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Threat Assessment: IAEA Director Lashes Nuclear Weapon States By Bryan Bender Furthermore, growing reliance by those countries on nuclear weapons has eroded the ability of international organizations to control the spread of nuclear arms and other catastrophic weapons, said Mohammed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. While not naming specific countries, ElBaradei appeared to be addressing primarily the United States, which has been widely criticized for recent activities that, some have said, raise the profile of nuclear weapons and increase the likelihood of their use. ElBaradei’s remarks reflect the views of many countries that the five declared nuclear weapons states that are party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States — have been slow to reduce their nuclear stockpiles as called for by the treaty, and that such delays undermine efforts to disarm other states believed to be developing weapons of mass destruction. ElBaradei’s speech to a nonproliferation conference sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace comes as U.N. weapon inspectors are poised to return to inspect and destroy suspected weapons in Iraq, the only country ever formally found to violate the NPT (see GSN, Nov. 13). In addition, the IAEA is closely watching a revived North Korean crisis after evidence emerged that North Korea has possibly failed to dismantle its nuclear weapons development programs and is now seeking to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs (see GSN, Nov. 6). ElBaradei said overall disarmament is hampered by adherence to nuclear weapons as a key tenet of several countries’ security policies, including the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, which earlier this year raised the prospect of using nuclear weapons both against non-nuclear states and in pre-emptive wars against new threats from terrorists and rogue states (see GSN, Mar. 14). “I should note that some non-nuclear weapon states are hedging on their willingness to conclude required additional protocols to their [IAEA] safeguard agreements by pointing to the lack of progress on nuclear disarmament,” ElBaradei said (see GSN, Sept. 25). The Bush administration has indicated plans to study whether to develop a new nuclear penetrator for deeply buried targets (see GSN, Oct. 10) and whether to lift the moratorium on underground nuclear tests in the future to assure the viability of new nuclear weapon designs (see GSN, Oct. 22). The lack of progress in nuclear disarmament “can be traced in general to the continuing reliance on the doctrine of nuclear deterrence and the lack of an overall disarmament strategy,” ElBaradei said. In an apparent critique of the Bush administration, he added: “Some nuclear weapon states have reversed direction, by stressing the continuing value of nuclear weapons in defense of national security interests, including discussions of the feasibility of developing new types of nuclear weapons, and scenarios for the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states.” A major theme of the NPT, opened for signature in 1968 and now encompassing 188 parties, was to bridge the divide between nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states, what then-U.S. president and sponsor of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty John F. Kennedy called the nuclear “haves and have-nots.” “A key assumption at the core of the NPT was that the asymmetry between nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states would gradually disappear,” ElBaradei said. The five nuclear weapons states that signed the treaty agreed at the time “to divest themselves of those weapons through ‘good faith’ negotiations,” he said. All other signatories committed to “not acquire nuclear weapons, and to accept IAEA verification of all their peaceful nuclear activities, in return for access to peaceful nuclear technology,” he said. “But the record on upholding those commitments is mixed,” ElBaradei said. Recent activities by declared nuclear states, including the U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty earlier this year, threaten to broaden the divide and in the process make it more difficult to persuade states not to seek nuclear weapons or their delivery systems (see GSN, June 13). For example, the NPT review conference in 2000 called for an “unequivocal undertaking” by nuclear weapon states to completely eliminate their nuclear arsenals. “But a scant two years later,” according to ElBaradei, “we have moved sharply away from those commitments, with a number of the ‘13 steps’ toward nuclear disarmament — such as ‘irreversibility,’ ‘START II, START III and the ABM Treaty,’ further ‘unilateral’ reductions in nuclear arsenals, ‘increased transparency,’ ‘further reduction of nonstrategic nuclear weapons’ and ‘regular reports’ on the implementation of Article VI of the NPT — left without concrete follow-up actions and in some cases discarded.” The setbacks include the rejection of the CTBT by the U.S. Senate in 1999, the scrapping of the ABM Treaty, as well as failure so far to negotiate a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty more than seven years after agreement was reached on a mandate, he said. He also cited faltering progress on hammering out verification procedures for the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, negotiations the United States has opposed (see related GSN story, today). “These regressions have led to stagnation in the disarmament process and have put a damper on the hopes for further progress,” ElBaradei said. “The ability to move forward on nuclear nonproliferation, including meaningful cuts in nuclear arsenals, will depend heavily on the nuclear powers’ ability to develop alternative security strategies that do not feature nuclear deterrence,” he added. As for the three nuclear powers that have not signed the NPT — India, Pakistan and Israel — ElBaradei said that they should be engaged rather than isolated. “In my view, we should not continue to treat these states only as ‘outsiders,’ but rather induce them to act as partners in the global effort to consolidate the nonproliferation regime and to make progress in nuclear disarmament.”
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