Brief Reflections on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime

Source: Carnegie

Below are excerpts from remarks delievered by Ariel Levite, principal deputy director, Israel Atomic Energy Commission, at the Second Moscow International Proliferation Conference. Mr. Levite's views do not necessarily reflect an official Israeli position and his full presentation.

The NPT has been a huge success story for 35 years in stemming nuclear proliferation. In the 1990s, however, cracks began to emerge in that regime and they have grown and become serious enough to threaten the stability of the entire regime.

Where do most of the problems lie?

• Structural and legal weakness of the NPT grounded in its bargain: full access to fuel cycle technologies and the right to withdraw on short notice in return for nuclear abstinence.
   
• Indirect and imperfect connection between NPT obligations and safeguards arrangements (e.g. the safeguards cover only fissile material, not weaponization activities, and they are oriented exclusively toward deterring and detecting diversion but not acquisition of weapons-grade fissile material).
   
• Structural weaknesses of the IAEA: lack of transparency in reporting, lack of focus for verification efforts, unwillingness to admit weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the safeguards, reluctance to employ Special Inspections, total dependence on external intelligence, design flaws and legal constraints.
   
• Lack of flexibility of the global regime to address specific regional circumstances such as those prevailing in South Asia and the Middle East.

Many of these weaknesses emanate from the IAEA's schizophrenic origins as an agency designed to promote peaceful uses of nuclear technology under Atoms for Peace. Other weaknesses have to do with the changing nature of the nuclear proliferation challenge. Technology has widely disseminated (especially in centrifuge enrichment), but the key problems lie not from the likes of Australia, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, and even Brazil and Argentina, but from North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, etc.

We can no longer realistically expect to promote new treaties and conventions that have both global scope as well as genuine meaning in stemming proliferation. The fate of the CTBT is quite telling in this respect. Nor is it likely that we will be able to promote a consensus around verification measures that are tighter than those already incorporated in the Additional Protocol. Finally, we must also acknowledge the profound weakness of the present enforcement mechanisms. Non-compliance issues are only reluctantly referred to the U.N. Security Council, and even when this happens the Security Council typically fails to generate a consensus to take effective corrective action. North Korea and Iraq are cases in point.

So what can and should still be done? We should try to retain as best we can the current NPT regime and the existing safeguards arrangements, making efforts to improve them wherever possible without formal negotiations. New efforts should be guided by the following eight principles:

• Opting for arrangements among the like minded as a substitute to new universal initiatives. For example, the U.S. Proliferation Security Initiative.
   
• Assigning much greater emphasis to the promotion of regional arrangements rather than global mechanisms, as only these can be adjusted to fit the unique circumstances and time horizons of key regions.
   
• Emphasizing access to facilities and technologies over materials diversion, which is the current focus of safeguards arrangements.
   
• Employing, wherever possible, collective or at least joint ownership and/or management of fuel cycle facilities as a critical complement to verification.
   
• Adopting a new approach toward verification that retains the universality norm, yet practices it in a discriminate fashion, where track record, size of infrastructure, and lack of transparency affect both the scope and resources devoted to the verification effort.
   
• Tying access to nuclear technology and fuel to compliance with obligations as an extra incentive to attain enforcement.
   
• Shifting the burden of proof of compliance with non-proliferation obligations to the state parties undertaking them. A state that fails to address concerns regarding its non-proliferation conduct promptly and adequatly will automatically forfeit its rights to sensitive technology and supplies.
   
• Finally, adopting a policy that explicitly recognizes the utility of defensive as well as coercive measures, all the way up to the use of force, as a legitimate means for enforcing non-proliferation. This should be done, of course, under the inherent right of individual or collective self defense (under Article 51 of the UN Charter) and subject to the standard caveat that use of force should be a means of last resort.