Nuclear disarmament: OEWG: recent comment

UNIDIR recently published a background paper on the 2016 Open-ended Working Group (OEWG). 

The paper was launched at a side-event during the 71^st United Nations General Assembly. The event was organised by Thailand, co-sponsored by Indonesia, Malaysia, THE Philippines and Vietnam, with assistance from UNIDIR.

The proceedings of that event, including comments made by UNIDIR, will shortly be posted on UNIDIR’s website.

Tim Caughley
Resident Senior Fellow

Nuclear disarmament: Verification: recent publication

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

Nuclear disarmament: Risk: New Project

The facts-based discourse on the humanitarian consequences of detonation of nuclear weapons has since 2010 drawn increasing attention to the need to better understand the causes and level of risk surrounding those armaments. Developments in this discourse include three international conferences on humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons, various published studies on particular aspects of risk such as close calls, nuclear-weapons arsenals on high-alert, challenges for humanitarian response, and systems accidents, as well as public revelations about safety lapses.

To date policy attention has predominantly focused on understanding the consequences of nuclear weapon detonation events. Yet there is growing recognition that the causes and level of nuclear weapons risk warrant closer scrutiny. In December 2015 the ICRC President said that that greater policy exploration of nuclear weapons risk would allow issues around these weapons to be considered in a different way, and so be especially helpful for constructive engagement with nuclear-weapon-possessor states.

Related to this, in 2015 the UN General Assembly established an open-ended working group (OEWG) to discuss (among other things) transparency measures related to the risks associated with nuclear weapons and measures to reduce and eliminate the risk of accidental, mistaken, unauthorized or intentional nuclear weapon detonations. In addition, the OEWG was tasked to consider the need for measures to increase awareness and understanding of the complexity of and interrelationship between the wide range of humanitarian consequences of a nuclear detonation.

The tenor of the OEWG discussions during 2016 suggests that to extend policy understanding of nuclear risk, further research and engagement will be required, both to detail the risk ‘picture’ and to communicate these findings to the disarmament community. Greater policy exploration of nuclear weapons risk will allow issues relating to these arms to be better understood, facilitating constructive engagement with nuclear-weapon-possessor states.

UNIDIR’s ‘Causes of Nuclear Risk’ project aims to address issues of risk surrounding nuclear weapons through specially commissioned papers and meetings devoted to this theme organised in collaboration with relevant institutions. The Institute’s website www.unidir.org will draw further attention to those papers and meetings over the next six months.

Tim Caughley
Resident Senior Fellow


[photograph: Reflections - United Nations Headquarters Building, New York]

Security and Nuclear Disarmament

A foundation of global strategic stability is regarded by a number of states as a prerequisite for progress on nuclear disarmament. In today’s troubled world, efforts to achieve such progress are seen as misguided, if not futile.

An alternative view is that the continuing existence of high numbers of nuclear weapons is a factor that contributes to the unsettled security environment. This perspective draws on a range of concerns about possessors of nuclear weapons—stalled efforts to reduce nuclear arsenals, increased investment in modernising those arsenals, apparent readiness of leaders or aspiring leaders to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons, and so on. Compounding this situation is the absence of trust between nuclear-weapon possessors and non-possessors and the abdication of responsibility by the Conference on Disarmament for negotiating on nuclear disarmament (and other) issues.

Proponents of these positions will be at loggerheads this month in the UN General Assembly-mandated Open-ended Working Group on taking nuclear disarmament forward (OEWG). The OEWG will conclude its work on 19 August and account for itself to the UNGA in October. Its respected chair Ambassador Thani Thongphakdi of Thailand has already circulated a draft report for the OEWG’s consideration.

Meanwhile, the beleaguered Conference of Disarmament gears itself up for making its own report to the UNGA. By the way, it is curious that some of those states that see the current international security environment as being unfavourable for progress on nuclear disarmament remain hopeful that the CD can in the same security situation nonetheless overcome its 20-year deadlock over how to negotiate issues of comparable strategic complexity.

In any event, perhaps in proposing a new topic (see our previous post), Russia is trying to get the Conference to side-step this impasse and turn instead to an issue of common concern—i.e., terrorism (in Russia’s proposal, relating specifically to acts of chemical and biological terrorism).

Another comparatively neutral option for the CD is to re-examine its ‘working methods’. For example, the idea of extending the one-month term of the CD’s rotating presidency has been put forward. But this would be a non-issue if the CD were actually in negotiating mode. This is because the chair of those negotiations would effectively become the CD’s power-broker. The Conference president would then become largely symbolic for the duration of the negotiations. The term of the negotiating chair, unlike the CD president’s, need not be confined to a single month.

Whether or not events this August in the CD will shape that body’s future and to what extent the course of negotiations on nuclear disarmament will be forged in the OEWG remain to be seen. But one thing is certain: the outcomes and their security ramifications will both be aired fully in the UN General Assembly later this year.

Tim Caughley

Resident Senior Fellow