The new diplomatic push at the United Nations to establish a global prohibition on nuclear weapons could undermine the path laid out under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to one day rid the world of such armaments, a senior U.S. diplomat said this week.
“A ban treaty will come at enormous cost to the NPT political process without securing the elimination of a single warhead or improving the security of any state,” U.S. delegation representative John Bravaco said Monday in his opening statement to the U.N. Disarmament Commission in New York. “It risks deepening the divide between states, polarizing the political environment, and further complicating future prospects for achieving consensus, whether in the NPT Review Conference, the UN, or the Conference on Disarmament.”
Bravaco spoke just days after the first week of substantive negotiations on the proposed nuclear weapons ban treaty and less than a month before the first Preparatory Committee meeting for the 2020 NPT Review Conference, scheduled for May 2-17 in Vienna, Austria.
The United States last week joined about 40 nations, including the four other nuclear powers recognized under the NPT, in boycotting the nuclear ban conference in New York. These governments will not be parties to or restricted by any document that comes out of the negotiations.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley questioned the value of such a treaty when nations such as North Korea would obviously not abide by its terms. Bravaco said Monday the ban would fail to recognize the direct link between the state of the global international security environment and opportunities for disarmament, as recognized in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and would “delegitimize” the extended deterrence the United States provides to its partner nations around the world.
That, unsurprisingly, is not necessarily how the more than 100 nations participating in the conference see it, said Alicia Sanders-Zakre, a research assistant with the Brookings Institution who has been covering the conference.
“There was general consensus among participating states that the ban treaty should not undermine the NPT and that the treaty should actually reference the NPT and other existing legal disarmament frameworks,” she said Thursday by email. “Many participating states see the ban treaty as a fulfillment of Article VI of the NPT, which obligates states to pursue negotiations in good faith towards disarmament and thus complementary to the NPT.”
The 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty prohibits most member nations from acquiring, holding, or building nuclear weapons. It recognizes five nuclear-weapon states – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States – but forbids them from assisting any other treaty nation in acquiring the bomb. The ultimate goal is to set the stage for “a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
A nuclear ban would contribute to that intent, said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association.
“It has the potential of further delegitimizing the possession and use of nuclear weapons, and it’s a strong signal from the non-nuclear-weapons state majority that nuclear weapons are not important or helpful to their security but in fact are a liability for international security,” he said in a telephone interview Thursday.
The relationship between the proposed nuclear arms prohibition and the NPT is likely to be discussed at the upcoming Preparatory Committee meeting, though Chairman Henk Cor van der Kwast, the Netherlands’ disarmament ambassador at large, likely will strive to keep it from taking over the entire session, Kimball said. The Dutch diplomat was traveling this week and not available for comment, an aide said Friday.
The next and potentially final round of substantive nuclear weapons ban negotiations is scheduled for June 15 to July 7, at which point the conference could submit a report for the next U.N. General Assembly session in September. Kimball said he ultimately expects that negotiators will produce a document addressing development, production, use, and possibly testing of nuclear weapons – though potentially not this year.
Upon approval by the U.N. First Committee and General Assembly, the treaty would be opened for signature. It would enter into force after being signed and ratified by a certain number of nations – a figure that remains under discussion, Kimball said.
Governments that are participating in the talks won’t necessarily sign a treaty, he noted. The Netherlands, for example, is a member of NATO, which considers nuclear weapons to be a key component of its deterrence capabilities. The nation houses a small number of U.S. nuclear weapons on its territory.
Meanwhile, attention will turn next month to the first of three Preparatory Committee sessions to be held annually leading up to the next NPT Review Conference. The first two gatherings are intended to address the principles, objectives, and promotion of the treaty, with the third producing consensus recommendations to be taken up at the Review Conference. The 2020 meeting will evaluate implementation of the treaty and aim to produce a final document setting the path for the next five years.
Observers shouldn’t expect too much from this year’s advance event, Kimball said: “We’re going to hear a lot of general statements. We may see some new and old proposals about how to move forward, but no decisions will be or need to be taken on those issues.”
Delegates will try to formalize the rules and procedures governing the Review Conference, and perhaps to determine which diplomats from which nations will preside over the following Preparatory Committees and the Review Conference, he said.
Kimball said he expects North Korea’s nuclear-weapon drive, the state of U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control, and establishing a path for making the Middle East a WMD-free zone (as formalized in the 1995 NPT Review Conference report) to be among the top issues throughout the upcoming meetings. The decades-old, contentious debate over the route for establishing the WMD-free zone helped trip up the 2015 Review Conference, which ended without agreement on a final document and action plan.
Washington’s longstanding concern has been to safeguard the security of close ally Israel, the only nation in the region to possess nuclear weapons. The change in presidential administrations has not changed its thinking on the regional WMD-free zone, as Bravaco obliquely made clear in his comments Monday: “We urge all NPT parties to reject the false divisions over the best way to proceed on disarmament and the Middle East, so that they do not hamper consensus during this NPT review cycle.”
The U.S. Mission to the United Nations did not respond to a request for additional detail on the Trump administration’s thinking on the NPT Review Conference.
