Conference on Disarmament: Time for Change

These are some notes that formed the basis of a talk on the Conference on Disarmament to the UN Disarmament Fellows on 21 August 2017.

1. In 1978, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) established the CD as a ‘single multilateral disarmament negotiating forum of the international community’ (see para 120 of the report of the First Special Session on Disarmament (UNSSOD-1)). It is a ‘single’ forum in the sense that it is a standing body with its own secretariat that can conduct negotiations sequentially on agreed topics. In that sense it is a convenient venue for disarmament negotiations, but it is not an exclusive one—it is NOT the ‘sole’ forum.

2. The CD was set up as a ‘negotiating body’. This is in contrast to the UN Disarmament Commission and the First Committee of the UNGA that are ‘deliberative’ forums—venues for developing understandings at most rather than legally-binding treaties. The last negotiations carried out in the CD were from 1994 to 1996 to develop a treaty banning the testing of nuclear weapons (CTBT). Since then, the Conference has briefly begun negotiations on banning fissile material and on negative security assurances (both in 1998) but neither negotiation was sustained beyond that year. Increasingly, States have turned to alternative forums – UNGA (e.g., for the ATT, FMCT and TPNW), Diplomatic Conferences (APMBC and CCM).

3. The CD is a negotiating forum of limited membership (65 States). UNSSOD-1 attached ‘great importance’ to the participation of all the nuclear-weapon States. To ensure this, decision-making has to be by consensus (i.e., the absence of a formal objection). This avoids situations, for example, where those States would find themselves in a minority, out-voted on matters affecting nuclear weapons. The consensus rule in the CD is not in itself the reason for the CD’s longstanding deadlock. But because consensus is the sole decision-making rule, there is a responsibility on all members to apply it in a principled way. It should not be treated as a blunt veto but should be used sparingly, ideally only in situations where genuine and exhaustive efforts to seek consensus have been made and where a State’s national interests would be palpably jeopardized. In any event, the difficulty of separating substance from procedure in relation to the weighty security topics on the CD’s agenda means that it is unlikely that members would agree to finessing the consensus rule in any way far less incorporating additional decision-making rules.

4. The terms of reference of the CD include practically all multilateral arms control and disarmament problems. Currently the CD primarily concentrates on four ‘core’ issues:

- nuclear disarmament,

- banning the production of fissile material for use in nuclear weapons (FM(C)T);

- preventing an arms race in outer space (PAROS); and

- assuring non-nuclear-weapon States against the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons (NSAs).

The terms of reference of the CD should not to be confused with its annual agenda, or with the Programme of Work (PoW) which is required to be negotiated and adopted at the beginning of each year (Rule 28).

5. The Rules of Procedure of the CD are sometimes blamed for inhibiting the Conference. But the problem is less the rules themselves—after all, they served satisfactorily in the past—and more the manner in which the members choose to apply them. For instance, throughout these past 20 unproductive years the practice of linking mandates for dealing with all four core issues within a single Programme of Work is at odds with the rules. The PoW needs be no more than a schedule of activities - there is no need for it to embody any mandates let alone linking all four where, given the consensus rule, if there's a formal objection to one of the mandates in the PoW they all fail. Mandates, of course, are required for each negotiation the CD launches, but they don't have to be actually incorporated in the PoW.

6. During debates in the CD, States often lament the ‘absence of political will’ amongst members. But the problem is the clashing of political wills, not their absence. Some States want action and progress, but others prefer the status quo. Traditionally, security issues take time to negotiate. Sadly, however, efforts to recognise and overcome the clash of wills have been fitful and feeble. Hesitant attempts have been made to move away from PoWs that link all four core issues, to change the focus of the Conference to new issues, to intensify discussions via an informal Working Group on the way ahead, etc. These attempts have yet to bear fruit.

If the CD is to prosper once again, members are faced with a more existential choice. Is the CD going to surrender in effect to irrelevance in the face of the challenge of negotiating in a highly disturbed global security environment? Or is it going to respond to that challenge by getting back to basics:

- acknowledging that the longstanding and stale clash of political wills is bankrupting the legitimacy of the CD;

- interpreting the RoP constructively rather than the reverse;

- accepting that active diplomacy amongst the members is urgently required to find mechanisms for re-building long-lost trust and confidence—mechanisms for staggering the attention of the CD on its core issues rather than trying to deal with them simultaneously, mechanisms for developing pre-negotiations on technical issues and matters of definition, etc:

- recognising that the task of restoring confidence requires accepting the realities of the consensus rule while at the same time insulating it from abuse; and

- being always mindful that the advantages of existing as a single (but not sole) multilateral disarmament negotiating forum of the international community will continue to atrophy as negotiations take place elsewhere and the CD’s stature diminishes.

In short, the 'rationality and diplomatic solutions' sought of the CD by the UN Secretary-General at the outset of this year's session remain in urgent need of application.

Tim Caughley

Resident Senior Fellow
UNIDIR

Political will/Political won’t. Compromise?

Apart from the ritualistic and sometimes ironic “congratulations” that are offered each month to the incoming president of the deadlocked Conference on Disarmament, the most common expression heard in the Council Chamber  is “political will”.  

Or more accurately, “the lack of political will”. 

I was asked by one of this year’s UN Disarmament Fellows what “political will” means.  My response was to duck the question by saying that what was lacking in the CD was “compromise”, not political will.  

- Compromise between those states that don’t want a ban on the production of fissile material to cover existing stocks of such material, and those that do 

- Compromise between those that want a binding agreement to prevent an arms race in outer space, and those that don’t

- Compromise between those that don’t want negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons, and those that do 

- Compromise between those on the one hand that want the nuclear weapon states to provide legally binding assurances that nuclear weapons will not be used against non-nuclear weapon states, and on the other hand those that believe existing assurances are sufficient

- Compromise amongst those championing negotiations on any one or more of those activities

- Compromise between those that see the CD’s rules of procedure as a constraint, and those that see their national sovereignty as diminished by such constraint... 

But to return to the question.  “Political will” was described by the previous High Representative for Disarmament Affairs Sergio Duarte as the source of energy that allows for movement past agreed milestones. A former Director of UNIDIR Patricia Lewis defined political will as “the sustained determination to advance a public interest, even in the face of strong resistance”.  Both recognised that the current problem in the disarmament arena is not so much a lack of political will but a clash of political wills.

As has been apparent in the CD’s thematic debate on revitalising the Conference, views on how to overcome this clash of wills remain far apart.  Indeed, some doubt whether the political will to forge compromises and negotiate broadly acceptable outcomes is even possible in a more complicated post-Cold War security environment.  If this is so, sustaining the CD in its current mode will be harder to justify, spawning perhaps ad hoc processes driven by like-minded states, but open to all, where political energy is more readily harnessed to achieve a public interest. Those states that choose to stand aside from such processes deny themselves the ability to influence the outcome, outcomes that strive for consensus but which allow recourse to voting to prevent endless deadlock.

In the meantime, it would be nice to hear and see more use of the word “compromise” in the Conference on Disarmament in a practical effort by its members to give meaning to "political will" as the CD finalises its annual report to the UN General Assembly and completes its otherwise barren 2012 session.

This is a guest blog by Tim Caughley, Resident Senior Fellow, UNIDIR.

For brief background material on the CD see the publication “The Conference on Disarmament Issues and Insights” 

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.

Paradigm shift in the negotiation chamber

Multilateral disarmament and arms control negotiations have achieved scant success in recent years. Based on this observation, a few questions come to my mind: Can we get beyond blaming political will and find innovative ways to shift today’s approaches towards more productive strategies? How can multilateral negotiations be made more effective? In particular, how can new insights about the dynamics of cooperation help us tackle complex negotiation dilemmas?

I recently read an interesting report published by the Institute for the Future, an independent, non-profit strategic research group based in California, whose aim is to identify emerging trends that will transform the global marketplace. This report, entitled “Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business: Managing Dilemmas in the 21st Century”, is in my opinion highly relevant to the practice of disarmament and arms control multilateral negotiators. One point stressed in this paper is that it’s necessary to develop our understanding of cooperation by looking at it through the lens of various disciplines:

“In the last decade, scientists and social thinkers in a range of fields have independently discovered cooperation at the heart of a number of important phenomena. Evolutionary biologists, for example, have revealed how symbiosis plays a key role in everything from cellular evolution to speciation and ecosystem complexity. Mathematicians are revealing basic patterns that underlie synchrony and swarming at all levels of nature, informing our understanding of how cooperative actions and institutions can emerge from distributed actors. Sociologists have revisited the “tragedy of the commons,” illustrating how various commons have been transformed into successful cooperative ventures in different industries and environments.” (see reference below)

An interdisciplinary approach, including insights from physics, psychology, evolutionary biology and behavioural economics shouldn’t aim at developing recipes to insure success of negotiating processes. In fact, when it comes to understand social groups’ dynamics, there are no recipes or magical algorithms. However, it seems to me that these studies have a lot to teach us about complex problem solving. And I like to think that in 20 years, I’ll be able to say that I was among the first to believe in this paradigm shift.


Aurélia Merçay


Reference

Saveri, A. et al., available at http://www.iftf.org/docs/SR-851A_New_Literacy_Cooperation.pdf

Tit for Tat and the Diplomat

It’s been a pretty dismal decade for international disarmament and arms control diplomacy. The review meeting of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in May 2005 failed to agree on any meaningful steps to curb and roll back the spread of nukes. India and Pakistan – and now Iran and North Korea – pose challenges to the existing nuclear order that may stretch it beyond breaking point. The nuclear test ban flounders in limbo although a fragile moratorium holds pending its entry into force. The treaty banning biological weapons still lacks a verification regime although it did manage to get through its review meeting in late 2006 without breaking up in disarray like in 2001. And, although talks there have gained a new lease of life there this year, efforts to commence negotiations on screening fissile material production, or prevent an arms race in outer space, remain stillborn after almost a decade of talks in the fading splendour of the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva.

Explanations for these failures usually revolve around ‘political will’ and geopolitics, characterizations that are generally valid. But they don’t convey the full picture.

A missing element is how the multilateral system itself works or, rather, fails to work. Multilateral diplomats aren’t merely the messengers of governments. Their perceptions and skills matter to the success or failure of international diplomacy (just think of John Bolton). The problem is that, as the examples above show, diplomatic “business as usual” seems maladapted to solving contemporary challenges, or of adopting new ways of doing things that will better achieve international security objectives.

The accuracy of negotiators’ perceptions or the relevance of their skills to multilateral arms control processes has received scant attention until now. One reason why is that they regard diplomatic negotiation as a black art. To this way of thinking, intuition and persuasion are unknowable x factors, opaque to rational analysis or double-checking. They’re seen as the advantage a good negotiator has over a mediocre one, and a source of professional mystique to boot.

“Trust us – we don’t understand how we do what we do, but we know what we’re doing.” It’s a risky premise when the stakes for humanity’s welfare are so high and depend as heavily as they do on cooperative activity across cultural and political divides.

It’s also a view that’s mistaken. Intuitions are important in the hothouse of multilateral negotiating. But advances in understanding human nature based on the natural and behavioural sciences show that some intuitions can be wrong – even when they feel right. If negotiators don’t recognise this, they increase their chances of failure.


John Borrie