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: Verification: recent survey

VERIFICATION SURVEY

UNIDIR recently published a survey on activities, studies and precedents relevant to a consideration of the mechanisms that will in due course be needed to verify the elimination of nuclear weapons and their components.  

Attention was drawn to that paper at a side-event organised by Norway during the 71^st United Nations General Assembly in New York. UNIDIR’s summary of its contents can be found at in an earlier posting on this site.

New Zealand, the funder of the project which produced the publication, also drew attention to the paper at a side-event on ‘Effective Measures for Nuclear Disarmament’ on 17 October 2016. Verification will be among the most crucial measures needed for the effective elimination of nuclear weapons and ultimate maintenance of a world free of nuclear weapons.

Tim Caughley

Resident Senior Fellow

Can the nuclear Siamese twins be separated?

"Atoms for peace and atoms for war are Siamese twins."
- Hannes Alfvén, Swedish physicist and Nobel laureate

From the very outset of the nuclear age, the challenge has been to facilitate the civilian use of nuclear energy while curbing nuclear weapons. But, as Robert Oppenheimer once observed, “the close technical parallelism and interrelation of the peaceful and the military applications of atomic energy” make countering nuclear proliferation an especially difficult task. At the heart of the problem is a large overlap between civilian and military applications of nuclear energy, which both depend essentially on the same key ingredient: fissile material.

Today the world faces the prospect of a nuclear “renaissance” – a potential expansion in the use of nuclear energy worldwide. Energy supply is a critical economic, national security, and environmental issue for our planet and nuclear energy could be a vital part of the energy mix providing energy in quantities needed to decrease our dependence on fossil fuels.

We don’t know now if there really going to be a nuclear “renaissance” and what form it will it take. But the revival of interest in nuclear power could potentially result in the worldwide dissemination of uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing technologies. This presents obvious risks of proliferation as these technologies can produce fissile materials – high enriched uranium and separated plutonium – that are directly usable in nuclear weapons. As a result more states could acquire the capability to produce materials directly usable for, or easily converted to, explosive use.

And they can do it completely legally. Article IV of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) guarantees “the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes”, including technologies of uranium enrichment and fuel reprocessing.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) seeks to inhibit the use of nuclear energy for military purposes through the system of international safeguards. But the acquisition of uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing facilities would bring states a long way toward nuclear weapons even without directly violating the NPT, namely without “diverting” special nuclear material and, therefore, without any possibility of being restrained by IAEA safeguards designed to verify whether material has or has not been diverted.

One does not have to look far for an example. Japan is currently the only non-nuclear-weapon state that operates all the elements of the complete nuclear fuel cycle. It has a very advanced nuclear infrastructure, including commercial-scale enrichment and reprocessing plants, large quantities of nuclear material (more than 45-metric tons of separated plutonium), modern nuclear scientific, engineering and production capabilities. It’s to Japan’s credit that it has a perfect NPT compliance record and has pursued a consistent policy of non-weaponization of nuclear technology. None of this changes the reality that the country is a “screwdriver turn” away from acquiring nuclear weapons – in months rather than years – if it took the political decision to go nuclear. Indeed, periodically this question resurfaces in Japan and just recently several retired military officials argued that the country should consider possessing nuclear weapons.

Should a nuclear “renaissance” result in more non-nuclear-weapon states acquiring enrichment and reprocessing facilities, the task of safeguarding such facilities could place significant additional work load on the IAEA – already strained both in budget and personnel. Moreover, safeguarding commercial-scale enrichment and reprocessing plants poses significant verification challenges. That’s because large plants process so much nuclear material over the course of their operation that it’s very complicated to make accurate material-accountancy measurements as part of ensuring none of this material has been diverted. Moreover, if a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT) is negotiated and agreed, its verification could mean placing under safeguards enrichment and reprocessing facilities in the nuclear-weapon states and non-NPT states, which now are mainly outside the international safeguard system. All of this will require resources and strategic foresight.

All of this said, nobody should contest the right of any nation to utilize nuclear energy in a secure, safe and environmentally sound manner. So key questions are these: how should the international community address the growing security and proliferation risks from the nuclear fuel cycle? How can the international community limit access to sensitive nuclear technologies, all the while protecting states’ rights to develop the peaceful use of nuclear energy?

Continued nuclear development along national lines – the situation we have now – presents a sort of 'Catch-22' because it will create additional proliferation risks undermining the international nonproliferation regime. Even if a large-scale nuclear “renaissance” doesn’t occur, it would not help much. Many countries would not willingly agree to indefinitely preserve the de-facto existing “two-tier” system where some nations – essentially the members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group – are entitled to nuclear fuel cycle technologies, and others are not. Some of them may decide to acquire their own enrichment or reprocessing capabilities, decisions perhaps for political and national strategic reasons rather than primarily driven by economic considerations.

So, how is the nuclear puzzle to be solved? Let’s go back to 1946, when The Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy (generally known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report) appeared. At the time, the report contained a stark warning: “A system of inspection superimposed on an otherwise uncontrolled exploitation of atomic energy by national governments will not be an adequate safeguard”. The Acheson-Lilienthal report was the first effort to define a policy on the international control of atomic energy. But, in the condition of the time, the task of establishing some form of international authority over the most dangerous aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle proved impossible. Instead, the international community eventually adopted the very approach - occasional inspection by the IAEA - criticized by the report’s authors.

More that sixty years later we face the same problem, only on a much bigger scale. And again it seems that multilateralization can offer a gateway to nuclear fuel cycle services for any nation. A multilateral approach to the nuclear fuel cycle, if appropriately arranged, has substantial potential to ensure that the benefits of nuclear energy are made available to all states, while strengthening the nuclear non-proliferation regime and reducing incentives to build new nuclear fuel cycle facilities in states that do not now have them.

The rationale for multilateral approaches to the nuclear fuel cycle is relatively straightforward. In the case of a multinational enrichment or reprocessing facility, in which ownership, control or operation are shared among a number of states that can watch each other, all of its participants are under a greater degree of peer scrutiny. This would make it more difficult and riskier to cheat. The possibility of seizure of the facility by the host country would always be present, but because of the ensuing confrontation between that country and the other participants and the international community, a considerable political barrier inhibits such action.

The use of multinational facilities instead of an array of national facilities would reduce the number of plants to be placed under safeguards, increasing the feasibility of continuous inspection while possibly reducing costs of these inspections. Multinational facilities could also serve as confidence-building measures, helping to reduce suspicions among participating states about each other’s nuclear weapon intentions. Moreover, large multinational fuel cycle facilities could be cost effective and provide economies of scale smaller national facilities would probably lack. Multilateral fuel cycle mechanisms could respond to the “entitlement” motivation of the customer states in terms of their participation in ownership, management, operation, decision-making, profit-sharing, and so on.

A way to solve the nuclear puzzle is ultimately to “denationalize” sensitive nuclear fuel cycle activities – first of all, uranium enrichment, spent fuel reprocessing, and fabrication of mixed plutonium and uranium oxide fuel – and convert the current “two-tier” system into a truly multilateral fuel cycle arrangement of equal rights and obligations. This multilateral fuel-cycle arrangement could benefit the whole of humankind as:

• The existing “two-tier” system would be virtually eliminated
• “Entitlement” motivations of customer states would be satisfied to a great extent, especially if new multilateral facilities were created taking into account regional considerations
• Open and non-discriminatory access to nuclear fuel services would be guaranteed
• Without nationally-controlled uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing facilities no fissile materials for military purposes would be produced
• It would be difficult to justify a national enrichment or reprocessing program
• No states with nationally-controlled “threshold” capabilities would exist, which is important in a world moving toward nuclear disarmament

The task is tremendous: it is not easy getting international support for dramatic changes in the way we use nuclear energy. Nonetheless, we have no choice if the world is to be protected from the misuse of sensitive nuclear technologies. To begin with, the international community should conduct in-depth discussions and thorough analysis of the technical, legal, political and economic aspects of various proposals and ideas for multilateral nuclear fuel cycle frameworks. The long lead-times for nuclear construction allow us to do that. But states involved cannot allow themselves just to waste this time indulging in endless and selfish politicized arguments.

This is a guest post by Dr. Yury Yudin. Yury is a Senior Researcher at UNIDIR and manages the project ‘Multinational Approaches to the Nuclear Fuel Cycle'. A pre-publication version of his new study paper, 'Multilateralization of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle: Assessing the Existing Proposals' is available in PDF format by clicking here.

Picture credit: photograph of a centrifuge cascade (part of the nuclear enrichment process), courtesy of the IAEA's Image Bank.

Blinkers and biological weapons

Following on from previous posts on the value of low technology, it turns out that even how we think about things might be influenced by an increasing reliance on ‘high-tech’ solutions. James Evans reported in last week’s edition of Science magazine that the explosion of electronic information might not be such a good thing. He argues that while accessing things online allows a wider audience to access more information, quicker and more cheaply, it could also be undermining the principles of scholarship. Since such large amounts of information have become available online, referenced texts tended to be more recent, fewer in number and relate to a smaller set of journals and articles. Evans says that:

searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon.

I wonder if this principle holds true in multilateral disarmament? If so, it might offer insights. Anything that helps build consensus has to be good, right? But what happens when a consensus is built on a partial picture – a selective, unrepresentative view? By inference, Evans’ work suggests that we be being exposed to fewer alternatives, degrading opportunities for real discourse and shutting down potentially useful options for the future. And it may become much more difficult to change prevailing opinion after it has been established as non-mainstream views become increasingly isolated.

Certainly, when an idea gets out there and spreads, it already takes a great deal to change peoples’ minds. Such concepts enter our social consciousness and belief in it is reinforced simply because so many people have heard about it. As fewer people become exposed to competing or alternative views there is a danger that the orthodoxy becomes ‘the truth’. If we’re being increasingly channelled toward a small set of ideas, and these viewpoints are self-sustaining, then how are we to set about changing things if we need to?

This has certainly been a problem for the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). The treaty underwent a significant change in direction seven years ago, when efforts to negotiate a legally binding verification instrument were set aside. This prompted some, at the time, to suggest it was a regime on the verge of collapse - an image we are still fighting despite the BWC’s stewardship process having become a different animal.

The BWC now has an ongoing international process to strengthen how the treaty is implemented through national action; enhancements to its information exchange mechanisms (with growing support for more radical improvements over the next few years); increasing awareness of, and interest in, its activities by a rapidly expanding set of stakeholders; better integration into the broader disarmament and non-proliferation architecture; a plan of action for universalization that has already yielded good results in getting more states to join; and a small ‘secretariat’ to support the activities of states parties. And yet, there is still a perception that alternative structures and administrative arrangements must be created to achieve exactly the same ends.

This week, as diplomats, scientists, academics and civil society participate in a BWC expert meeting in Geneva, my thoughts are certainly on what sorts of messages this meeting is sending out. I hope that given the number and range of people who are participating, there will be no shortage of opinions as to what it all means and what has been achieved.

This is a guest blog by Dr. Piers Millett. Piers works for the BWC Implementation Support Unit in Geneva, Switzerland.


Photo Credit: "There is no freedom without dissent" by Furilo on Flickr.

Capturing the cost of cluster munitions

Last October we blogged that civil society actors seem to be waking up to the usefulness of satellite imaging technologies in trying to hold governments accountable for their actions, for instance for human rights violations or failure to protect civilians in conflict. (In contrast, the value of satellite imagery in traditional arms control was known from early in the Cold War - but cost and tight government control over access to imagery generally kept it out of the hands of non-state actors.) Amnesty International launched a website last year in partnership with the University of California at Berkeley to watch over parts of Darfur. And the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) later released similar satellite images of Myanmar.

Wired Magazine ran an interesting piece on 13 June, which presented some of the images collated by the AAAS's Geospatial Technology and Human Rights Project, which you can take a look at here. Its gallery presents a series of before and after satellite photographs spanning the globe, from Ethiopia to Zimbabwe to Myanmar, Eritrea, Sudan and even North Korea.

Among these images were two from Southern Lebanon. Conflict there in the summer of 2006 between Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and Hezbollah saw both sides use cluster munitions - IDF launching them into Southern Lebanon on a massive scale, especially in the last few days of fighting.

A Human Rights Watch report, Flooding South Lebanon: Israel's Use of Cluster Munitions in Lebanon in July and August 2006 made considerable use of commercially-available satellite images matched with global positioning data to show the locations of cluster strikes and document their effects. In this way, satellite imagery played a role in raising the profile of concerns about the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions, and therefore to the achievement of the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) through the Oslo Process, in which Human Rights Watch was active as a member of the Cluster Munition Coalition.

And Human Rights Watch wasn't alone. Aerial and satellite photographs were also used by other NGOs on cluster munitions. Norwegian People's Aid, working with the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and an independent explosive ordnance expert, Colin King, used similar techniques in their report, M85 - An Analysis of Reliability, which was presented and discussed in two Oslo Process conferences. And a Landmine Action UK report just out, entitled Counting the Cost: The economic impact of cluster munition contamination in Lebanon, cross-referenced satellite imagery of land use with data from the Information Management System for Mine Action (or IMSMA, which despite its title sometimes covers other forms of unexploded ordnance.)

John Borrie

GoogleEarth map of Lebanon from the Google Earth Blog.

The Power of the President

What makes for a successful multilateral arms control negotiation? Sufficient political will? Maturity of the issue being negotiated? Pressure from civil society? A critical mass of seasoned diplomats? The list is long and there is no single silver bullet that will ensure success every time.

But what about the role played by the President of such negotiations; the Ambassador chosen by the negotiating parties (usually on the basis of regional rotation) and entrusted with the delicate task of guiding negotiations to a successful conclusion? All other things being equal, does the President have the power to tip the balance and conjure success where none seemed possible?

Observing Pakistan's Ambassador Masood Khan (picture) in action at the 6th Review Conference of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) at the end of 2006 would lead one to answer this question in the affirmative. The 6th Review Conference was up against formidable challenges. Years-long efforts to negotiate a verification protocol to the Convention had collapsed in 2001 after the United States withdrew its support. As a result, the 5th Review Conference had to be suspended for a whole year to allow tempers to cool. States were heading into the 6th Review Conference having completed some constructive intersessional work but resentments were still raw. Hopes were not high that the meeting could put the BTWC process back on track.

Against the odds, Ambassador Khan guided the conference to a successful conclusion; i.e. a strong final document and a demanding intersessional work programme in the run-up to the 7th Review Conference in 2011. He has gone a long way towards explaining how he did so in an article he published in Disarmament Diplomacy earlier this year, although I have the impression that we may have to wait for his memoirs to get the full story. The article offers a fascinating and rare insight into the internal workings of a multilateral disarmament machine; worn cogs, snapped springs and all. My favourite characterisation, however, of how Ambassador Khan pulled it off was provided by my Disarmament Insight colleague, John Borrie, who described as "diplomatic jujitsu" the way Ambassador Khan kept delegations off balance by shuffling the agenda and tabling proposals.

Masood Khan is not one to rest on his laurels and is already looking for new challenges. He plans to introduce an innovative new way of interacting with NGOs and the biotech industry at next month's BTWC Meeting of States Parties. After that, he will turn his attention to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) - also known as the 'Inhumane Weapons Convention' - where he will preside over the Meeting of States Parties in November 2008.*

That meeting is due to hear a progress report on negotiations by a CCW Group of Governmental Experts on a proposal to address the humanitarian impact of cluster munitions. Given the inability of the CCW over last number of years to address adequately the harm caused to civilians by cluster munitions, and the emergence outside of the CCW of the ambitious Oslo Process on cluster munitions, the challenge facing the CCW on this issue is significant.

Ambassador Khan is undoubtedly a skillful diplomat who domonstrates that diplomacy is an art; abstract and sometimes even martial. The 6th Review Conference of the BTWC was his masterpiece. Helping to get the CCW to agree on an adequate response to the humanitarian impact of cluster munitions would be no less of an achievement.


Patrick Mc Carthy


* An earlier version of this entry stated in error that that Ambassador Khan had been nominated to preside over seven weeks of CCW negotiations in 2008 on the issue of cluster munitions.

References

Masood Khan, "The 2006 BWC Review Conference: The President's Reflections." Disarmament Diplomacy, issue no. 84, spring 2007.

John Borrie, "The Limits of Modest Progress: The Rise, Fall, and Return of Efforts to Strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention." Arms Control Today, October 2006.

Photo Credit: Photo of H.E. Mr. Masood Khan - Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the United Nations and other Specialised Agencies in Geneva - retrieved from the website of the Pakistan Mission to the United Nations Geneva.