VERIFICATION PUBLICATION: OVERVIEW
At a side-event organised
by Norway during the 71st United Nations General Assembly in New York, UNIDIR
introduced its most recent publication on verifying the elimination of nuclear
weapons as follows:
I am grateful to
Norway—a longstanding, valued supporter of UNIDIR—for inviting me to
participate on this panel. It is also a pleasure to have this early opportunity
to draw attention to a paper on verification published very recently by UNIDIR. This publication is the result of a project
funded by the Government of New Zealand, and can be found on UNIDIR’s website
www.unidir.org.
Possible measures and
processes for making progress on nuclear disarmament are receiving increasing
attention in multilateral diplomacy, notably in the 2016 Open-ended Working
Group and in the current session of the UN General Assembly. Irrespective of how nuclear disarmament progress is
made—and there are many views about that—one thing is universally recognised.
It is that along the path to eliminating nuclear weapons, possessors and
non-possessors of those armaments will have to develop and agree on various means
of verifying the destruction of nuclear armaments and prohibiting future
existence of them and the fissile material that they contain.
The rationale for UNIDIR’s
latest project on verification had two strands.
The first, as just mentioned, is that no matter by what process states
decide to take nuclear disarmament forward, mechanisms will at some point be
required to verify the destruction of nuclear armaments and their components.
It goes without saying that nuclear-armed states cannot simply be dispossessed
of their nuclear armaments against their will. However committed they may
become to a world without nuclear armaments, their views will be integral to the
success of negotiations on how to eliminate their arsenals, and they will have
to consent to the outcome.
Second, the inevitable
need in due course for verification mechanisms for nuclear weapon elimination
is widely appreciated. It is also broadly understood that negotiating those
mechanisms is likely to be complex and militarily and politically sensitive.
The problems surrounding the launch of negotiations just to ban fissile
material production bears witness to that. In these circumstances, we believed
that there was scope to carry out a survey of verification experience,
precedents and tools on which the international community will be able to draw
for taking that particular element of nuclear disarmament forward.
The objective of this
survey is to provide a general overview of past and present verification
activities and proposals relevant to the elimination of nuclear weapons. We have
looked beyond the current debate on nuclear disarmament towards the development
of the mechanisms required to provide assurances that a nuclear-weapon-free
world could be achieved and maintained. Reaching these objectives will be
challenging, but, as our paper shows, feasible. I refer to chapter 4 of the
paper in this regard. And incidentally, the paper mentions pre-negotiation
confidence-building work such as that of the Group of Scientific Experts that
is the subject of the next presentation.
This survey also explains
what is meant by ‘verification’ and outlines the role that verification
mechanisms are intended to play in ensuring that international obligations are
fulfilled. By way of possible analogy with verifying the destruction of nuclear
weapons, we summarize existing verification commitments of relevance including
those contained in treaties covering the two other categories of weapons of
mass destruction (biological and chemical weapons). The part played by
international organisations in promoting states’ adherence to these
obligations, and in trying to hold them to account if they fail to do so, is
also covered.
In addition, this
overview identifies a range of initiatives by states, civil society, and
academic and other specialist institutions such as VERTIC (also represented on
this panel) that can be seen as preparing the ground for future negotiations on
verification mechanisms for nuclear disarmament. For instance, we have drawn
attention to the United Kingdom-Norway Initiative on dismantlement verification
that began in 2007—the pioneering project that brought together a
nuclear-weapon state and a non-nuclear-weapon state to collaborate on
verification issues. It is significant that Norway and the UK believe that
there are no a priori legal barriers,
such as NPT obligations, to collaboration between nuclear-weapon states and
non-nuclear-weapon states.
The paper surveys the
verification landscape as a kind of stocktake. It does not, however, delve into
technical aspects of verification or what the Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute (SIPRI) has characterised as ‘nuclear forensic analysis’.
But it does draw on such initiatives, analogies and precedents to highlight key
political and legal challenges to be overcome by the international community in
order to provide assurance that obligations to remove nuclear weapons from
military arsenals can be verified in practice. The paper was published just
before Norway tabled a resolution on verification in First Committee, and I
would like to commend Norway also for that initiative. It has already attracted
an impressive number of co-sponsors.
In conclusion, the
complexity and nature of political and military sensitivities around nuclear
disarmament verification should not be under-estimated. Nevertheless, as
surveyed in UNIDIR’s paper, serious efforts are already being made to
understand, address and overcome those sensitivities at a practical level. The
experience of existing verification organisations will also be a valuable
source. Ultimately, however, the effectiveness of mechanisms that verify the
elimination of nuclear weapons will depend on the collective will of the
international community to achieve a world without nuclear weapons.
Tim Caughley
Resident Senior Fellow
