WASHINGTON -- A global financial meltdown might be at the top of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's agenda upon taking office Jan. 20, but international diplomats are already abuzz about the prospects for strengthening nuclear nonproliferation regimes under the new administration (see GSN, Oct. 20).
(Nov. 12) -
The closing session of the 2005 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference ended with no consensus on measures to strengthen the pact. The next conference is scheduled for 2010 (Eskinder Debebe/U.N. photo).
The Obama administration should have an early opportunity to signal its approach to the matter during a May 2009 preparatory meeting for the 2010 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference, according to experts.
The preparatory committee meeting in New York is expected to set the stage for the full review conference, a weeks-long summit held every five years to assess the performance of the treaty and to discuss ways of improving the pact.
Participants in the process are beginning to call for new initiatives ranging from taking major nuclear arsenals off hair-trigger alert to ensuring that any new global agreements apply to atomic arms in Pakistan, India and Israel (see GSN, Oct. 24 and Oct. 21).
As a presidential candidate, the Illinois Democrat stated an interest in bolstering the nonproliferation accord. However, he has yet to flesh out the details of such an effort.
"When I'm president, we'll strengthen the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty so that nations that don't comply will automatically face strong international sanctions," Obama said last year. He also pledged to "take the lead to work for a world in which the roles and risks of nuclear weapons can be reduced and ultimately eliminated."
Under the treaty, signatory nations with nuclear weapons -- the United States and four other major powers -- have vowed "good faith" efforts to work toward disarmament in exchange for all other nations renouncing nuclear arsenals.
The pact allows international assistance for civilian nuclear energy programs, as long as nations can demonstrate that atomic materials or technology are not diverted to military efforts.
However, the treaty's effectiveness has increasingly come under question in recent years, with North Korea and allegedly Iran developing nuclear weapons in secret (see GSN, Sept. 30). Questions swirl over the possibility that Syria is doing the same (see GSN, Nov. 11).
Some arms control advocates have charged that a new U.S. nuclear trade deal with India has further weakened the NPT rules by legitimizing the nonsignatory nation's atomic arms, thereby setting an international double standard (see GSN, Oct. 22).
Obama opted to support the India accord -- negotiated and championed by President George W. Bush -- so long as the pact would not aid the South Asian nation's ability to build new weapons or export its technology to other countries.
"The existing agreement effectively balanced a range of important issues -- from our strategic relationship with India to our nonproliferation concerns to India's energy need," Obama said in July. "I am therefore reluctant to seek changes."
Given the nuances surrounding nonproliferation issues, it might be unrealistic to expect the incoming administration to be ready to hash out its policy approach to the 2010 NPT Review Conference by the May 4-15 preparatory committee session, according to one observer.
"A new administration takes office in January 2009, making [the May 2009] PrepCom too early for [a] major reorientation of U.S. policies," Deepti Choubey, deputy director of the Nonproliferation Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said during a Nov. 7 panel discussion. There she presented a new monograph titled, "Are New Nuclear Bargains Attainable?"
"I'm a little worried about the expectations that the rest of the world has of an Obama administration," she said. "We need to tamp down those expectations ... because this administration is facing a very crowded policy agenda. And there are significant bureaucratic challenges for coordinating a reorientation in approach ... [in] a very short time frame for action."
Another panelist, though, argued that high expectations could become a catalyst in helping the new administration reach challenging objectives -- in this case, preserving and bolstering crucial nonproliferation norms.
"Don't try to tamp down expectations," cautioned Achilles Zaluar, a Brazilian diplomat who specializes in nonproliferation and defense issues. "Expectations ... are to the international regimes as credit is to banks and to the financial system. They are ... the blood that makes it live."
Rather, he said, participants in the upcoming review process must "restore some sense of shared assumptions and shared expectations."
Another panelist, Australian envoy Peter Sawczak, said it might prove difficult to rally global interest in the issue amid protracted economic crises and military conflicts.
"I don't know how we capture public attention with this," he said. "We've obviously done it very successfully in the context of landmines and cluster weapons, but we can't really afford a humanitarian disaster in the nuclear context to move public debate along."
Another challenge would be "to present nuclear challenges in layman's terms," said Sawczak, a former counterproliferation official at the Australian Foreign Affairs and Trade Department. The scientific community must find a way "to explain how we can achieve disarmament, intervening stockpile security, and increased nuclear energy quickly," he said.
A U.S. diplomat in the audience raised the notion that reaching for an ideal outcome in 2010 might set up the conference for failure, potentially poisoning the atmosphere for small but positive steps that might otherwise be achieved.
"It's good to have high expectations because that helps you reach them," said Scott Davis of the State Department. "But ... we know we did not reach [consensus at an NPT review] in 2005; we know there's great contention among the parties on a range of issues; and I will suggest that it will be very difficult to get consensus on at least a comprehensive set of NPT issues at the 2010 conference."
Another U.S. official -- Mike Wheeler of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency -- raised similar concerns. He cited the ongoing financial crisis that could result in "the energy [being] sucked out at the senior level of almost every government."
"What can you do to manage expectations that the 2010 conference really is a step on the way to 2015, as opposed to a make-or-break conference, which is some of the ways that the expectations have been posed here?" Wheeler asked from the audience.
Others, though, said it is not a stretch to imagine the new administration diving into the issue immediately, setting forth its goals at the May preparatory conference and leading the globe to significant progress at the review conference in 2010.
"We have a president-elect who's got views that are substantially different from the previous president on many nonproliferation [and] disarmament issues," said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. "I think it is not just possible but it's absolutely necessary that the PrepCom recognize that the 2010 review conference review the progress or lack of progress on the commitments made in 1995 and 2000."
Treaty nations in 2000 agreed on a set of 13 "practical steps" to move toward the treaty's disarmament provisions, including ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and negotiation of a "START III" accord for additional nuclear arms reductions.
However, the Bush administration opposed test ban ratification and it achieved a more informal arms reduction agreement, the Moscow Treaty, in 2002.
The 2005 session resulted in deadlock (see GSN, May 27, 2005).
A new U.S. election this year has introduced the potential for significant change, Zaluar noted.
"You have a change of policy here," he said. "You have everybody trying to make good with a new administration, including the other nuclear-armed states. You have good relations between the U.S. and India. I think you have a positive climate [for] diplomacy in general. ... [It is] much more positive than we had, let's say, just after the invasion of Iraq and I think that [mood] will go into the 2010 conference."
Both Zaluar and Sawczak said more progress might be made in curbing nuclear weapons proliferation if the new U.S. administration can persuade a Democratic-led Senate to approve the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
"The fact of the matter is CTBT has a very direct and practical role in preventing new nuclear weapons states," Sawczak said. "If you haven't got as sophisticated a technological base as the U.S. has, you'll have to expose yourself to a test at some stage."
To encourage international acceptance of any U.S.-proposed measures to tighten NPT mandates at the 2010 conference, "there's a certain logic in doing CTBT first," said the Australian diplomat.