NPT News in Review, Vol. 19, No. 1

Editorial: Butterflies Not Bombs
21 July 2024

Ray Acheson

The photo on the cover of this edition of the NPT News in Review was taken about 60 miles south of where the world’s first nuclear weapon was detonated on 16 July 1945, in a stunning white sand desert full of plants and animals. The radioactive fallout from that single detonation spread across 46 US states as well as Canada and Mexico. It primarily impacted local communities, especially First Nations, who have never received reparations or compensation.

It’s been 79 years since that test, and since the US went on to drop two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The harms of 1945 are still being felt today, and the horror is far from over. The current nuclear weapon policies, plans, and programmes offer a bleak backdrop to the NPT Preparatory Committee, which means participants have their work cut out for them to make progress—but also grave urgency to do so.

Nuclear horrorshow

As of early 2024, China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States possess about 12,100 nuclear warheads. The United States and Russia are responsible for about 89 per cent of these. While the total number of nuclear weapons has continued to slowly decrease from the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, the Federation of American Scientists reports that “the number of warheads in global military stockpiles—which comprises warheads assigned to operational forces—is increasing once again.”

Furthermore, all of the nuclear-armed states are “modernising” their nuclear arsenals—the warheads, the delivery systems, and in some cases the facilities that produce these weapon systems.

The United States is in the midst of a 2 trillion USD modernisation programme, replacing all of its nuclear warheads, bombers, missiles and submarines. In this context, it is also expanding its production of plutonium “pits” for nuclear warheads in the largest nuclear infrastructure project since the Manhattan Project.

Russia is in the late stages of a multi-decade long modernisation programme to replace all of its Soviet-era nuclear-capable systems with newer versions. It has also withdrawn its ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and has increased activity at its former nuclear weapon testing site.

China’s nuclear weapon modernisation programme has reportedly accelerated and expanded. It has continued to develop new missile silo fields, new ICBMs, and new warheads, has refitted its nuclear submarines with new missiles, and has developed an air-launched ballistic missile for its bombers that might have a nuclear capabilty.

France is in the midst of significant modernisation programmes for it ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, submarine, aircraft, and nuclear-industrial complex, while the United Kingdom is replacing its nuclear submarines and warheads and is planning to increase the number of warheads in its stockpile.

The maintenance, modernisation, and expansion of nuclear weapon programmes are expensive. Collectively, the nuclear-armed states spent 91.4 billion USD on nuclear weapons in 2023. At 51.5 billion USD, the US government spent more than all the other nuclear-armed states combined. Private contractors continue to profit from this spending; as the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and PAX found that in 2023, “Financial institutions held more than $476.8 billion in bonds and shares, while also providing $276 billion in financing.”

Meanwhile, nuclear sharing is spreading. For years, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Türkiye have hosted US nuclear weapons, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) has trained and planned for the use of these weapons. In 2022, Belarus changed its constitution to allow the stationing of Russian nuclear weapons, in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In 2023, Russia announced that it moved some of its nuclear weapons to Belarus. In response, Poland has said it would be willing to host NATO nuclear weapons, while the Swedish government has said it would do so in “times of war”.

In addition, Australia, the United Kingdom, and United States have initiated a military alliance, AUKUS, that will see them sharing highly enriched uranium and nuclear-powered submarines, as well as other related technology, infrastructure, and radioactive material. This arrangement has raised tensions in the Asia-Pacific region and looks poised to destabilise international relations even further.

In recent years, government officials in at least four nuclear-armed states—the DPRK, Israel, Russia, and the United States—threatened to use their nuclear weapons. Most recently, the repeated threats of use since 2022 by the Russian government, and comments in 2023 from an Israeli minister about the use of nuclear weapons against Palestine, make it clear that the risk of nuclear weapon use is as high as it ever has been. The response, particularly from European NATO states, has been to amplify their attachment to nuclear weapons as a perceived deterrent.

Learning from the past to build a better future

In this context, it’s difficult to imagine a successful NPT meeting. It’s been so long since anything resembling progress, or even positivity, has been experienced in the NPT context that it’s easy to forget there were times when almost every government in the world was able to agree on substantive commitments to reduce nuclear threats and diminish nuclear weapon stockpiles. But heading into another round of talks this week, it’s important to remember that this was possible, and can be again. And in fact, we can—and must—go further than ever before.

While past NPT commitments have not achieved disarmament—or even really tried to—reaching those agreements facilitated a culture of compromise, or at least dialogue. The outcomes reached in 1995, 2000, and 2010—while not nearly enough to eliminate nuclear dangers, let alone nuclear weapons—did bring all NPT states parties into a negotiating frame where they accepted responsibilities and pledged to fulfil their legal obligations. Today, we’re far from that culture.

The first Preparatory Committee of the current review cycle, held in Vienna in 2023, could not even agree to reference the Chair’s summary and recommendations in the procedural report. Iran, backed by Russia and Syria, blocked the summary from being tabled as a working paper or listed in the procedural reports list of documents because they felt it was biased against Iran and in favour of western states’ positions. While the burial of a Chair’s summary was a new low point even for the NPT, the defence of the summary was disingenuous as well. The states expressing dismay at the rejection of this paper have killed much more meaningful outcomes from NPT meetings in the past.

Of course, these kinds of procedural fights are never really about documents. Underneath comments about precedent and process are some very serious politics. The bottom line is that states parties are divided on their belief of whether nuclear weapons are good or bad. This was perhaps best exemplified by Poland’s astonishing comment at last year’s meeting that the security of states cannot be diminished in the pursuit of the goals of the NPT. That is, some states parties see a legal treaty, which they have ratified of their own accord, as being out of line with their security interests. This is an incredible admission that the NPT will not be implemented as long as some governments think nuclear weapons offer them security. Given the ongoing impacts of nuclear violence and injustice, not to mention the current risks of nuclear war, all efforts must be made to confront and end this deadly perception.

We don’t need the days of NPT-past—we need much better.

We don’t need the empty rhetoric or the halfhearted pledges. We don’t need bad faith agreements to “reduce the saliency of nuclear weapons in security doctrines” while pouring billions into modernisation programmes and arms races. We don’t need governments agreeing to thirteen steps or sixty-four actions and then tearing them up or failing to implement them.

The NPT needs to be implemented, full stop. The failure to implement the NPT has led to more danger than ever before. We’re in a moment where one nuclear-armed state is committing genocide, another has invaded and is at war with its neighbour, and many NPT states parties are funding, arming, or otherwise supporting these aggressions and war crimes. The potential for global holocaust is as high as ever and for the past twenty-three years NPT states parties have squandered every opportunity to walk this whole mess back from the brink.

But it’s not too late to turn things around. The governments of nuclear-armed states can dial this back with just a few moves: stopping the threats and preparations to use nuclear weapons, halting their investments in the nuclear arms race, and agreeing to disarmament talks. There’s already another treaty that they can sign onto today to shut the nuclear dangers down for good. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, a tool for implementing Article VI right now, is ready to go. But the vehicle the nuclear-armed states choose to deescalate and disarm isn’t important, it’s only important that they do so, now, before we are engulfed in radioactive flames. The world needs more butterflies and less nuclear bombs.

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