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An Introduction to Non-Proliferation and Disarmament I’m Wade Huntley, and currently I’m the Director of the Simons Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Research. I’ve been here for about a year and a half now. I came here immediately from Japan, where I spent a year and a half in Hiroshima, at the Hiroshima Peace Institute, as associate professor. Prior to that I spent many years in Berkeley, California, first doing my undergraduate degree and then graduate work. I have a doctorate in Political Science. I focused on International Politics, American Government and Political Theory. And then I was also in Berkeley for over six years working at a small non-governmental organization that did a variety of types of work in the Asia-Pacific region, on security, environment and energy issues. So that’s where I have developed most of my interests in East Asia and the Asia-Pacific region more generally. Nuclear disarmament means the abolition of nuclear weapons on earth. It is an ultimate goal. Non-proliferation and arms control are means to that end, in the minds of disarmament advocates at least. Non-proliferation essentially means to prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons or the technologies that create them. Arms control means to limit and reduce the nuclear weapons capabilities of the governments that already have them. So those two go hand in hand. Now, there are some people who believe that nuclear weapons can never be abolished and that we just live in a nuclear world -- you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. And so for them, non-proliferation and arms control are ends in and of themselves. But if you do feel as though nuclear abolition is possible, then the relevance of that in the near-term world is to try to make all non-proliferation and arms control efforts also advance disarmament in some way. And there are ways you can successfully do non-proliferation and arms control that actually make it harder to make further progress. And so the value of the objective of disarmament is not only keeping alive this long-term goal but also making the short-term activities promote that long-term goal. The non-proliferation treaty is probably the central instrument today that works toward these ends. Ultimate nuclear disarmament is one of its fundamental goals, and that is the commitment of all the states that are part of it. It also entails obligations of states who have nuclear weapons to move toward disarmament, and those who don’t have nuclear weapons, not to get them. So it is still a very central arrangement and regime for disarmament in today’s world. It’s embattled today. It is under siege from all sides. Many people consider it to be failing. Even people who are disarmament advocates are now talking about moving beyond the NPT. My own view is that we have to be very careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. We have to be very careful not to overlook the important things that the NPT not only has done in the past, but continues to do today. But at the same time, it is a treaty that came out of the Cold War context; it doesn’t adequately address a lot of the challenges and dangers that we’re facing now. So my own view is that we need neither to abandon the NPT, nor to fix the NPT. We need to take the NPT and add to it, build from it. It’s not enough, but it is essential. Canada’s Role in Disarmament, Arms Control and Peacebuilding
Canada has historically had a very good record of promoting nuclear disarmament, promoting arms control, and promoting the larger arrangements of peacebuilding that support those kinds of objectives. And the value of that, over the past, has been terrific. The challenge, I think, for Canadian policy today is to, first of all, decide as a nation whether those goals are still the principal goals that the country wants to follow. If so, then figure out how to pursue those goals in today’s world -- in particular, to understand the shifted and in some cases new challenges of what I think of as the second nuclear era, the post-Cold War nuclear era. There are some very, very different challenges there. And so pursuing global disarmament, pursuing nearer-term goals that Canada has always ascribed to, now requires different techniques, different means, different applications. I think that’s the biggest challenge right now for Canada. Even if it decides that these traditional goals are going to remain a central, purposeful definition of its national direction in the world, there is still the challenge of figuring out how to apply that. Non-Proliferation in India and China
The rise of China and India is very centrally related to non-proliferation efforts, but in a number of different ways. The agreement between the United States and India relates to this in a couple of ways. It’s very clear from advocates that helping to support India -- if not build it up as some kind of a balance to China -- is a major motivation. If you have tracked some of the recent discussions in the American media in the wake of Bush’s most recent visit, the balance between the benefits of bolstering India on the one hand, and the damage to the NPT on the other, is the crux of the debate. But I think this is an unfortunate way of framing the problem because it assumes a lot of things about how India may behave that are very much in doubt. It assumes that India wants to be an American agent in the region, which is a dubious proposition at best. And it also assumes that some kind of balancing behaviour is the best that you can do, which is, in my view, far from the case. If you could much more effectively create regional relationships that supplant this balance of power behaviour, at least to some extent -- I mean, I’m not a utopian; I don’t believe we can suddenly have this wonderful world government. But we can move very, very powerfully and very convincingly toward more stable and structured relations that are not just naked balance of power behaviour. And then if you do that, that whole side of the equation falls away and then the non-proliferation dimensions of that kind of nuclear sharing become much more clear and focused. Priorities and Obstacles
In today’s world I would identify two or three priorities. One is the existence of a lot of fissile materials throughout the world, particularly in the former Soviet Union, that need to be brought under control. And that effort could also be extended into looking at the civilian nuclear power industry in many countries and making sure that the materials that they operate with are under adequate control. So that’s one thing. A second and related issue is that the NPT guarantees member countries civilian nuclear power development, but it has now become pretty well agreed upon by most analysts that there is a bit of a loophole, which is that the development of that civilian technology gives countries the capabilities to quickly become nuclear weapons states if they want to. So some sort of an arrangement to provide civilian nuclear power to countries, as it’s guaranteed, without turning over the knowledge and technologies of the nuclear fuel cycle --that’s a huge challenge, and it’s a very political challenge because many non-nuclear countries are at very different points on the scale in terms of how far they have developed their own indigenous technologies. So, for example, it’s very hard to tell Iran that it cannot have the same kind of technological capabilities that many other countries like Japan already have, without introducing a whole second discrimination into the NPT. So that’s really the bedevilling challenge, and there isn’t an easy answer to that -- it’s just going to take a lot of hard work. Finally, I think that it has become clear to most people that the five states allowed to have nuclear weapons under the NPT are not moving as diligently toward their commitment to disarmament as most of the rest of the world would like to see them do. And finding some way to generate, successfully, pressure on those countries to make further progress without alienating them... The obvious obstacles that you would point to, in terms of the existing stockpiles of weapons, are the particular policies of the U.S. government now, the particular policies of the Chinese government, the particular policies of the governments in India, in Pakistan and in Israel -- all of which are, in my view, not contributing to the solution. But I think that underneath a lot of these issues is a deeper problem, which is the reliance on nuclear threats for security. The tendency of governments is to rely on some kind of threat -- either a deterrence threat or a coercive threat, to use a nuclear weapon -- and they use that as a way to maintain their national security. And that link, between the capabilities on the one hand, and the security environment on the other, is created by relying on the threat. You can go across the board and you can look at how much the U.S. still relies on nuclear deterrence, you can look at how North Korea relies on its incipient capacity, and you can even look at how non-nuclear states rely on the threat to get nuclear weapons to exert pressure on their neighbours. So this is the political side of the problem, and if you can move toward improving the conditions of international relations, establishing some kind of terms of global governance that supplant the natural competitiveness of states, and relieve them of the opportunities and temptations to rely on nuclear threats for their security, then the nuclear weapons will become much less relevant in a day-to-day way. They will no longer be looked at as instruments of power or prestige, and then the task of abolition will become much easier. |
An Introduction to Non-Proliferation and Disarmament