DISARMAMENT: Activists See Few Concrete Results from Nuclear Talks

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 18 1997 (IPS) - Nuclear activists greeted the conclusion of a two-week review of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) here with a mixture of relief and dismay: relief that nations discussed relevant nuclear issues, and dismay that they did little about them.

But most analysts agreed that the first preparatory committee meetings of the NPT since the treaty was extended indefinitely in 1995 was neither a failure nor much of an accomplishment. Simply by avoiding a major split between nuclear “haves” and “have- nots”, they say, the meetings cleared an important hurdle.

“It wasn’t as bad as it could have been,” says Jim Wurst, editor of ‘The Disarmament Times’. “The nations didn’t get stuck on petty procedural issues, so you could say they passed the first real test since the treaty was extended.”

At the same time, Wurst concedes, “they didn’t have to resolve any sticky issues,” nor are they likely to clear up the most bitter nuclear disputes until the next formal review in the year 2000.

Stephen Young, a senior nuclear analyst for the British American Security Information Council (BASIC), agrees that the world’s five declared nuclear powers and the non-nuclear states at least managed to have a discussion on nuclear issues, even if the meeting never resolved their problems.

But for other non-governmental organisations (NGOs), that lack of resolution was a sign the preparatory talks failed. “We’re not impressed,” says Jacqueline Cabasso of the Western States Legal Foundation, a pro-disarmament U.S. group. After so much discussion over the years, she argues, this meeting produced no real progress toward eliminating nuclear arms, despite the number of nations and peoples who favour that goal.

Especially upsetting, some nuclear activists say, is the lack of a strong response by the developing nations — the majority of the more than 180 states that are party to the NPT — to ask for firm commitments to disarmament among the five declared powers (Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States).

“South Africa came in asking for a treaty by the year 2000 on negative security assurances,” or commitments by nuclear nations not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states, notes Alice Slater, president of the U.S.-based Global Action Centre for the Environment. “After all this time, that is such a small thing.”

The NGO coalition ‘Abolition 2000’, in its own summary of the NPT talks, complained that “at this (meeting), only timid and paltry measures are sought, such as negative security assurances and a fissile material cut-off, which further codify the status quo and reinforce the domination of the existing nuclear weapons states.”

Yet many NGOs are convinced that an advisory opinion last year by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which deemed that all uses or threats of use of nuclear arms could be illegal, should in fact compel all nations to begin real disarmament negotiations.

“According to the July 1996 opinion of the ICJ, there is a present legal obligation to negotiate and conclude a treaty leading to nuclear disarmament,” says Peter Weiss, an attorney at the Lawyers Committee for Nuclear Policy.

But elimination of all nuclear arms remains at best a distant possibility among NPT member-states. As the talks wrapped up Friday evening, proposals for security assurances and for suggestions to negotiate a halt to production of fissile material were two of the only concrete steps backed by many governments for future discussion.

Future NPT talks may also discuss the extension of NPT commitments to the Middle East — which includes Israel, a non-NPT country believed to have nuclear weapons capability.

But only a few nations, notably Mexico, have persisted in seeking to hold the five declared powers to their commitments, stated in the NPT, to pursue the ultimate goal of complete nuclear elimination.

Meanwhile, the nuclear haves continue the arms race even despite the U.N. approval of a ban on nuclear tests last year and arms-reduction pacts between the United States and Russia. Cabasso argues that nuclear testing in fact goes on, using “theoretical, numerical, and experimental simulation models” that do not require critical-mass nuclear explosions, but still allow nations to update their arsenals.

Because of such tests, she adds, the United States was able to develop a new, earth-penetrating nuclear bomb, the B61-11, without conducting underground nuclear tests. She argues that nuclear weapon states must be prevented from such continued arsenal upgrades by commitments “not to deploy new-design nuclear weapons, or nuclear weapons modified to have new or improved military characteristics.”

“The majority of people in every land wants to see an end to nuclear weapons, nuclear power, and nuclear contamination,” Abolition 2000 added in its statement. “It’s time to stop this deadly dance and take the weapons off alert, separate the warheads from the missiles and start negotiations on a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons.”

But the closed-door meetings that ended here Friday night give little hope that nations will even begin to push for real action on those demands until the next NPT review in 2000, most of the observers here agree.