ANALYSIS:Programmes in Iran and North Korea undermine the good news, but the US hopes to set an example, writes LARA MARLOWE
A WORLD without nuclear weapons. The dream seemed to move incrementally closer yesterday, when presidents Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev announced their intention to conclude a treaty cutting the number of nuclear warheads deployed in their arsenals to as few as 1,500.
The Moscow Treaty, concluded between presidents Bush and Putin in 2002, set a goal of between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads by 2012.
This follow-on to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start I) is important because Start I will expire on December 5th, and unlike Start, the Moscow Treaty contains no provisions for verification.
Yesterday’s outline agreement could unravel if an understanding is not reached on US plans to deploy an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic. Russia claims the plan is an existential threat to its security, but its real concern appears to be a political refusal to relinquish influence over the former Soviet bloc. Washington claims the system would become unnecessary if Iran renounced its nuclear programme.
Despite continuing tensions over the US anti-missile system, US objections to Russian human rights abuses, and Russia’s continuing occupation of part of Georgia, this is arguably the most propitious time for arms control since the nuclear age began.
Not only do Washington and Moscow appear likely to move ahead with the mutually agreed, bilateral arms reductions they started in the early 1990s, in the intervening years France and Britain have completed significant unilateral arms reductions. Britain got rid of its air-delivered nuclear weapons, to rely on submarines alone. France dismantled its land-based intermediate range nuclear missiles, as well as its battlefield tactical nuclear weapons. Since the 1990s, all four of the world’s first nuclear powers have declared moratoria on the testing of nuclear weapons and the production of fissile material.
Disarmament moves have gained momentum in the three months since Obama and Medvedev promised to pursue an agreement, when they met at the G20 summit in London.
In his speech in Prague on April 5th, Obama vowed to strive for “a world without nuclear weapons”. He promised to “aggressively pursue” US ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which was agreed in 1996 and which the US Senate rejected (at the urging of the Bush administration) in 1999.
As if responding to the US president, the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament on May 29th agreed to negotiate a Fissile Materials Cut-off Treaty (FMCT). The conference was founded under UN auspices in 1979 and now has 65 members. The history of the FMCT is a lesson in how easily this new initiative could bog down. Former US president Bill Clinton proposed an FMCT in 1993, and for 16 years the conference has been discussing whether to discuss it. Chinese insistence on Paros (Preventing an Arms Race in Outer Space – a response to Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative) blocked progress until now.
Nor will the CTBT be brought into force easily. Obama will have an uphill battle getting it ratified by the Senate. And unlike the FMCT, it would have to be ratified by all 44 states with significant nuclear activity. Obama speaks of a diplomatic offensive. China might follow the US example, but Iran, North Korea, Israel, India and Pakistan are unlikely to adhere to the CTBT.
Success would nonetheless be significant. “If we achieve the FMCT and the CTBT, it means a dual freeze on nuclear arsenals,” explains Col Michel Fritsch, of the technology and proliferation department at the French defence ministry.
There is optimism over the Russian-American agreement, moves on the FMCT and CTBT, and for consensus on next May’s five-year review of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
But the good news is undermined by continuing crises over the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programmes. “If Iran obtains nuclear weapons, the other achievements will be meaningless,” says a French diplomat. “Because it will unleash a nuclear arms race in the region.”
In an interview with the New York Times last weekend, Obama said it was “naive” to think that the US and its allies and Russia could continue to grow nuclear stockpiles “and that in that environment we’re going to be able to pressure countries like Iran and North Korea not to pursue nuclear weapons themselves”.
The relevance of US and Russian reductions to the North Korean and Iranian efforts is hotly debated. Obama’s critics, including the former Pentagon official Richard Perle, have dismissed the notion as “dangerous, wishful thinking”.
And some Europeans have reservations about Obama’s goal of “a world without nuclear weapons”, because they fear it could undermine nuclear deterrence.
A British official expressed fears that such talk will incite impossible demands from groups like Greenpeace and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. When Gordon Brown recently appeared too gung-ho about divesting the world of nuclear weapons, French president Nicolas Sarkozy “told him to pull up his socks,” says a high-ranking French official.
French officials studiously avoid what they call the “slogan” of “a world without nuclear weapons”. “The objective should be a safer world, not necessarily a world without nuclear weapons,” says a diplomat. Referring to Obama’s Prague speech, another spoke of “Father Christmas”.
Whatever about the cynics the sea-change in US attitudes represents the greatest hope of progress. Obama first used the words “a nuclear-free world” 26 years ago, in an article published in a student news magazine at Columbia University. Two years ago, Republicans Henry Kissinger and George Schultz and Democrats William Perry and Sam Nunn, all historic figures in US foreign and defence policy, advocated “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons” in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.
As recounted by Ivo Daalder and Jan Lodal in a landmark article in Foreign Affairs magazine last November, two thirds of all living former US secretaries of state and defence have since supported the Wall Street Journal article. Daalder, who also espouses total nuclear disarmament, became Obama’s ambassador to Nato in May.