Section 3 Questions

Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)

Conference on Disarmament

General Assembly First Committee

UN Disarmament Commission

Special Session on Disarmament

3. Existing and Pending Disarmament and Verification Regimes

Questions

What existing verification bodies and mechanisms will need to be expanded? How?
How should they be coordinated?
Is a new umbrella mechanism necessary?
What is working best about the current regimes?
How can they be built on?
What data-sharing agreements are necessary to balance transparency and confidence with concerns related to non-proliferation and classified information?

Comments

Implementing the NWC would require a dedicated international organization because of the complexity of monitoring nuclear disarmament and the confidentiality of information involved. With the special sensitivity around nuclear weapons, we need a tighter regime than what we have currently under existing agreements. The OPCW, UN and IAEA have experience in handling confidential information that a NWC could draw on.
The model NWC could be improved by further exploring the balance between transparency and confidentiality. The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), for example, requires that confidential information be submitted in special annexes to state parties declarations.
The idea of domestic penal legislation was first introduced during the negotiations on the CWC in the Conference on Disarmament. The legally-binding requirement for states parties to pass such legislation can serve as a good model for the NWC.
The Canadian national authority under the CWC sold the convention to industry by making videos that explained the convention and its benefits.
Whistleblowers need to be certain that sources of the information they submit is protected. States need to be sure that commercial or other secrets are kept confidential.
Another relevant novel feature of the CWC is challenge inspections. The purpose was to form a norm of 24-hour notice. This tool has not yet been used, however, possibly because it would be seen as a political insult or could trigger a reciprocal inspection request.
Under the NWC, the implementing agency’s director-general, in addition to states, should have the right and responsibility to initiate a challenge inspection.
The NWC Technical Secretariat should have a standing inspectorate iof professional teams of inspectors. These could undertake routine, randomly chosen, and/or challenge inspections. The Secretariat should also have the capacity and mandate to analyze data from a variety of sources, including open sources.
The IAEA could evolve into an implementing agency for the NWC but there are also advantages in creating a new agency, which could build on US-Russian verification activities.
The IAEA would be a good institution to implement and verify a fissile materials cutoff treaty, although some believe the IAEA role in promoting nuclear energy is problematic in the context of nuclear disarmament and its verification.
But the IAEA role is also seen as important because it possesses expertise in monitoring nuclear non-proliferation.
Should the NWC agency be free standing or under the aegis of the UN? If under UN auspices there is the question of whether the Security Council veto would affect it. One argument is that nuclear weapon states would have to relinquish their veto in this context.
In 1986 Canada submitted a report to the UN General Assembly on verification seeking to define it generally and promote pooling of resources to maximize effectiveness. It noted that verification should help meet the need to institutionalize rules and procedures and should not assume bad faith but provide a framework if non-compliance occurs. The verification process itself, however, does not identify what can or should be done in the event of non-compliance.
A conceptual question regarding the verification of a nuclear weapons convention is whether the focus is on verification of the process of destruction of weapons or the post-destruction situation (e.g., South Africa).
If the former, then we need to consider how to address the case of a non-nuclear weapon state inspector without violating non-proliferation principles regarding the transfer of knowledge. Inspectors could be present but not actually watch the destruction process, for example.
States will probably be reluctant to pay for a new agency, and non-nuclear weapon states might ask why they should pay for disarmament and verification activities. The counter-argument would be that ridding the world of nuclear weapons is in the interest of all states.
It might be useful to think in terms of the evolution of an appropriate implementing agency, building the elements even before the completion of a treaty. The elements could include a voluntary register, trial inspections, training of inspectors.
The US Department of Energy is recording the history and collecting information about the knowledge, theory, and practice of building nuclear weapons. There should be a similar project to gain confidence in disarmament — information with respect to warheads, PU and HEU inventories. There are very few people left in the US and Russia with information of the history of what has been done.
The proposal could be widened to include the oral history of diplomats and officials who have been engaged in these regimes of disarmament negotiation.
There is a UN General Assembly resolution calling for a study on non-proliferation and disarmament education. It is hard to assess the prospects of the disarmament regime without looking at education.