been taken.”

Opponents say replacing the warheads would commit the UK to a nuclear weapons system up to 2055, as opposed to the lifespan of the current system, which is expected to become obsolete around 2025. They also claim that pressing ahead with a new generation of warheads before the non-proliferation treaty review conference in 2010 would be seen as inflammatory and could breach international agreements.

Harvey said: “Moving forward on a replacement warhead just two years before key talks on nuclear non-proliferation would be a decision with huge consequences and it demands open debate. The thought that it may have been taken already behind closed doors is deeply concerning.”

Last year the government was forced to rely on Conservative party support to get its plans to renew Trident through parliament. Under those proposals, the nuclear submarines would be replaced and missiles upgraded, but no decision was taken on the warheads, which opponents say are the “key element” of any nuclear system.

“Building newer, potentially more advanced warheads will breach our commitment to disarm under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and will send out a destabilising and hypocritical message to other states both with and currently without such weapons,” said Hudson.

“A decision to go ahead with new warheads will have a much greater impact than the plan for new submarines, which merely provide the launch platform for these terrible weapons.”