Humanitarian Lens on Nuclear Weapons

There is renewed and deep international concern about the catastrophic humanitarian consequences that would result from the detonation of nuclear weapons in populated areas. Yet 25 years after the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence remain central to the security doctrines of a significant number of states. Drawing on a range of perspectives, the volume depicted above explores what viewing nuclear weapons through a humanitarian lens entails, and why it is undergoing such a revival. Recent developments in this respect are examined, as well as what these could mean for nuclear arms control in the near future.

The new publication was launched at UN Headquarters in New York on 16 October 2013.  To read it, use this link.

Tim Caughley and John Borrie, UNIDIR

http://www.unidir.org/NucHumanitarianLens

CD: Face-to-Face

Fifteen years have elapsed since the Conference on Disarmament last engaged in substantive work.  Briefly in August 1998 the CD tried to fulfil a newly agreed mandate to negotiate a ban on the production of fissile material.  Those efforts lasted three weeks.  Since then, negotiations on that issue have never risen beyond a procedural level.  The same is true for the other core agenda items – nuclear disarmament, preventing an arms race in outer space and negative security assurances.

During these barren years, no less than 90 presidents of the conference have grappled with the task of developing a programme of work for dealing with these four topics in a manner that is tolerable to the CD’s membership.  As required by the CD’s rules, the responsibility for chairing the 24-week annual session of the conference changes no less than six times each year. 

Sharing the presidency in alphabetical order of member states may be democratic, but it takes a toll on continuity.  And during this past decade and a half it has also proved a very lonely task.  In the absence of consensus on mandates for getting down to serious work, it has fallen to successive presidents to conduct constant shuttle diplomacy among individual delegations to find a breakthrough.  While those consultations take place off stage, the CD is effectively at a standstill.  Disarmament experts have begun to turn their attention to opportunities offered by new forums and approaches outside the conference.

Recently, the CD took a decision to mitigate both the effects of the discontinuity of the presidency and also its loneliness.  An informal working group has been established to produce the elusive programme of work. 

The duration of the new body will not be constrained by the rapid rotation of presidents.  Even better, as the group is open to all CD members and observers, a more transparent and inclusive process for uncovering and narrowing rooted differences of view should result (although this benefit will be tempered by the apparent exclusion of civil society, again).  Successive presidents will still have a role in conducting private consultations with concerned delegations, but that will no longer be the central dynamic.

One other reflection, in passing, on the rule to confine each CD presidency to four working weeks... If the conference does eventually succeed in elaborating and agreeing a programme of work, the issue of presidential rotation will fall away.  Attention would turn instead to the chairs of the subsidiary bodies established to carry out the real work of the conference.  The chairs of those bodies will become the key actors, and on past practice they won’t – and shouldn’t – be rotated month-by-month.  At that point the CD president’s role will revert largely to a titular one. 

In the meantime, if the informal working group is to salvage the CD’s credibility, it will recognise that its creation has surmounted a current short-coming in the conference’s methods of work.  An obstacle to face-to-face efforts, delegation-to-delegation, to forge the necessary compromises on matters of real substance has been removed. The issue of presidential continuity has been dealt with, and the responsibility for settling the CD's long-standing differences has been placed where it belongs - on the membership as a whole. Let the thawing begin...

Tim Caughley, Resident Senior Fellow, UNIDIR

CD: Three Mysteries

Three aspects of the Conference on Disarmament’s longstanding paralysis are particularly mystifying.

First, despite all the agonising among the 65 CD members about the current deadlock, there has been no emergence of a group of concerned countries to explore a way though the impasse.  Every month a new president alone takes on the responsibility of finding a breakthrough.  Why is this such a lonely task?  Have members tacitly accepted that the CD’s usefulness has come to an end?  After all, 16 years have elapsed since the Conference last fulfilled its mandate as a negotiating body.  If this is not the case, why is there no coordinated activity – sustained across the monthly presidencies – to shore it up? 

The Secretary-General of the Conference, Mr Tokayev, recently proposed the establishment of an informal working group with a mandate to produce a Programme of Work that would lead to negotiations. This idea has struck a chord with a number of member states. It will be interesting to see whether those members actively lobby and meet among themselves - ideally as an informal cross-regional group - to pursue this promising avenue, or whether it is simply left to successive presidents to painstakingly consult on its general acceptability.

Another mysterious aspect of the CD’s malaise is this.  Strong statements are made regularly by members of the Conference about the need to negotiate on the topic to which they attach priority.  The trial of strength over which of the core issues is “ripest” for negotiation amounts to a direct clash of political wills. The result is that there is no agreement on anything. The consensus needed for the Programme of Work and the conduct of negotiations is altogether absent.

Why is this so strange?  Well, take the case of a fissile material negotiation, or “fissban”.  The principal proponents of this issue profess to being frustrated by their inability to re-launch the negotiation that began and prematurely ended in 1998 and has never been resumed.  But what is stopping them from rallying their supporters and conducting a sustained debate in Plenary, focused ideally on a working paper containing a framework or elements of an eventual treaty?  They don’t need a Programme of Work for such an initiative – under the Rules, working in Plenary is the CD’s default option (Rule 18).

Assuming such discussions gather momentum in Plenary and build up the necessary trust along the way, a negotiating mandate will in due course be needed to intensify the work.  And time will have to be allocated to the working group in which the negotiations would be conducted.  So procedural hurdles would still remain.  The CD would, however, have rediscovered the will to work which is currently absent judged by the lack of initiatives of the kind just described.  This should in itself have a cathartic effect. By the way, a “simplified” Programme of Work (see previous postings on this site) would be the obvious vehicle for making time available for the intensified phase of negotiations just noted (to be pursued alongside other business agreed by the Conference).

Finally, it is interesting to speculate why no state has come forward with any concrete working paper on fissile material negotiations in recent years? Draft treaties were tabled in 2006 and 2009 by the US and by Japan and the Netherlands respectively, while Brazil, Canada and Australia each made proposals in 2010.  But since then, there has been nothing quite as specific apart from the working paper of Bulgaria, Germany, Mexico, Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden and Turkey in June 2011.  The lack of any recent proposal on fissile material  - as a new focus for Plenary debate - is hardly a ringing endorsement of the CD. 

Maybe, as with nuclear disarmament, attention is turning elsewhere. UNOG’s website records that, in advance of the convening in Geneva in 2014 and 2015 of a Group of Government Experts (GGE) on fissile material, 25 states and the EU have recently responded to the UN Secretary-General’s request to submit their views to him on a fissile material ban.  The GGE will proceed on the specific understanding that if the CD meanwhile agrees and implements a programme of Work that includes the negotiation of a fissban, the GGE will cease and any product of its work will be passed on to the CD. 

With very little time left during the current session of the CD for the tabling of concrete proposals on a fissban, let alone a Programme of Work, and in the absence of any member-driven, cross-regional initiative to caucus to overcome the sorry deadlock, these mysteries about getting work underway seem set to remain unsolved.  Yet the solutions aren’t nearly as complicated as the current, discredited efforts to agree fatally-linked, multiple mandates in a single document. Persisting with the latter is the third and most worrisome mystery.

Tim Caughley, Resident Senior Fellow, UNIDIR

CD: “Simplified” programme of work

The notion of a “simplified” programme of work is getting increasing airplay in the Conference of Disarmament (CD) these days. (For those unfamiliar with the chronic stalemate in the CD, agreeing a programme of work setting out the priorities of the Conference is a necessary precursor to real engagement in that body.)

It is not surprising that interest in simplifying the annual work programme should be growing.  Since 1999, drafts of the programme have been unnecessarily laden with mandates that have defied the consensus required for their adoption except in 2009 when there was an-all-too short-lived breakthrough (CD/1864). Mandates included in draft work programmes since 1999 are to begin real work on up to four “core” priorities dealing with nuclear disarmament, fissile material, outer space and security assurances.

The Rules of Procedure, as well as CD/1036 (a decision on the “Improved and Effective Functioning” of the Conference adopted on 21 August 1990), envisage a streamlined approach whereby the programme of work would be no more than a mere schedule of business rather than an overarching mandate or mandates for beginning to elaborate a treaty or memorandum of understanding on one or more of the core issues.

Decision CD/1036 led to the current rule on the work programme, rule 28, with its emphasis on establishing rather than adopting. This is not a matter of semantics. It means that having established through his or her consultations that no reasonable objection exists to the schedule of business for the year, the CD president would get work underway without a formal decision. In theory at least, the work programme, shorn of mandates, would be so simple as not to require a formal, consensus decision of the Conference.

Things haven’t panned out as envisaged.  Mandates on the 4 core issues have become inseparably linked, and worse, they have been embodied unnecessarily in draft work programmes. These linkages aren’t accidental.  They are deliberate.  Therefore they can be broken. A simplified programme of work might help in that regard.

What would a simplified programme look like? This column has been offering ideas since 2009 – see list below – and suggested a possible format in 2011.  Boiled right down, a simplified approach would have these features:

1. There would be an allocation of time to be spent during the annual session on each of the 4 core issues and other substantive agenda items.  That timetable would also allocate space for the annual high-level segment and for agreeing the CD’s report to the UN General Assembly.  In addition, it would reserve time for discussion of the outcomes of the second feature of the programme.

2. Within the allocation of time for each of the core issues, the central matter for CD members to resolve would be: under rule 23 of the Rules of Procedure, is there a need to establish a subsidiary body in which engagement would be intensified? That is, does a basis exist for the negotiation of “a draft treaty or other draft texts”?  Note that a subsidiary body is generally regarded as being more appropriate for facilitating intense engagement than the comparatively stilted, formal option of conducting work in plenary, although under the Rules, plenary meetings are the default option and would be the venue for fulfilling this part of the simplified work programme.

3. As when and if the questions arising under rule 23 are answered in the affirmative, members would immediately apportion time from the reserved allocation (see 1. above) for the negotiation of the necessary mandate. Mandates would evolve independently of each other.

4. Agreement on the negotiated mandates would require consensus.  Decisions on mandates would take place singly rather than collectively, unless otherwise agreed (by consensus)(see further below).  Agreement on individual mandates is most unlikely to be achieved simultaneously.  The timetable would need to be flexible enough to deal with that reality.

In weighing the pros and cons of this simplified approach, the following key considerations arise:

- Does this approach involve bending the Rules of Procedure? No, it entails applying them more faithfully.

- Will the mandates that have been refined and embodied in successive draft programmes of work since 1999 remain on the table? Yes, of course, but they will be examined one-by-one, and judged on their individual merits rather than as a package of four.

- What is the main advantage of this approach? It will help members to gauge issue-by-issue whether there really exists a will to begin serious work on each priority and, if so, their readiness to compromise on the ingredients of the mandate that will be required.  This may assist in recalibrating the 4 priorities, for example, in downgrading the push for security assurances, an issue whose need may have subsided marginally relative to the other 3 issues.  And by considering each issue on its own merits, members should be able to weigh more acutely the CD’s capacity to make progress on elaborating more than one “draft treaty or other draft texts” at a time.

- Will treating the mandates one-by-one guarantee that linkages among them are avoided? No, but any attempt to forge linkages will necessarily be more transparent.  Linkages may be needed, for instance, in developing a framework of issues as a compromise solution to the standoff over fissile material and nuclear disarmament.  Or there may need to be an understanding over the sequence of treatment of core issues to ensure that none is unacceptably overwhelmed by intensifying work on others.  Members protecting their interests in such a way on a given issue will necessarily do so openly on the record of the CD. 
The key difference from the present situation is that work on the mandates will be taking place under an agreed work programme, albeit a simplified one. The clock will actually be running. Members will no longer be wringing their hands waiting for the president to pull a rabbit out of the hat.

Tim Caughley, Resident Senior Fellow, UNIDIR

http://disarmamentinsight.blogspot.ch/2013/02/back-to-basics-in-conference-on.html

http://disarmamentinsight.blogspot.ch/2013/01/conference-on-disarmament-cd-echoes-of.html

http://disarmamentinsight.blogspot.ch/2011/07/last-throw-of-dice-for-cd.html

http://disarmamentinsight.blogspot.ch/2011/03/cd-getting-to-first-base-on-simplified.html

http://disarmamentinsight.blogspot.ch/2010/02/shannon-mandate-aged-15.html

http://disarmamentinsight.blogspot.ch/2009/10/conference-on-disarmament-getting.html

Creative Options for the CD Part 2

This is the second of two postings drawn from comments made on 15 May during a seminar organised by Indonesia and UNIDIR. The first post offered creative options for breaking the longstanding impasse in the Conference on Disarmament (CD).  This posting considers briefly the need for creative options to the CD itself.  It begins by asking whether the relevance of the CD has diminished since its Cold War heyday? As in the first post, it ponders the puzzling lack of initiatives by members to supplement dutiful efforts of successive presidents to find a way through the longstanding impasse.

Is it beyond the CD’s three regional groups to play a more active role in augmenting or reinforcing the president’s efforts to broker compromise?  They could depute several members – say a troika of present, past and future chairs – to meet their counterparts in other groups plus China (which forms a group of one) actively to explore ways forward instead of caucusing only in their opwn blocs .  The absence of any initiative of this or any other cross-regional kind is revealing in itself.  In the post-Cold War era, has the CD lost a sense of purpose?  Attention, in any event, has begun to turn elsewhere.

Many of those states that have experienced success this decade in the CCW on Protocol V, in the General Assembly on the ATT, and in the diplomatic conferences on anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions, have begun to challenge the status quo. They know that, while the CD may be a “single” multinational negotiating body dealing with a whole range of issues under the one roof as envisaged by UNSSOD-1, it is by no means the sole negotiating forum.

In the arms control and disarmament sphere, the dynamic of like-mindedness has offered a new way forward. Action, not passivity, is the byword of groups of states that work together in common cause with civil society and international organizations notably to secure humanitarian objectives such as the stigmatisation landmines and cluster munitions and other egregious armaments.

The CD’s lengthy impasse has been the catalyst for new initiatives.  The setting up by the General Assembly of the OEWG on nuclear disarmament and the GGE on fissile material surely reflects a simple message.  If the CD has the capacity to be at all responsive to the post-Cold War security environment it needs first to confront head-on its deadlock on these two core issues of substance now assigned to parallel forums.

Second, in reaching compromise on substance, the CD needs to apply its rules of procedure in a constructive, enlightened manner rather than as the kiss of death. The path to effective multilateralism in the Conference depends on moving from a passive to an active culture with a focus on how to begin things, not how to stop them.

The responsiveness of the CD to these challenges - if not to its very existence then certainly as to its effectiveness - is on the line. Those clinging to the status quo in the Conference might do well to heed a development at the recent preparatory meeting of the NPT: - the sense of empowerment engendered by the statement of 80 like-minded states on the issue of the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons was palpable.

Tim Caughley, Resident Senior Fellow, UNIDIR

Creative Options for the CD Part 1

This posting is drawn from comments made on 15 May during a seminar organised by Indonesia and UNIDIR.

In looking at the impasse in the Conference, it is necessary first to acknowledge the complicated international security backdrop to the CD. How much does the security climate impact on the effectiveness of the Conference? How can it be measured? In practical terms, however, the UN General Assembly appears to believe that any such impacts are manageable.  Why else would it continue to agree in these times of budgetary constraint to convene the CD for 24 weeks a year, year in, year out for such a modest return?

That question is not intended to downplay the symbolic importance of the CD. The Conference was established as a multilateral negotiating forum by the General Assembly at its special session on disarmament (UNSSOD-1) in 1978 at a time when arms control and disarmament had been treated as the preserve of a dozen or so powerful military nations. The quid pro quo was the emphasis placed by the General Assembly on participation of nuclear-weapons-possessing states on the basis of consensus.

The fact is, though, that recently the General Assembly has become less unquestioning about the stalemate in the CD.  The CD itself has yet to take the hint. Its seeming lack of capacity to challenge the status quo is worrying.  Or at least it is to those members whose security is patently not well served by the status quo.

Some of these habits may be changing. The General Assembly recently agreed to various initiatives for new subsidiary organs on nuclear disarmament and fissile material, two core issues of the CD. It also decided to convene a High Level Meeting (HLM) on nuclear disarmament. These developments are not mere coincidence.

Key questions being asked by UN members states about the CD are: 

• Why does misuse of the rule on the programme of work persist? 
• Why is the consensus rule applied as though it were a crude right to veto?
• Why is annual report to the General Assembly (the CD’s constituting body) more revealing for what it doesn’t say than for what can be found in the actual text itself?
• Why is the Conference so extraordinarily conservative over its membership and the involvement of civil society?

Those who profess to be satisfied by the status quo solemnly champion the CD’s continued existence but in a curiously passive manner. There are not only few signs of self-driven change but even fewer signs of serious efforts to promote change.

Here briefly is what significant groups of states say about resolving the CD’s impasse.

* At the 2010 HLM on revitalizing the CD, the NAM – when stressing the priority attached to nuclear disarmament by UNSSOD-1 - said this: “… it is counter-productive to ascribe the lack of concrete results in the CD to its rules of procedure, as such an approach could conceal the true obstacle faced by the CD, which is lack of political will”. 

* In its most recent statement, the P5 “ … expressed their shared disappointment that the Conference on Disarmament continues to be prevented from agreeing on a comprehensive program of work, including work on a … ban on the production of fissile material … and discussed efforts to find a way forward in the Conference … including by continuing their efforts with other relevant partners to promote such negotiations within the CD”.

The P5 did not spell out the extent of its efforts to find a way forward. And the NAM did not say exactly how a lack of political will could be remedied. But it is clear that any creative option for resolving the CD’s impasse must first recognize, then deal squarely with, the reality that it is the stand-off over fissile material and nuclear disarmament, the issues alluded to by the P5 and NAM respectively, that is casting the darkest cloud in the Council Chamber.

The ostensible obstacle – and manifestation of the stand-off on substance - is how to achieve agreement on a programme of work.  But the rule requiring agreement on a programme of work is only an obstacle if the CD treats it as one.  If, however, the Conference is ready to begin serious work, it will simplify its approach to the work programme, de-emphasise the inherent linkages among all four core issues and treat the programme as no more than the organizational tool that it is.  All that the rule requires in terms of content is that the programme include a schedule of activities – that is, a timetable.

The characteristic of a healthy body that wanted to get down to work would be a readiness to caucus informally to explore solutions.  Yet when did we last see groups of member states actively organizing meetings with one another to seek a break-through? 

Revitalisation of the CD requires less introspection and more action. The Conference should first recognise that a line needs to be drawn under its efforts to produce a multi-mandated work programme. These steps might then follow:

* The CD would concentrate for the rest of the current session on agreeing in principle on a schedule or timetable of activities for 2014.

* This year’s annual report to the General Assembly would incorporate that draft schedule.

* The schedule would allocate equal time for discussion to each of the four core issues with a lesser amount of time to other agenda items.

* It would be adopted along with the agenda when the CD reconvenes next January.

* For each of the four issues, the only point for discussion under the time allocated would be this: under rule 23 of the Rules of Procedure is there a need to establish a subsidiary body?  That is, does a basis exist for the negotiation of “a draft treaty or other draft texts”?

* Where those questions are answered in the affirmative, mandates for the required subsidiary body or bodies would be negotiated.

* Mandates would evolve independently of each other. They would not be aggregated in future work programmes which would be confined essentially to allocating time to subsidiary bodies for pursuing agreed mandates.

If linkages among mandates crept back into the CD’s modus operandi, the necessary spirit of compromise to keep the Conference functioning would patently be lacking.  The General Assembly would draw its own conclusions. In respect of the new OEWG on nuclear disarmament and the GGE on fissile material, perhaps it has already shown its hand.

Tim Caughley, Resident Senior Fellow, UNIDIR

ATT Consensus: Voting – what if...?

With the dust beginning to settle after the high drama of the negotiations of the Arms Trade Treaty, some reflections on the decision-making process are beginning to emerge. Here's another one ...

To recap, in 2009 the United Nations General Assembly agreed in A/RES/64/48 to convene a UN Conference to elaborate a treaty setting the “highest possible common international standards for the transfer of conventional arms”.  The UNGA also agreed that the conference would proceed, on the basis of consensus, to “achieve a strong and robust treaty”.

In short, the goals were a strong, robust treaty containing standards that were the highest possible that could be achieved without any nation formally opposing the adoption of the final product of the Conference.

For the United States in particular the possibility of blocking the adoption of a treaty that did not meet its needs was a major factor behind the incorporation of the consensus rule.  UN Conferences are masters of their own rules: the ATT Conference could equally have adopted the rules of the UNGA under which decisions on important questions are made by a two-thirds majority of member states present and voting.  

In the event, consensus eluded the negotiators of the ATT. The culminating act of the Conference should have been the adoption of the draft Treaty but Iran, North Korea and Syria objected to the text.  Those 3 countries did not just shrug their shoulders and resign themselves to the reality that almost 180 other countries were more or less satisfied with the draft.  Nor did those 3 states decide simply to remain silent and content themselves with not signing, ratifying or acceding to the new treaty.  They chose instead to rely on the consensus rule to formally voice their opposition, so blocking consensus and burying the product of the Conference.

Well, not quite. The draft survived intact. Sixty-four countries tabled it a few days later for decision in the UNGA where consensus, as noted earlier, is not required.  It passed easily with 154 nations voting in favour including the US, but with the DPRK, Iran and Syria still against, and 23 abstaining.

Circumventing the consensus rule in this forum-shopping manner had its detractors amongst the naysayers and abstainers in the GA. But a prior question to ask is why the consensus rule was adopted by the Conference in the first place.  The rationale for the consensus rule in treaty negotiations is ostensibly to prevent the national security interests of a minority being jeopardized by a large majority.  Yet treaty obligations cannot be imposed on any state without that nation’s consent.  Consent is not implied by the mere act of being part of a consensus.  Consent must be expressed explicitly both through constitutional procedures as well as in the manner prescribed by the treaty (usually ratification or accession).  These are national decisions entirely within each state’s control.

At the international level, consensus means that negotiators must strive at all times for the greatest meeting of minds possible. There is nothing wrong with aiming for general agreement.  In the context of hundreds of thousands of deaths each year from armed violence, the objective of the ATT of producing “highest possible common international standards” patently requires it.  To hold any real meaning, however, that same expression surely recognises that a lowest common denominator outcome must be avoided.

And this is where voting comes in to play.  As we’ve noted before, the possibility of voting, however remote, concentrates the minds.  In so doing, it improves the ultimate product by raising the level at which compromise is finally brokered.  What if the ATT rules of procedure, in prescribing consensus, had also provided for voting by a very high majority but only after all feasible efforts to reach general agreement had been exhausted? Would the text have been stronger? Would the standards have been higher? Would consensus have been achieved? Would Iran, North Korea and Syria still have stood aside? Would the US even have participated in the Conference?

Difficult questions to answer.  But let’s finish with perhaps a more fundamental question.  Isn’t this a situation where the international community to its cost has overlooked the reality that the consensus rule can invest disproportionate power in the naysayers?  Or has the UN General Assembly become the de facto voting mechanism of last resort, as in this case and that of the CTBT?  Not a tidy way of proceeding, but arguably one that justifies the means - one that in effect “corrects” the misguided original adoption of the consensus rule by the GA in 2009. International comity, however, would be better served by a less haphazard way of developing treaty law, and especially by a more enlightened application of the consensus rule.


Tim Caughley, Resident Senior Fellow, UNIDIR 

Humanitarian Success

Interest in learning more about the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons drew almost 130 states to a meeting in Oslo recently.  Given the high consequences for humanity of any detonation of a nuclear weapon, such a large turnout is hardly surprising. 

Notably, however, the 5 permanent members of the Security Council - all possessors of nuclear arsenals and all subject to NPT obligations to disarm - declined their invitations to attend.  Their reasons for staying away warrant examination.

But first some facts.  The Oslo event was simply an evidence-assessing opportunity - no negotiating, no decisions, no lofty declarations.  Rather, the conference offered an arena for a fact-based discussion of the humanitarian and developmental consequences associated with a nuclear weapon detonation. The meeting drew on inputs from a wide-range of scientific, medical, and other experts including disaster-preparedness specialists from the Red Cross Movement and UN agencies.

Nonetheless, the 5 NPT nuclear weapon states (P5) collectively took the view that the 2-day Oslo meeting would divert discussion and energy from a practical step-by-step approach towards nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.

Given the current paralysis in nuclear disarmament negotiating fora - a state of affairs that played a part in inspiring the new approach represented by the Oslo meeting - this is a curious argument.  What are the practical steps to which the nuclear weapon states might be referring?

Apart from ongoing US-Russian bilateral steps and some inconclusive P5 caucusing, there’s not much evidence of activities of any progressive kind. 

- For instance, the practical steps agreed by the nuclear weapon states as part of the NPT parties’ consensus in 2000 were honoured in the breach, if not undermined by some of the P5, until belatedly re-affirmed in the 2010 Review Conference action plan. 

- No practical steps are possible in the Conference on Disarmament which has long been blocked by a succession of nuclear weapons-possessing states.

- Progress on even the most basic opening up of transparency via agreement amongst the P5 on a reporting format for the NPT’s repository of information on nuclear weapons’ holdings is glacial.

- Any further relaxation of the cold war levels of alert of nuclear weapons is sternly opposed by 4 of the 5 permanent Security Council members when the issue comes before the UN General Assembly from time to time.

- Fulfillment by the nuclear weapon states of the NPT article VI obligation “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament” is unconsummated.  Worse, attempts by other states to offer a focus on nuclear weapons - such as at the Oslo event and the forthcoming UN Open-ended Work Group on nuclear disarmament (OEWG) - have been spurned.

- The most that can be said about possible practical steps currently in train is to hope that the P5 are making steady progress, along with all other NPT parties, in implementing the 2010 action plan.

The 5 nuclear weapon states opted not to be represented in Oslo even by a junior note-taker.  This leaves them open to criticism of seeming insensitivity to the argument of the vast majority of states that issues affecting nuclear weapons are of consequence and concern to all nations, not just the possessing countries.  This they may deny. But in the absence of any sustained progress on possible steps towards nuclear disarmament in which they are collectively involved, there will inevitably be speculation on the real reason for the 5 NPT nuclear weapon states to shun the Oslo meeting. 

What can be said, however, is that the Oslo event, the OEWG in mid-year, the UN High Level Meeting on 26 September, and the Mexico-hosted follow-up to the Oslo meeting are bringing heightened new focus to nuclear weapons’ issues this year.  Equally, these meetings offer opportunities for the P5 to outline progress on the practical steps to which they attach so much importance including those on which they have undertaken to report to the NPT PrepCom in 2014.  Taking up these opportunities would be rather more consistent with the spirit of the NPT especially article VI than being absent.  Let’s hope that they will reconsider their approach.
Tim Caughley and John Borrie