Annex 2. Global Disarmament Regimes: A Future or a Failure?

Opening Remarks by Richard H. Stanley, President, the Stanley Foundation

    Welcome to the Stanley Foundation's 34th conference on United Nations Issues. Each year for more than 30 years, we have gathered to explore timely issues related to world challenges and global governance. This conference continues that pattern with the bjective of contributing to a secure peace with freedom and justice.

We are here to talk about how to manage weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the future role of global disarmament and nonproliferation regimes .We do this in a new and different 21st century climate.

Some have suggested that the existing legal frameworks for WMD are relics of the Cold War that should be discarded. Others argue that they remain necessary and that any difficulties are due to inadequate commitment and support. We intend to explore the full range of these perceptions, and it seems best to begin with a review of the changed nature of today's world.

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WMD Goals and Objectives

    We seek to manage weapons of mass destruction within this new and changing environment. Subject to your amendment, let me propose some goals and objectives for WMD management. It seems to me that the world will be safer and more peaceful if:

1. Weapons of mass destruction are never again used for war or terrorism.
   
   
2. Existing WMD arsenals are sharply reduced or eliminated.
   
   
3. WMD proliferation to non-WMD states is sharply limited or prevented.
   
   
4. Safeguards are put in place to prevent WMD from falling into the hands of terrorists.
   
   
5. These goals are accomplished in ways that build norms, strengthen the rule of law, and enlist the support of as many state and non-state actors as possible.
   
   

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The Status of Global Regimes

    What is the status of global WMD regimes today? In the past decade, a combination of factors has led to increased questioning of disarmament and nonproliferation regimes such as the Nuclear Non - Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), and the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).

The NPT has been weakened from within by states such as Iraq and North Korea and from without by nonsignatories such as Israel, India, and Pakistan. This raises hard questions about the global community's ability to enforce, implement, and extend this long-running regime. Furthermore, the P-5 obligation to reduce and ultimately eliminate their own nuclear arsenals is little closer to fruition than it was ten years ago, casting doubt as to whether these powers are serious about this part of the nonproliferation grand bargain.

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The Way Forward

    Our challenge here is to decide what philosophy or strategy will be the best way forward to achieve WMD goals and objectives. In the long run, will shared, mutual, verifiable constraints on international actions make states more secure, or will security through a counterproliferation approach instituted by the greater powers be better? Is there a third strategy? And what is needed to advance the most promising strategy?

As we begin our discussions, the following broad questions seem relevant:

• What are the long - term advantages, consequences, and side effects of alternative philosophies for WMD management?
  
  
• Should regulation of strategic weaponry through cooperative agreements, whatever forms such practices might take, continue to be a goal of both individual states and the international community? Or are the very concepts of arms control and disarmament ineffective and unfeasible?
  
  
• If there is a role for arms control and disarmament, should existing frameworks be discarded for a fresh start or should they be amended or extended to enhance their effectiveness?
  
  
• Should future cooperative approaches be universal in character, or should they be based on more selective or limited forms of multilateralism?
  
  
• Is combining WMD disarmament, horizontal nonproliferation, and economic development concerns within each of the global regimes the best strategy? Or should these matters be separated, both politically and conceptually?
  
  
• Can the existing regimes be amended to deal with the danger of transnational terrorism? If so, how?
  
  
• Should there be new preventive efforts to address the demand side of proliferation? How might a demand-side approach deal with transnational terrorism?
  
  

Ultimately, the international community should be guided by the answer to one fundamental question :What kind of world do we want 10, 20, or 50 years from now? Then we must work to bring about those security instruments and national security practices that are most likely to foster the preferred vision for global peace and stability.

Conference Report

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These troubling developments raise several hard questions, namely:

• What role, if any, is there for cooperative disarmament, arms control, and nonproliferation in guaranteeing global peace and security? Should cooperative global security pacts remain central to fulfilling the UN Charter's mandate?
  
  
• If there is still a role for universal treaty regimes, what is the nature of future disarmament and nonproliferation efforts? Have existing agreements been irreparably damaged, or is it still possible to move forward within existing legal and institutional structures? What alternatives might there be to the current agreements?
  
  
• More generally, was it the correct strategy to combine vertical disarmament of the P-5, horizontal nonproliferation efforts, and economic development concerns within each of the global treaty regimes? Or should these be separated, both politically and conceptually?
  
  
• Are universal, global accords actually feasible politically and technically, or will there always be "outliers" such as Israel, India, and Pakistan who undermine the efforts to achieve treaty universality?
  
  
• Is it realistic to expect that the P-5, let alone others, will always agree on the correct methods for enforcing global accords and punishing noncompliance by way w a rd states?
  
  
• Finally, what is the ideal form of U.S. leadership in shaping the future of global security?
  
  

Current Status of Global Efforts: Mounting Dangers and Missed Opportunities

Finding No. 1

A majority of participants believed that the most strict and effective provisions of global treaty regimes have yet to be effectively tested, and it is too early to call them failures when their full inspection and verification capabilities have not been tried on a widespread basis.

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Finding No. 2

The NPT regime is on the verge of becoming a hollow shell if the North Korea problem is not effectively addressed o r if Iran succeeds in building a nuclear weapons capability (uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing capability) under the umbrella of legitimate IAEA safeguards.

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Finding No. 3

The NPT regime also faces a serious erosion of norms regarding the possession and use of nuclear weapons.

There is a rising probability that the longstanding taboo against the use of nuclear weapons in wartime will be broken during future hostilities. Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki there has been a psychological, moral, and legal taboo against using nuclear destruction as a rational instrument of statecraft. However, with India and Pakistan facing each other in an increasingly coercive bilateral nuclear relationship and with the United States considering new uses for nuclear weapons in "anti-agent" or "bunker-busting" roles against WMD holdings in non-nuclear states, this longstanding norm is at risk.

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Finding No. 4

With regard to disarmament (as opposed to nonproliferation), a number of roundtable participants agreed that the CWC represented the most accomplished of the global disarmament regimes.

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Suggestions by Individual Participants for Strengthening and Supplementing the Existing Regimes

    To address the above problems and concerns, several individual participants were invited to outline in detail their specific recommendations for strengthening, amending, or supplementing the current global regimes. Their individual contributions are given as accurately as possible below, followed by the results of group discussions.

Expanding and Strengthening Existing Global Mechanisms

One participant offered the following ten steps to be taken:

1. Establish a global commission on WMD to address the challenges of a post-9/11 world. A focused, longer-term study is needed - and could perhaps be arranged along the lines of the Canberra Commission.

2. Agree to and establish as a norm a "no first-use" policy on nuclear weapons.

3. Create a legally binding treaty on negative security assurances, including a clause that states nuclear weapon states will never attack non-nuclear weapon states with nuclear weapons. Such a measure is important to prevent more North Koreas from happening.

4. Adhere to the IAEA Additional Protocol, making it mandatory for all NPT members. This would ameliorate concerns about Iran.

5. Create an NPT secretariat or executive council board that meets annually to assess threats to the treaty.

6. Make the IAEA and OPCW aggressive about special inspections.

7. Provide the IAEA with more money to safeguard fissile materials and expand safeguards to chemical and biological materials.

8. Build support for the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT) outside of the Conference on Disarmament, since efforts within it have been stymied.

9. Promote the establishment of national legislation to ban chemical, biological, and potentially nuclear weapons.

10. Consider extending the life of UNMOVIC beyond Iraq. The inspection regime has a great deal of valuable infrastructure and technology that could be retained for future verification missions.

The above suggestions enjoyed wide support from the participants; however, several doubted the feasibility of a few of the proposals, noting there is little real hope for political agreement any time soon - they have already been tried and have failed on political and strategic grounds. Most notably:

• A no-first-use convention would be rejected on strategic grounds by states such as Pakistan and the United States.
  
  
• Making the Additional Protocol binding and mandatory for all NPT members failed at the 1995 NPT Review Conference.
  
  
• There exist states like China that refuse to consider an FMCT in or out of the Conference of Disarmament.
  
  

A Combination of Practical and Revolutionary Reform

Other participants focused on a combination of far-reaching amendments to regimes - such as empowerment of the United Nations as a real actor in verification and military efforts - and more technical, narrow proposals. These sets of recommendations focused almost exclusively on nonproliferation rather than disarmament.

One participant offered the following five suggestions:

1. Change the role, structure, and composition of the UN Security Council to be less consensus-based and more reflective of post-Cold War realities.

2. Focus not on regime universality but rather on how to restrict sensitive trade between regime and non-regime members.

3. Create an enforcement mechanism stronger than a secretariat, inside or outside the United Nations, involving real resources like navies and air forces that could also be used to interdict illicit WMD or arms transfers. One participant noted that nonproliferation would have been served by interdicting the North Korean missiles bound for Yemen, but Yemen's support in the war on terror received precedent. This exposes a contradiction in the equation of counterproliferation and counterterrorism. Tools must be constructed to overcome this. A number of participants expressed the belief that the Bush administration made a mistake on the Yemeni missile transfer.

4. Ensure that any FMCT would cut off both civilian and military materials.

5. Consider the idea of a "Nonproliferation Trust, Inc." that would assume control over all spent fuel and the reprocessing of it.

This was followed by seven other suggestions for consideration:

1. Look at the regimes in a broader scheme of security to deal not only with WMD but also regional security concerns.

2. Look to declaratory statements for the establishment of moral precepts and norms, such as the institution of a no-first-use doctrine by all nuclear powers , but understand that such normative statements are useless unless states subscribe to them and implement the norms in their operational doctrines.

3. Create a standing investigative group in the United Nations with a mandate to monitor compliance with WMD regimes (possibly with the deployment of a UN verification satellite) and a mechanism to enforce noncompliance.

4. Identify proliferation choke points and restrict access to them (including the restriction of trade in technologies for reprocessing and enrichment plants). If access cannot be completely restricted, make these facilities multinational and institutionalized.

5. Identify specific danger points, such as access to radiological materials.

6. Increase cooperation in the areas of export controls and monitoring.

7. Identify future contentious issues, such as space weaponization, and address them before they arise.