“There are plenty of promises and hope
floating around you”. This was the
message inside a Chinese fortune cookie opened during a visit to New York last
week for the annual UN General Assembly meeting on disarmament matters (First Committee). It is a message that bears closer analysis to the prospects for
nuclear disarmament than first meet the eye…
“Plenty of promises” exist in terms of international
commitments to nuclear disarmament as well as recent pronouncements of world
leaders that the planet will be a safer place when nuclear weapons are
eliminated.
Those self-same undertakings have given
rise in turn to a degree of “hope”.
But, if this session of the General Assembly is any measure, that hope
has a firmer grounding than in recent years. What is the difference? There are several answers, and strangely these expectations
arise despite, or perhaps because of, the paralysis in the Conference on
Disarmament (CD).
In the margins of the Assembly, there is
growing recognition that at least one game-breaker, perhaps several, have
emerged in the shape of a new focus on nuclear disarmament outside the CD:
--- There is the resolution promoted by
Austria, Mexico and Norway proposing the setting up of a working group open to
all states to “develop proposals to take forward multilateral negotiations for
the achievement and maintenance of a world without nuclear weapons”.
--- Another draft resolution in circulation
is being promoted by Cuba. The aim of Cuba’s paper is to have the General
Assembly agree to convene a one-day long High-level Meeting on Nuclear
Disarmament in September 2013.
--- And last but not least there is the
Norwegian initiative to host a meeting in Oslo next March to bring a new focus
to the humanitarian impacts that would result from the use of a nuclear weapon
whether accidental or deliberate.
Although it doesn’t deal specifically with
nuclear disarmament, mention should also be made of Canada’s annual General
Assembly resolution on fissile materials, the latest version of which proposes
the setting up by the UN Secretary-General of a group of government experts in
Geneva until such time as the CD reaches agreement on a programme of work. The
experts would be tasked with elaborating a treaty banning the production of
fissile material for nuclear weapons.
At the time of writing it is difficult to
predict the outcome on any of these initiatives, but in sum – and in terms of
the fortune cookie - they offer “plenty of…hope” that a new departure towards
nuclear disarmament will emerge.
How or when will we know whether that hope
is well founded? One measure will be whether members of the CD are ready to
face facts and acknowledge that prospects for progress on nuclear disarmament in
that forum are negligible no matter how much some of them would like to believe
otherwise. Even if the new developments just noted prompted the Conference to overcome
its chronic inability to agree its priorities and to adopt without dissent its
elusive annual “programme of work”, a more difficult barrier looms.
The 14-year standoff over the CD’s
priorities has eroded the level of trust amongst members. Restoring it will take time, perhaps
further testing the patience of some members. An early sign of the existence of
improved trust following a breakthrough on the CD’s priorities will be the
absence of the gerrymandering that scuppered the 2009 work programme. On that occasion certain procedural
steps were unnecessarily put to the Conference for formal decision and fell
just short of the necessary consensus.
Of course, several political factors of regional
and international significance will come into play before the end of this year.
Nonetheless it is tempting to conclude that, after a dearth of activity on nuclear
disarmament in a multilateral context, 2013 holds the
promise and hope of at least some progress of one kind or another.
This is a guest post by Tim Caughley. Tim is a Resident Senior Fellow
at UNIDIR.
The photograph of a fortune cookie is a file from the Wikimedia Commons
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