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Video Interview
Note: The opinions presented are not necessarily those of the Government of Canada.
(Video players are available here: QuickTime | Windows Media)
Transcript:
“Sleepwalking into a new weaponization phase”
I am Hans Blix, and I have been chairing an independent commission on weapons of mass destruction. It is financed in part by the Swedish government and in part by the Simons Foundation in Vancouver, with a lot of support from Canada. Of course, we often look to Canada as a country that is among the most constructive in the field of disarmament and arms control.
We have presented a report that covers nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and questions related to outer space and missiles. The report comes with 60 recommendations, half of them related to nuclear, and the rest to the other types of weapons. It’s being presented to the public, governments, think tanks and NGOs.
We hope that this will begin to plant the seeds for a new wave of disarmament. Disarmament has been stagnating in a most horrible way over the last few years. The World Summit that took place in 2005 could not even deliver two lines on arms control and disarmament. The Non-Proliferation Review conference that took place in the spring of 2005 ended in acrimony. And yet we still have 27,000 nuclear weapons, warheads, in the world. And we can also see the beginning of arms races -- in space, for instance, where we understand that a lot of money is spent every year on questions like stationing weapons in space. The missiles area is another one to raise. So it is not simply that we are stagnating; it is worse than that. Kofi Annan was saying a few days ago that it is as if the world were sleepwalking into a new weaponization phase.
Broken promises
There is a great deal of discontent among the non-nuclear states with the NPT [nuclear non-proliferation treaty]. They felt that they went along with an extension of the NPT, from the 25-year validity that it had to unlimited validity. This happened in 1995. They got promises from the nuclear-weapons states that they would push on with disarmament, with a comprehensive test ban treaty, and with a protocol in the Middle East. Many of the non-nuclear-weapons states feel that they did not get this, so they feel cheated.
Moreover, when the nuclear-weapons states say to the non-nuclear-weapons states that they should stay away from this, someone said that it is a little like smoking a fat cigar and telling their youngsters not to smoke. Unless they themselves take some steps, they are handicapped in preaching to others. I think there is truth in this. I think we need to see a return to serious effort in disarmament in the nuclear-weapons states. We have not seen that in the last few years. We have seen a reduction in a number of warheads in Russia and in the United States. But we have also seen efforts to get new types of nuclear weapons, like bunker busters in the United States and the development of the missile shield, etc. We think that we are at a crossroads. Either we move on and return to disarmament or there is a risk of new arms races.
The non-NPT states are only Israel, India and Pakistan. Frankly, I don’t see any way in which any one of them would move in [to the international non-proliferation, arms control and disarmament regime]. But I think that if we had movement out of the nuclear weapons age, I’m sure that they would come along. India has said so for a long time, and I’m sure that the others would do so too. We would need the reawakening of the ambition to move out of the nuclear age. We could do that -- we don’t have a bipolar world any longer. I think the Russians and the Chinese would also be willing to come along. Verification will be a big issue, but we have learned a lot about verification -- in the case of Iraq, in the case of the work that we carried out in UNMOVIC [United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission] before the war in 2003.
Combating proliferation
There are many different ways of combating the spread of WMD. The area we are most familiar with, of course, is nuclear weapons. The basic approach will be to try to create such political foreign relations conditions that countries don’t feel the need for nuclear weapons. The end of the Cold War was a very great boon in this respect. The same thing applies regionally. If you were to have a détente in the Middle East, if you were to move on in the peace process, well, there would be less of an interest to move for weapons. But you cannot be sure that you can attain such conditions immediately; therefore, you have to have other ways of discouraging and making it more difficult.
You have export controls and you also have something like the Proliferation Security Initiative today, which means that a number of countries would intercept ships on the high seas if they have an idea they might be exporting a centrifuge or other things. It also involves a lot of cooperation in terms of intelligence. So there are many ways in which you try to stop proliferation.
I talk about the nuclear, but there are similar things in the fields of biology and chemistry. All these three areas are dual use -- nuclear can be used for nuclear power and it can be used for weapons. Biological is vaccines and the biological revolution -- we all want that -- but we all also want to prevent it being used for weapons. Chemical is the same -- the world would not have the standard of living that we do if we didn’t make use of chemistry. But at the same time, we want the chemical factories to be protected -- we don’t want there to be any leakages of material for chemical weapons.
Need for verification
Take the area of a cut-off of production of fissile materials, that is to say highly enriched uranium or plutonium for weapons purposes. This is an area in which the U.S. has recently tabled a proposal. In principle, I think the world is very favourable to it, and Canada has been very active in this. If you can turn off the tap for new plutonium and new enriched uranium, and at the same time if you can dismantle nuclear weapons in disarmament, then you can gradually reduce the nuclear threat to the world.
However, the latest U.S. proposals do not contain any means of verification. I think that the vast majority of the countries in the world would be sceptical about that. They will say, “OK, if one goes along with this, how are we sure?” How will Pakistan be sure that India actually will stop production, and vice versa? And China? So I think there will be a big drive to have verification. But in itself, it’s a positive proposal. That is one example.
We have verification of enrichment plants in Brazil and this is carried out by the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]. In Japan there is a huge enrichment plant and that’s also verified by the IAEA. There are enrichment plants in the U.K. and in France that are verified by Euratom. Even in China, you have enrichment plants that were sold to the Chinese by the Russians under the condition that they would be verified by the IAEA. So there is a lot of experience in this field, and really no principle of the actions is difficult -- it’s a question of resources.
Further Reading:
The final report of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (WMDC) "Weapons of Terror: Freeing the World of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms" - http://www.wmdcommission.org/files/Weapons_of_Terror.pdf
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“Sleepwalking into a new weaponization phase” 