The Hindu : Looking beyond the NPT

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Feb 18, 2004

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Looking beyond the NPT

By C. Raja Mohan

NEW DELHI, FEB. 17. The sweeping agenda unveiled by the U.S. President, George W. Bush, last week to bypass the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) cannot be seen in isolation. It is part of a controversial revolution that the Bush administration has engineered in American arms control policy over the last three years.

The seven-point action plan, announced last Tuesday by the President, is aimed at restructuring the global nuclear order. The attempt to create new non-proliferation instruments is part of a mental make-up in the Bush administration that was reflected in many of its earlier actions.

These include the rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) that seeks to put an end to all nuclear tests and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with Russia that limited the scope of defences against nuclear-armed missiles.

The Bush ideologues never tried to hide their contempt for traditional arms control. The Bush administration believed that many of the old concepts developed during the Cold War had outlived their utility and needed to be refashioned. Cold War arms control had two major pillars — the ABM Treaty and the NPT. The former codified the laws of nuclear deterrence between Washington and Moscow. The latter created mechanisms to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to additional states.

The logic of Cold War deterrence insisted that only offensive nuclear weapons could ensure peace between rival superpowers. Any defences, it was assumed by the ABM Treaty, would undermine it.

Pointing out that there is no longer an all-encompassing political rivalry between Washington and Moscow, the Bush administration argued that the threats to American security came from the danger of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of rouge states and terrorist groups.

To defend against these challenges, it was said, the U.S. needed to develop defences against ballistic missiles. The ABM Treaty that came in the way was torn up amid protests from home and abroad.

Unlike the ABM Treaty, the NPT was not easy to discard. It is a multilateral treaty with near universal membership barring India, Israel and Pakistan. Washington knows that drafting another legal instrument or reforming the current NPT through amendment was near impossible.

At the same time, the Bush administration believes that the threats to American security cannot be met through multilateral treaties alone. It insists there are states which will always cheat on their treaty obligations. Washington posited that it is not possible to verify compliance with the NPT obligations.

It pointed to the fact that technology of weapons of mass destruction will continue to spread. Finally, it concluded that developing national military capabilities and coordinated action with the allies outside the treaty framework is more important than the NPT in dealing with the proliferation risks. These propositions led the Bush administration away from the traditional non-proliferation agenda of the Europeans and the American Democrats. At the top of the old agenda is the demand is to universalise the NPT: Get India, Pakistan and Israel to join.

The other ideas are enforcement of the CTBT, negotiation of the Fissile Materials Cut-Off Treaty, a virtual ban on the trade in nuclear reactors, and an end to sovereign control of non-nuclear weapon states over critical elements of the nuclear fuel cycle.

Leaders of the European Union have repeatedly called on India to sign the NPT. Senator John Kerry, front-runner of the Democratic nomination, has said much the same recently.

Unlike the Europeans and the Democrats in the U.S., Mr. Bush is committed to the commercial future of nuclear energy. Instead of demanding the universalisation of an ineffective NPT, Washington is looking for alternative structures to deal with the challenge of non-proliferation.

The first of President Bush's seven-point action plan expands on the so-called proliferation security initiative (PSI). The PSI calls for pre-emptive military action by selected states to disrupt the international traffic in sensitive nuclear technologies and materials. Mr. Bush now wants coordinated law enforcement by states against proliferation networks of the type found in Pakistan.

Second, call for a United Nations Security Council resolution that demands nations to make proliferation activity a crime, tighten export controls and secure all sensitive materials. Third, strengthen the current efforts to secure nuclear weapons and materials in the former Soviet Republics and extend the programme to retrain scientists working on weapons of mass destruction in countries such as Libya and Iraq.

Fourth, call for a ban on the sale of uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing technologies to nations that do not at present have full-scale capabilities in these areas. Fifth, the proposal to ban nuclear commerce with those nations, which do not adopt tighter inspections under the so-called Additional protocol of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The fifth and sixth steps call for reforms in the functioning of the IAEA.

Together, this package amounts to the single biggest attempt to reorder the global nuclear system since the NPT came into force in 1970. It will significantly expand the current international law on non-proliferation. Parts of this agenda are expected to move rapidly in the next few weeks at the UNSC and the IAEA.

India, as a self-proclaimed nuclear weapon power outside the NPT, has a delicate diplomatic challenge in coping with the changing nuclear order.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Opinion

News Update

Stories in this Section

A CONFIDENT MOVE

MR. ZOELLICK COMES CALLING

Divisions in the European Union

Politics of Indira's grandchildren

Looking beyond the NPT

Maneka & Varun

Elections 2004

Cricket with Pakistan

Not for the elite alone