Scrapping nuclear weapons is a far more practical option than many British politicians would have us believe, says Bruce Kent
The belief that nuclear weapons ensure security rather than promote increasing insecurity has been sustained over the years by a number of myths. One of them is that, since nuclear weapons cannot be dis-invented (quite true), they cannot be eliminated. Therefore, so it is claimed, a more secure world without them is simply not possible.
The logic is weak. The Tower of London contains plenty of horrible instruments of torture, once in active use, but which are now simply museum pieces. We can be restrained by law and conscience – and often are. Already, conventions – admittedly not perfect – exist or are in progress, covering the banning of chemical weapons, bacteriological weapons, landmines and other horrors. Yet, for some reason, getting down to negotiating a global ban on nuclear weapons is assumed to be impossibly difficult.
Such negotiations are not such a distant and utopian option as the British Foreign Office seems to think. In 1996, the International Court of Justice gave a clear and unanimous ruling. “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”
When and how to start? Clearly the most opportune moment for collective action would be at the 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference due to start next May in New York. There must be no repetition of the total failure of the 2005 review conference. Yes, it will take time – perhaps years – to agree all the details. What is needed is an agreed aim and positive steps in that direction.
It is not as if a plan for progress had to be invented. A draft nuclear elimination convention, which runs to nearly 150 pages, was prepared by international groups of engineers, doctors, lawyers and scientists over ten years ago and is now, thanks to Costa Rica, lodged with the United Nations.
It is entitled Securing our Survival – The Case for a Nuclear Weapons Convention. Copies of it and of a four-page summary can be obtained from the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons at www.icanw.org.
More recently, in December 2006 at the UN General Assembly, 126 countries, including nuclear armed China, India and Pakistan, called for a start to be made on “multilateral negotiations leading to an early conclusion of a nuclear weapon convention prohibiting the development, production, testing, deployment stockpiling, transfer, threat or use of nuclear weapons and providing for their elimination”.
The draft convention covers all the contentious issues of inspection, verification, criminality, sanctions and the protection of whistleblowers. A UN agency would be set up to monitor the whole process and to advise the Security Council of breaches. But this agency would not, unlike the International Atomic Energy Authority, have any role in promoting nuclear power.
All the stages on the way to collective elimination are clearly set out, starting with the recording of current levels of nuclear weaponry, leading at the end to the placing of all fissile materiel under international control.
The difficulties are not technical, as the draft makes clear, but psychological.
“Currently, the leaders of the nuclear weapon states do not have the political will to abolish nuclear weapons”, says the draft summary. This is not true of some major non nuclear weapon states. Germany has taken the lead in urging that all the 200 free fall bombs of the United States should be removed from Europe. The Italian parliament has called for Europe to be a nuclear weapon-free zone. Mexico is trying to get the statutes of the International Criminal Court amended to allow for the prosecution of those possessing and threatening to use nuclear weapons. These are all recent positive steps.
Sadly, it is in Britain where the Government has yet to realise, in the words of the late Olof Palme, that the only real security in the nuclear age is common security. The debate about the renewal of Trident continues as though such a renewal would have no effect on the 2010 NPT review conference. Of course it would – and a very negative one at that. How can we, in the “good faith” called for by the International Court, call for global abolition while ensuring that Britain is to remain nuclear armed for perhaps another 40 years?
In 1996, the ICJ said that the obligation to negotiate abolition is a present obligation, not a distant hope. We have a sensible draft on which to start, a US President who wants such negotiations to begin and a global public opinion in support. Not to begin is to betray the future.
