Steve Miller is a friend, a colleague, and an authority on the Sangiovese grape in central Tuscany and on the chunky red wines of the Piemonte. He also happens to be a tenured professor at Harvard who has just published this essay for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Read it, please, for a thoughtful tour d’horizon of where things stand right now with the NPT and the nonproliferation regime.
You might have to read it twice to truly appreciate it. My first reading of this work annoyed me. A second reading revealed why: I had concluded that Steve had throughout used interchangeably the terms “NPT regime” and “nonproliferation regime” to refer to his chosen subject in shorthand. Maybe I concluded that because Steve was focused on the grievances which are being articulated by the Non-Aligned Movement, the Arab League, and others who champion the principles of non-discrimination and NPT universality. But the terms “NPT regime” and “nonproliferation regime” since India’s 1974 test have never been equivalent, as the history of multilateral nuclear trade controls clearly illustrates. I am, however, anticipating.
My initial reading of Steve’s piece also vexed me because it seemed to suggest that right now we are dealing with a dramatic new development that threatens to kill the NPT or, if you insist, the “nonproliferation regime.” A few of the critics cited in the paper are known to use hyperbolic language at times to describe this state of affairs.
Steve begins by outlining differing conceptions of what the NPT is and is supposed to do, depending on which of the shop-worn “three pillars” of the treaty should be most important. (In fact, as ACW readers know, it really isn’t clear where the “pillars” idea came from in the first place). And the essay goes on to describe the tussles among states and coalitions, including about whose interests the NPT serves. Steve then presents accounts of some of shocks to the system since the mid-1990s: North Korea, Iran, and the U.S.-India deal. He adds to the mix debates over Israel’s nuclear weapons, extended deterrence, Article IV rights, the Article X “loophole,” NSG restrictions, and the Additional Protocol. That’s the first 36 pages of a 41-page paper and when you get to page 36 it all looks pretty hopeless.
But at that point, Steve tries hard to square this circle in the last five pages, by telling us that in fact the situation is not all that bleak and that if NAM states, “bridge” countries in the New Agenda Coalition, and the nuclear weapon states know what is good for them, they may turn out to be more flexible than his first 36 pages might prompt us to conclude.
I would certainly agree that the present time is one of grave dangers, but I would argue that the issues being debated now and in Steve’s paper aren’t really fundamentally different than they were when the NPT entered into force in 1970 and at any time thereafter.
Nuclear Trade Lessons
Take the case of nuclear trade, a subject about which the paper says quite a bit.
NPT Article III.2 called for safeguards and export controls to be used to make the NPT credible. After EIF, the Zangger Committee was set up to define what was meant by the words “especially designed or prepared” — the yardstick included in Article III.2 to “trigger” safeguards on nuclear equipment.
A couple years later, however, in 1974, India tested a nuclear device using a reactor and heavy water provided by the U.S. and Canada under peaceful-use assurances. Two things then happened: First, a group of states–which included some that were outside the NPT but had nuclear weapons and nuclear capabilities–convened to tighten export controls beyond what Article III.2 called for. They did this because in the shadow of the Indian test they were convinced that the NPT alone would not suffice to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. That view turned out to be correct.
Second, following upon the first development almost immediately, there were protests in the developing world that a “cartel” of suppliers were setting up a “club” to depart from the NPT and discriminate against the rest. Sounds familiar? That argument didn’t begin with Iran.
When the newly-formed NSG published Infcirc/254, that meant that the NPT was no longer the exclusive reference for nonproliferation. That happened 34 years ago. It has been that way ever since. Steve’s list of shocks to the system begins with North Korea, which was caught cheating in 1993. He could have included Iraq, an NPT state which 2 years earlier was found to have a massive nuclear weapons development program undetected by the IAEA. That finding led to the first meeting of the NSG since 1978 and a piling on of new trade controls. The bottom line is that since 1974 the regime, in the view of developing countries, lurched into export control overdrive whenever a severe nonproliferation failure happened: first India–then Pakistan/Urenco–then Iraq–then North Korea–then A.Q.Khan–then Iran. Over three decades the NPT was abrogated from within more than once. It didn’t happen because the countries that cheated were being deprived of their Article IV rights.
Steve describes the conflicts in the nonproliferation regime–near-universal adherence punctuated by crises–as “schizophrenic” but that may be just a high-falutin’ way of saying that the regime isn’t perfect. Eh bien! Or as Annie Hall kept saying in that movie: Lah-dee-dah. Every step of the way there have been compromises.
I think Steve is on to something important where he says near the close of the paper that states’ “interests” should be considered over their “rights.” To return to the nuclear trade area, the NSG may have learned that lesson (there are NSG participants who will tell you privately that until George W. Bush announced he wanted to halt ENR transfers to have-nots, the issue was non-controversial) and hopefully the NSG will apply it in its outreach activities to that group of countries who will emerge as candidates for membership (um… “participation”–the NSG’s politically correct term), as some nuclear trade experts urged during my preparation of this report last year on the future of the NSG.
It, and a workshop I held for NSG participating governments six months before, drilled into a matter which the NSG is going to have to come to grips with if it is to remain credible: membership enlargement. If nuclear trade and demand for nuclear power increases in coming years, if new customs unions are formed, that will mean more NAM states in the group.
I am intrigued by Steve’s suggestion that increasing the number of members beyond today’s 46 will lead to success, not paralysis. (“[A]s the NSG becomes more inclusive, it may be easier to accommodate the supplier-recipient dialogue that many feel may detoxify the Article IV dispute.”). That certainly is not how a lot of the players in the trenches see it. Some pretty senior people will tell you privately that, in their view, the negotiation completed in 2011 on guidelines for ENR marks the end of the NSG as a trade rule-making arrangement. Why? In 1975 eight countries came up with a complete set of guidelines in just 18 months. Changing the language in just two paragraphs on ENR took seven years.