Global Security Newswire

GENEVA — How the world’s richest countries are progressing in preventing terrorists from getting materials for weapons of mass destruction will be one of the topics on the agenda when the heads of state of the Group of Eight industrialized states meet June 1-3 in Evian, France.

At its June 2002 summit in Kananaskis, Canada, the G-8 agreed to establish a Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction and on six principles to prevent terrorists from getting weapons of mass destruction (see GSN, June 28, 2002).  Zacharie Gross, the desk officer for nuclear disarmament issues in the French Foreign Ministry, said yesterday that in the year since the Global Partnership was launched, there has been “a common realization that this is a threat to all of us.”

Before this, Gross told Global Security Newswire, it was mostly “a small number of countries, in this case nuclear weapons states,” such the United States and France, that were working with Russia.  But after Kananaskis, more countries, with different views on nuclear weapons and nuclear power, are getting involved.  The Global Partnership has created “a level playing field for all interested actors to work efficiently,” Gross said.

The Global Partnership specified Russia as the initial focus of its work.  “Among our priority concerns are the destruction of chemical weapons, the dismantlement of decommissioned nuclear submarines, the disposition of fissile materials and the employment of former weapons scientists,” the Kananaskis statement said.

In announcing the partnership, the G-8 also pledged to raise $20 billion to support its projects over the next 10 years.  Gross said $18 billion has been pledged, with more than $1 billion on hand for use this year.  Countries outside of the G-8, such as Norway and Switzerland, have contributed funds, he added.

Gross said the work could expand beyond Russia. Ukraine has expressed interest “in benefiting from this program,” Gross said, and the G-8 could pursue this in the second half of this year.  He said he had no information concerning what types of projects Ukraine might have in mind.

In the year since the agreement was reached, Gross said, there have been both negative and positive trends.  One development is “a trend of growing awareness,” he said.  “Kananaskis was an important moment for the international community, world leaders and opinion makers ... to realize that this is an issue for the whole world, not only for some regions.”

On the other hand, “You have worrying trends of proliferation,” Gross said, citing the situation in North Korea and “concerns and preoccupations about what is going on in Iran.”  The United States, the United Kingdom and France have said elements of Iran’s nuclear program are more consistent with a drive for nuclear weapons than with nuclear power generation.

The war in Iraq, undertaken with the express purpose of ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, was divisive within the G-8 but is not having “any sort of concrete effects” on the Kananaskis agreement, Gross said.  “We see it [the Kananaskis principles] as an alternative to coercion; it is acting preventively,” he said.  “It also complements the normative approach of international agreements and multilateral treaties.  You need to have all the tools available and use them as efficiently as possible.  The cooperative approach is obviously one of the most welcomed and promising.”

The six principles “to prevent terrorists, or those that harbor them, from gaining access to weapons or materials of mass destruction” are strengthening multilateral treaties in these fields; developing measures “to account for and secure” such materials; developing measures to protect “facilities which house such items”; developing international cooperation to “deter and interdict ... illicit trafficking in such items”; maintaining effective export controls on materials that might be useful for producing weapons of mass destruction; and adopting measures to “manage and dispose” of stocks of nuclear chemical materials that are no longer needed, “based on the recognition that the threat of terrorist acquisition is reduced as the overall quantity of such items is reduced.”

While many of the points covered in the principles are not new, presenting them “as a coherent package is new,” Gross said.  “We have been pursuing outreach activities to get a maximum number of countries to subscribe to these principles,” he said.

French Foreign Ministry officials last week briefed diplomats attending the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty meeting here on the Kananaskis principles.