During its 45-year history, the treaty has facilitated consistent progress towards preventing nuclear weapons proliferation. However, India, Pakistan, Israel, and NPT dropout North Korea remain outside of the non-proliferation regime.
The round table on the 45th anniversary of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), held at Rossiya Segodnya’s press center a few days ago, was attended, among others, by Anton Khlopkov, Director of the Center for Energy and Security Studies, and Alexei Fenenko, senior research fellow at the Institute of International Security Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The next NPT Review Conference is scheduled for spring 2015. During its 45-year history, the treaty has facilitated consistent progress towards preventing nuclear weapons proliferation. However, India, Pakistan, Israel, and NPT dropout North Korea remain outside of the non-proliferation regime.
Anton Khlopkov said at the start of the discussion that it was necessary to distinguish between the non-proliferation treaty and the non-proliferation regime, because the regime has included not only the treaty itself but also the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, IAEA guarantees, and a number of other instruments that have helped to avert nuclear proliferation.
The non-proliferation regime has experienced problems throughout its existence, from the signing of the NPT in 1968 right up to the present. Today, the biggest problem is the Iranian nuclear program. This issue was discussed recently at negotiations in Switzerland. North Korea also presents a problem, but, unfortunately, there has been no progress toward a solution for the last few years. On the contrary, the crisis has only escalated.
Khlopkov believes it’s important that the key participating countries – Russia (USSR), the US, and the UK – that were involved in drafting the treaty later became its depositaries and have generally presented a united front on all key non-proliferation problems. While Iraq and South Africa posed the greatest challenge in the past, more recently it has been the Iranian nuclear program. In the 1980s, the USSR and the USA held biannual official meetings on nuclear non-proliferation, despite a chill in bilateral relations at that time.
Khlopkov expressed regret that over the past year the United States has effectively destroyed a number of channels for cooperation on nuclear problems, such as the G8 and the bilateral Nuclear Energy and Nuclear Security Working Group, whose work Washington suspended. The United States has shut down or frozen a number of other mechanisms and channels for discussing non-proliferation.
He also expressed hope that the NPT Review Conference in New York will show that the US is prepared for a pragmatic dialogue. Washington seems to have realized in the last few months that a productive dialogue on nuclear non-proliferation should be resumed.
Alexei Fenenko thinks that the treaty and the non-proliferation regime form a pillar of today’s global order. The five legal nuclear powers are the permanent members of the UN Security Council. This arrangement took shape after WWII and remains in effect to this day, despite the vicissitudes of history. The non-proliferation regime has been effective. It was violated by just one state, North Korea, in 2003.
Participants in the discussion focused on nuclear terrorism. Fenenko said that he knew of just one case of nuclear terrorism: a rebellious French general, Maurice Challe, made a failed attempt to seize a nuclear testing range in Algeria in 1961. The Taliban’s rumored attacks on Pakistani nuclear facilities in 2004 remain unconfirmed. It was indeed feared that the Taliban were within 100 kilometers of nuclear facilities, but today, in 2015, they are unable to get as close.
The threat is being exaggerated in order to restrict some countries’ access to civilian nuclear technology, among other reasons. Citing the danger of international terrorism is a pretext to cast aspersions on technology transfers.
But Khlopkov also said that we cannot ignore the threat of nuclear terrorism. He added that Russia is taking measures to combat this threat, including by advancing diplomatic initiatives to toughen international antiterrorism legislation, specifically where it concerns nuclear terrorism.
Despite the current tension in Russian-American relations, nuclear terrorism is one of the few areas where cooperation continues. A case in point is the joint program implemented by Rosatom State Corporation and the Department of Energy with the participation of the IAEA.
In December 2014, two batches of highly enriched uranium were removed from Kazakhstan. Somewhat earlier, similar operations were carried out in a number of other countries. All of this serves to enhance the non-proliferation regime and preempts possible terrorist attempts to get access to nuclear materials.
Khlopkov also believes that, given recent developments in relations between Moscow and Pyongyang, efforts to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula can be revived. Kim Jong-un reportedly will visit Moscow in May, providing an excellent opportunity to invigorate the dialogue on the long-term denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. The situation has essentially been frozen, but the crisis continues to mount. The same can be said of the Iranian nuclear problem. Iran as a potential nuclear power is not in Russia’s interests.
The main negotiators on the Iranian nuclear program are the United States and Iran. But this is just one component of the crisis in relations between Washington and Tehran that has lasted since the Islamic revolution of 1979. In this context, Russia has an important mediating role to play. And it is largely due to Russian efforts that the dialogue on the Iranian program has continued.
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Along with Anton Khlopkov and Alexei Fenenko, the round table involved Vladimir Novikov, Deputy Head, Center for Euro-Atlantic and Defense Research, Russian Institute for Strategic Studies; and Yury Belobrov, senior research fellow, Center on Global Problems and International Organizations, Institute of Contemporary International Studies, Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation.
