Sixteen years ago, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn urged the world’s leaders to re-embrace the nuclear control and disarmament goals of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Reading today’s headlines, it appears their message was lost.
Russia’s Defense Minister just announced Moscow will be building up its nuclear arsenal. China is doing the same, as is North Korea, India, and Pakistan. Iran could acquire several nuclear weapons in a matter of weeks and the political leadership in South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have all publicly pondered the value of acquiring nuclear weapons of their own. The US, Israel, the UK, and France continue to modernize their nuclear forces.
Where does this leave the NPT? The American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Law and National Security wanted to know. It asked me to contribute to their 60th-anniversary publication, An Anthology: 60 Years of Transformation. Their question: What do the last ten years of major military and legal nuclear-related developments tell us about the future of nuclear nonproliferation.
My answer, “Nuclear Non-Proliferation…If You Can Keep It,” (attached below) is mostly grim: Unless our government and others get serious about enforcing Articles III and VI of the NPT, we are in trouble.
Article III requires states lacking nuclear weapons to place their civilian nuclear activities and materials under international safeguards. These must be able to detect a possible military nuclear diversion well before it could result in a bomb.
Unfortunately, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards are not yet up to this task and will fall further behind as more dangerous types of advanced, small and large modular reactors using higher enriched uranium and plutonium-based fuels spread. What’s needed here is a major overhaul of the IAEA’s timeliness detection goals that would dramatically increase the number of nuclear inspections and conceded that certain activities and materials might be beyond what can ever be safeguarded.
Meanwhile, Article VI of the NPT calls for “good faith” negotiations on “effective measures” to end “the nuclear arms race.” The poster child for this provision today is China. Beijing not only has repeatedly refused to join the United States and Russia in nuclear arms reductions talks, but is also expanding its nuclear arsenal at breakneck speed.
Enforcing Article VI will not only require spotlighting China’s noncompliance, but proposing nuclear control initiatives that Russia and China should embrace. These include improved hotline agreements; compliance with agreed voluntary IAEA reporting requirements on civilian plutonium production, activities, and holdings; and clarification of what a nuclear test might be.
There is more to the piece, including an optimistic take on how new generation warfare might push reliance on nuclear weapons further into the background and how new security alliance efforts might ward off allied nuclear ambitions. None of these positive efforts, though, can prevail unless we take the NPT far more seriously than we have.
January 6, 2023
Author: Henry Sokolski
Nuclear Non-Proliferation … If You Can Keep It
Peaceful Nuclear Futures: Hardly Assured
Nuclear proliferation has hardly slowed in the last decade. India, Pakistan, China, and the United Kingdom have increased their nuclear weapons stockpiles, while leaders in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Iran have all voiced an interest in militarizing their nuclear programs. The United States, meanwhile, has been schizophrenic in its control of its civilian nuclear exports. Washington has tightened restraints on exports to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Taiwan, China, and Russia and relaxed conditions on nuclear transfers to Vietnam, India, and Saudi Arabia. It has also articulated ambiguous security assurances to insecure states, including Libya, Taiwan, and Ukraine, that gave up their nuclear weapons programs or nuclear weapons based on their soil only later to be overthrown, threatened with invasion, or invaded.
None of this has strengthened nuclear non-proliferation. Just the reverse. In a series of firsts, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif; Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman; and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have all publicly threatened to leave the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, opened for signature July 1, 1968, 729 U.N.T.S. 161 (entered into force Mar. 5, 1970). See Reuters, Iran Says It Will Quit Non-Proliferation Treaty if Case Goes to UN, VOA News, Jan. 20, 2020; CBS News, Saudi Crown Prince: If Iran Develops Nuclear Bomb, So Will We, Mar. 15, 2018; Reuters, Erdogan Says It’s Unacceptable That Turkey Can’t Have Nuclear Weapons, Sept. 4, 2019. South Korea’s public, meanwhile, overwhelmingly supports acquiring the bomb, and leaders in South Korea and Japan have called on the United States to redeploy nuclear weapons on their soil (something the Pentagon has so far resisted). Toby Dalton et. al., Thinking Nuclear: South Korean Attitudes on Nuclear Weapons, Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Feb. 21, 2022; Sayuri Romei, The Legacy of Shinzo Abe: A Japan Divided About Nuclear Weapons, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Aug. 24, 2022.
Then there is Washington’s enthusiasm to develop and export advanced, small, modular reactors. See World Nuclear Association, “Small Nuclear Power Reactors,” May 2022. These plants’ backers allow that many of these new reactors could use or produce super weapons-grade plutonium and may need to be fueled with uranium containing five to seven times more of the weapons-useful isotope U235 than what most reactors now use. See American Nuclear Infrastructure Act of 2020, S. 4897, 116th Cong. § 103 (2020); Victor Gilinsky & Henry Sokolski, Fast Reactors Also Present a Fast Path to Nuclear Weapons, National Interest, Sept. 26, 2021. The spread of such plants is only likely to increase spent reactor fuel recycling and uranium enrichment—activities critical to making nuclear weapons.
China, Iran, Turkey, Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia have each expressed interest in building civilian uranium enrichment or spent fuel reprocessing plants or fast reactors. All of these countries but Turkey and Saudi Arabia are currently operating, developing, or building such plants and all have considered acquiring nuclear weapons or want to build more. In China’s case, the Pentagon believes Beijing will use its civilian fast-reactor program to expand its nuclear weapons production capacity significantly. Off. of Sec’y of Def., Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China (2021). Interest in such civilian nuclear systems has catalyzed mutual suspicions. China views Japan’s and South Korea’s fast reactor and spent fuel recycling programs as nuclear weapons options, and Japan and South Korea view each other’s and China’s programs in a similar fashion. See China Arms Control & Disarmament Ass’n, Study on Japan’s Nuclear Materials (Sept. 2015); Frank N. von Hippel, South Korean Reprocessing: An Unnecessary Threat to the Nonproliferation Regime, Arms Control Today, Mar. 2010. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and its neighbors view Iran’s nuclear program (which includes uranium enrichment) as a weapons option, and Iran views its neighbors’ nuclear programs with similar suspicion. See Michael Eisenstadt, Iran’s Nuclear Hedging Strategy, Washington Inst. for Near East Policy, Nov. 2022. How might Turkey, Egypt, and Algeria, which also have civilian nuclear programs, react to any of these Middle Eastern states acquiring nuclear weapons? What might Australia—a country that had a nuclear weapons program in the 1960s—do if South Korea or Japan acquired bombs of their own? No one knows.
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