The NPT Under Siege

Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)

Conference on Disarmament

General Assembly First Committee

UN Disarmament Commission

Special Session on Disarmament

The NPT Under Siege

Speaker: Rhianna Tyson, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

Mr. Chairman, distinguished delegates, and NGO colleagues,

This 2003 Preparatory Committee convenes at a harrowing moment in history. Disarmament has been used as a pretext to go to war, resulting in the overthrow of the regime in Iraq. The U.S. and North Korea find themselves in yet another nuclear confrontation, which has led to the first withdrawal of a State Party from the NPT. The CTBT still has not entered into force, and the CD, despite a promising proposed agenda set forth by Five Ambassadors, remains stagnant.

It is all too obvious that the Nuclear Weapons States have failed to implement the practical, attainable 13 step nuclear disarmament plan, agreed to unanimously at the conclusion of the 2000 NPT Review Conference, in some cases blatantly casting aside or repudiating its central elements.

The world’s first Nuclear Weapons State, the United States is leading the backwards charge away from the unequivocal undertaking to eliminate nuclear weapons. President George W. Bush has declared that he will not resubmit the CTBT to the U.S. Senate during his term. And the Bush Administration and House Republicans are calling for the amount of time it would take to prepare for resumption of full-scale underground nuclear testing to be cut in half from 36 months to 18 months, or even less. At the same time the U.S. is actively considering a variety of modified or new nuclear weapons for potential use in current and projected warfighting scenarios. While research efforts at the U.S. laboratories are now officially underway on a “Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator,” five times more powerful than the 15 kiloton atomic bomb that obliterated Hiroshima^[i], the Labs are also studying the effectiveness of so-called “low yield” nuclear weapons, two-thirds the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb that killed over 200,000 people. And a Bush Administration campaign is underway to repeal current restrictions on development of even lower yield “mini-nukes,” considered by some military planners to be “more useable.”

In a stunning repudiation of the principle of irreversibility, the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratory at Los Alamos just last week announced that it has successfully manufactured the first nuclear weapons pit (plutonium trigger) in 14 years that meets specifications for the U.S. stockpile, thus reestablishing a nuclear weapons production capability that ended in 1989. The newly made pit is for the W88 warhead, a 400 kiloton warhead carried on the Trident II D5 Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile, described in the Los Alamos press release as “a cornerstone of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.”

Contrary to the 2000 NPT promise, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) signed last year by Presidents Bush and Putin, terminated the START II and START III arms reduction process instead of preserving and strengthening their disarmament and verification procedures. Moreover, SORT does not require the destruction of a single warhead or delivery system, providing only for cuts in “deployed” strategic weapons, which could be redeployed at any time. And, unless it is extended, SORT will expire the same day it enters into force. This should certainly not set a precedent for future treaties. In addition, rather than preserving the ABM Treaty, the U.S. has unilaterally terminated it in order to pursue the provocative folly of building a Ballistic Missile Defense in its drive towards controlling and dominating the military use of space.

As for the Step 6 pledge to diminish the role of nuclear weapons in national security policies, all of the Nuclear Weapons States continue to maintain a central role for nuclear weapons in their national security strategies. Of gravest concern, in official policy documents released at the highest level, the U.S. has lowered the threshold for use of nuclear weapons by blurring the historical distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons, and by announcing a policy of preventive self defense inherently contrary to the United Nations Charter in which it reserves for itself the right to use nuclear weapons in a preemptive attack on any country or group it perceives to be seeking nuclear, chemical or biological weapons capabilities.

What are the implications for the NPT in this precarious context? Why, thirty- three years after it entered into force, does the threat of nuclear weapons still haunt our existence? Why is the threat of nuclear war now greater than at any time since the height of the Cold War? Thirty- three years of asymmetrical compliance has created unsustainable pressure on the Treaty, and today it faces near collapse. If the world community allows the Nuclear Weapons States to continue demonstrating their contempt for the Treaty, the NPT will crumble and we will find ourselves in the deadly grip of a new and uncontrollable global arms race.

IAEA Director-General Mohamed El Baradei has acknowledged this fundamental disparity in the Treaty regime: “The system of security we have now is not working properly. You have a limited number of nuclear weapon states and a nuclear umbrella under NATO, but most of the other countries are left in the cold. I can understand that as long as they perceive nuclear deterrence to be attractive, they will try to emulate those who have it.”

In fact, it must be faced that the means for proliferation are built into the NPT, most notably through Article IV, a provision by which Non Nuclear Weapons States are promised assistance with nuclear power technology and materials that can be converted wholesale into the capability necessary for the development of nuclear weapons, simply by withdrawing from the Treaty. The CTBT’s entry-into-force provision, which requires all states with nuclear reactors to ratify the Treaty, implicitly acknowledges that nuclear power capabilities enable countries to develop nuclear weapons.

Many NGOs believe that the NPT tradeoff to provide nuclear power to Non Nuclear Weapons States must be addressed by setting up a procedure for members of the NPT to phase out their commitment to nuclear energy with an obligation to support the establishment of an International Sustainable Energy Agency to promote the use of safe, clean, sources of energy that do not provide the means and materials to make nuclear weapons.

Distinguished delegates;

We must embrace the promise of the NPT, acknowledge its flaws and work to overcome them. A renewed commitment to the 13 point action plan as a tool for strengthening the Treaty is one important way to begin to address its shortcomings. And although some of these steps may be dead letters, we should not throw up our hands in despair and throw away this valuable roadmap to nuclear disarmament. For example, instead of mourning the now defunct ABM Treaty, we must work even harder to prevent the militarization of space.

This year Cuba joined the NPT, ratified the IAEA safeguards and additional protocol, and also ratified the Treaty of Tlateloco, thereby completing the world’s first nuclear weapons free zone. This accomplishment should be held up as a shining example for other troubled regions including Northeast Asia, South Asia and the Middle East.

The vital importance of Step 9 increased transparency by the nuclear-weapon States with regard to their nuclear weapons capabilities and implementation of agreements pursuant to Article VI - was reaffirmed in the Iraqi crisis, by an unexpected source. According to a report issued by the U.S. White House^[ii]

“The world knows what successful cooperative disarmament looks like. When a county decides to disarm, and to provide to the world verifiable evidence that it has disarmed, there are three common elements to its behavior:

The decision to disarm is made at the highest political level;
The regime puts in place national initiatives to dismantle weapons and infrastructure; and
The regime fully cooperates with international efforts to implement and verify disarmament; its behavior is transparent, not secretive.”

Distinguished delegates;

Another timely and critical issue that should be discussed at this meeting is the codification of Negative Security Assurances (NSAs). Potentially disastrous consequences, such as the DPRK’s withdrawal from the NPT, could be avoided through the adoption of a legal framework for NSAs, as Non Nuclear Weapons States are being increasingly threatened with the possibility of nuclear attack by the United States in its Nuclear Posture Review and White House policy documents.

The crisis the world finds itself in today has brought the issue of nuclear disarmament to the fore of international relations, domestic political discourse, and grassroots mobilization. The renewed prominence of disarmament should in and of itself be viewed as an irreversible phenomenon, and as representatives of governments, you must capitalize on this moment. With disarmament being discussed at kitchen tables around the world, it is imperative that we highlight the urgency, necessity, and demand for the universal elimination of nuclear weapons.

In light of the current assault on the very foundations of the NPT, bold new strategies are required. We urge you to enroll your governments to support Secretary General Kofi Annan’s Millenium Conference call, issued just before the 2000 NPT Review Conference, to hold a special global conference to eliminate nuclear dangers. Annan said:

“This month’s review conference on the Non Proliferation treaty [April 2000] is likely to be a depressing affair unless there are clear signals that all parties, including the nuclear weapons states, are ready for a real effort. I am suggesting that a broader based international conference, to identify ways of eliminating nuclear dangers of all kinds, should now be seriously considered.”

Annan’s proposal is worthy of global support. It would enable a meeting with all states, including non parties to the NPT. Billed as a conference to “eliminate nuclear dangers of all kinds,” it would be an opportunity to address the flawed NPT promise to make civilian nuclear technology available to non nuclear weapons states in effect, handing over the keys to the bomb factory, as we have seen with India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Most importantly, the negotiation of a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons can be placed on the special conference agenda.

Distinguished delegates;

The world’s people have been begging to be rid of these genocidal, ecocidal, and suicidal nuclear weapons for more than fifty years. The NPT has more member states than any other arms limitation agreement, a testament to the Treaty’s significance. Although some Non Nuclear Weapons States seem to be working towards proliferation, those which desire nuclear disarmament are the vast majority. The moral high ground is yours for the taking: together, you must reiterate your pledge never to use these weapons, never to unleash the indiscriminate, unimaginable horrors of nuclear explosions on any people. You must stand up and refuse to be threatened with such atrocity. Any state that believes in the viability and justification for such use can be isolated, if the majority of you, together with the burgeoning new global peace movement, can muster the common political will to do so.

You have the power. The time is now.

Convened by:

Rhianna Tyson, Reaching Critical Will

Alice Slater, GRACE, Abolition 2000

Jacqueline Cabasso, Western States Legal Foundation

[i] Walter Pincus, “Pentagon Pursues Nuclear Earth Penetrator,” The Washington Post, March 7, 2003. As reported last week, federal officials have signed documents to launch a preliminary design contest between the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories. “The weapon known as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator would be a full-power hydrogen bomb that would throw up enormous clouds of radioactive dust while wreaking large-scale damage and death if used in an urban area.” Dan Stober, “Nuclear ‘bunker busters’ sought; Move Signals Big Shift in U.S. Weapon Strategy,” San Jose Mercury News, April 23, 2003.

[ii] “What Does Disarmament Look Like?” The White House, January 2003