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Posted: May 31, 2017 |
Addressing Verification in the Nuclear Ban Treaty |
Addressing Verification in the Nuclear Ban Treaty |
June 2017 |
By Zia Mian, Tamara Patton, and Alexander Glaser |
The UN General Assembly last December called for negotiations this year to produce a "legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading to their total elimination." The nuclear ban treaty talks will have to engage the issue of confirming compliance by the parties with the specific prohibitions established... |
Delegates at the UN conference to negotiate a nuclear weapons prohibition treaty hold opening-day talks at the United Nations in New York on March 27. (Photo credit: Tamara Patton)During the first round of treaty negotiations in March leading to the draft text presented in May, there appeared to be broad agreement amon... |
There also were differences among states on how to treat verification. The ban treaty talks and the larger disarmament process they seek to put in place will need to consider how to assure compliance with their commitments for three classes of states: (1) established non-nuclear-weapon states that join the treaty, (2) ... |
As part of establishing a perspective on verification, the ban treaty process will need to make some broad choices about the eventual arrangements for a nuclear-weapon-free world, recognizing that there are many possible such end states and that some of these will be more resilient than others. This presents an opportu... |
Building on the NPT |
Many of the key prohibitions envisaged for the ban treaty already are captured by the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Under Article II of the NPT, each non-nuclear-weapon state undertakes "not to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices; and not to seek or receive any a... |
There are 172 non-nuclear-weapon states with comprehensive safeguards agreements with the agency, and 124 states have in place additional protocols that require more extensive reporting by states of their nuclear activities and permit the IAEA increased rights of access to information and sites.5 Of the 130 states-part... |
Further, among the 130 states seeking to agree on the ban treaty, 94 states are also members of nuclear-weapon-free-zone treaties. Each of these treaties includes an obligation, separate from that in the NPT, to conclude a safeguards agreement with the IAEA. This language varies between the zone treaties and became mor... |
This opens the way for the ban treaty to put in place a multilateral arrangement that adopts IAEA safeguards as part of its verification regime, as a parallel obligation to that of the NPT and nuclear-weapon-free-zone treaties, including provisions for special inspections. As is already the case for states that are par... |
A U.S. delegation led by State Department official Sung Kim crosses the military demarcation line between North and South Korea May 10, 2008, carrying boxes of North Korean documents. North Korea had declared its separated plutonium inventory and provided 18,000 pages of records on the operation of its production react... |
The final documents of the 2000 and 2010 NPT review conferences and the draft final document of the 2015 review conference each offered the same guidance on the issue of future verification in non-nuclear-weapon states and in nuclear-weapon states in the context of their nuclear disarmament: "The Conference…stresses th... |
Weapons Elimination |
Because the goal of the ban treaty is to strengthen the legal and normative basis for a process leading to the elimination of nuclear weapons, an important concern will be establishing guidelines for dealing with nuclear-weapon states committing to eliminate their weapons stockpiles through the ban treaty process. The ... |
Rather than trying to set up specific, detailed measures to eliminate nuclear weapons, the ban treaty could simply specify that any nuclear-weapon state seeking to join the treaty must do so through an arrangement agreed with the conference of parties to the treaty. This would allow the issue to be addressed on a case-... |
In principle, any nuclear-weapon state wishing to join the ban treaty could sign the treaty, declare its weapons holdings, and accept international monitoring of the process of taking its weapons off deployment, disabling them, and placing them in secure storage pending their verified elimination as part of an agreed, ... |
A state could choose to dismantle its nuclear weapons before joining the treaty and then offer up for verification its non-nuclear-weapon status, as was the case with South Africa’s accession to the NPT. This approach, however, would make the eventual verification process more difficult and time consuming and leave gre... |
In 1989, South Africa decided to terminate its nuclear weapons program. The highly enriched uranium (HEU) cores of its six existing weapons and for a seventh planned weapon were melted down, other key weapons components were destroyed or damaged so they could be not reused, and documents on weapons design and manufactu... |
This IAEA assessment included suggestions to South Africa about other components and information that could be destroyed and what destruction should involve.10 The IAEA recommended that "destruction" of nuclear components should be such that the "critical dimensions of destroyed components would no longer be measurable... |
In September 1993, the IAEA reported that it had "found no indication to suggest that there remain any sensitive components of the nuclear weapons programme which have not been either rendered useless or converted to commercial non-nuclear applications or peaceful nuclear usage."12 The lead IAEA inspectors concluded th... |
[t]he IAEA’s assessment of the complete-ness of South Africa’s inventory of nuclear facilities and materials and its assessment of the status of the former nuclear weapons programme - as in all cases where a large nuclear programme comes under safeguards - is not free from uncertainty. |
In the case of South Africa, the results of extensive inspection and assessment, and the transparency and openness shown, have led to the conclusion that there were no indications to suggest that the initial inventory is incomplete or that the nuclear weapon programme was not completely terminated and dismantled.13 |
Only in 2010, nineteen years after South Africa’s initial report, was the IAEA able to include the country in its list of states where it could conclude "all nuclear material remained in peaceful activities."14 Olli Heinonen, a former head of the IAEA Department of Safeguards, in a study of the South African case concl... |
In verifying the elimination of existing nuclear weapons programs, the ban treaty process will need to address existing nuclear arsenals, which range from about 7,000 weapons each in the United States and Russia to the fissile material equivalent of perhaps 10 weapons in North Korea.16 It also will need to tackle the a... |
It is reasonable to assume that a South African-style verification of warhead dismantlement and accounting of fissile material production would be a much more difficult task, may take several decades to complete, and may be fraught with large uncertainties. It would be much more manageable if verification was agreed in... |
In anticipation and support of these future verification efforts, both nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear-weapon states ought to pursue with a greater sense of urgency joint efforts to develop and demonstrate inspection systems for verified warhead storage and dismantlement. Equally important, nuclear-weapon states ought t... |
Legacy Capabilities |
As part of its verification of the disarmament of South Africa, the IAEA agreed with that government "to consult on future strategies for maintaining assurance that the nuclear weapons capability would not be regenerated."20 Accordingly, the IAEA took up the government’s invitation to provide the IAEA with "full access... |
The problem of legacy capabilities will be more significant for the nine current nuclear-weapon states. It will be most acute in the case of the United States and Russia, which have had the largest and most complex weapons programs by far. The scale of the challenge was captured in a 1997 National Academy of Sciences r... |
[i]f all nuclear warheads were eliminated, the current nuclear weapon states, and probably a dozen or more other countries, could in a national emergency produce a dozen simple fission weapons in as little as a few months, even if no effort had been made to maintain this capability. On the other hand, the production of... |
The timescale and the size of reconstituted nuclear forces identified by this report depends fundamentally on the access to nuclear weapons-usable fissile material, i.e., plutonium and HEU. Therefore, the ban treaty process must consider adding, either as an immediate obligation or as a goal of the treaty process, a pr... |
Any state wishing to build or reconstitute a simple nuclear arsenal would need first to produce tens to hundreds of kilograms of plutonium or HEU, which would increase the scale of the reconstitution, its complexity, and the time required, which together increase the risk of early detection. If the elimination of nucle... |
Weapons-Related Research |
Along with access to fissile material, research and development efforts leading to a weapons capability will be a key challenge for a legacy nuclear-weapon state seeking to reconstitute a nuclear arsenal, as it is for a would-be nuclear proliferant state today. Because the ban treaty is expected to prohibit the develop... |
The NPT and the IAEA safeguards system have grappled with this question recently in the case of Iran. The IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear program identified research and testing activities and management structures judged to have been "relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device."26 Among other things, thes... |
The 2017 Carnegie Endowment report "Toward a Nuclear Firewall" identified a similar set of "activities, materials, and equipment that should be inhibited because they are purely or strongly associated with nuclear weapons programs."27 The critical weapons-related activities to be prohibited included |
• milling of plutonium or uranium shells, spheres, or hemispheres; |
• neutron generators; |
• tritium technology; |
• hydrodynamic codes and experiments; |
• preparations for a nuclear test explosion, including devices using inert materials; |
• modification of a delivery vehicle to carry a nuclear warhead; |
• development of a re-entry vehicle; and |
• weaponization. |
The report noted that states where there is evidence of all these R&D activities should be subject to greater monitoring than states where there are few signs. It also identified the importance of "contextual factors," such as secrecy regarding such activities, military involvement, and the absence of activities that o... |
Technological and Societal Verification |
The UN open-ended working group on nuclear disarmament negotiations in its 2015 report to the General Assembly helped lay the basis for the ban treaty talks and suggested some verification measures that could be part of such a treaty process, such as routine and challenge inspections, as well as measures for the use of... |
Former Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu flashes the V-for-victory sign as he leaves prison April 21, 2004, after an 18-year sentence for revealing details of Israel’s secret nuclear-weapons program. In 2005, he told Israel’s Channel 2 television that he had acted after becoming alarmed by the danger posed by... |
Large constellations of small satellites, some of which are already being deployed, aim to provide daily coverage of the entire planet. This qualitatively new capability could be combined with the large archives of existing satellite imagery to provide a "time machine" showing what has been happening at a particular si... |
It has long been recognized that any system of nuclear verification would gain from access to information that could be provided by scientists and technicians inside nuclear programs, as well as by ordinary citizens, with regard to possible violations of a treaty.32 This would be especially important for exposing R&D a... |
There is a limited history of individuals exposing nuclear weapons activities. The most famous example is Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli technician jailed for 18 years for revealing details of Israel’s nuclear weapons program in 1986. At trial, Vanunu defended his actions as necessary to force Israel to acknowledge its ... |
The inclusion of verification elements in the ban treaty is feasible and important. Most of the proposed core prohibitions are already covered in existing legal structures and associated verification mechanisms. In addition, the treaty’s verification framework will be valuable in the process leading to the elimination ... |
The ban treaty could require parties to maintain the safeguards obligations they already have in force and establish the goal of convergence in transparency through all states accepting a comprehensive safeguards agreement and an additional protocol as a verification baseline. It also could provide guidelines for the p... |
The ban treaty process could consider, as an immediate obligation or as a goal of the treaty process, a prohibition on the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons-usable fissile material for any purpose. Finally, a treaty commitment to developing and accepting new verification technologies and requiring law... |
1. For statements from the first round of negotiations on March 27-31, 2017, see http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/disarmament-fora/nuclear-weapon-ban/statements; https://www.un.org/disarmament/ptnw/statements.html. The draft treaty is at http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/nuclear... |
2. For a brief summary of the positions expressed in the first round of ban treaty discussions regarding key obligations, see Allison Pytlak, News in Brief, Nuclear Ban Daily, March 30, 2017, pp. 10-13, http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/nuclear-weapon-ban/reports/NBD1.4.pdf. |
3. For an online version of the text of the Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), see IAEA, Statute of the IAEA, https://www.iaea.org/about/statute (art. 3.B(1)). |
4. William C. Foster, the U.S. negotiator to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said that, under NPT Article II, the construction of an experimental or prototype nuclear explosive device would be covered by the term ‘manufacture’ as would be the productio... |
5. For a list of states with IAEA safeguards and additional protocols, see IAEA, Status List: Conclusion of Safeguards Agreements, Additional Protocols, and Small Quantities Protocols, October 7, 2016, https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/16/10/sg_agreements_comprehensive_status_list.pdf. See also IAEA, The Struc... |
6. For an online version of the text of the Central Asian nuclear-weapon-free-zone treaty, see UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA), Treaty on a Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone in Central Asia (CANWFZ), http://disarmament.un.org/treaties/t/canwfz/text. |
7. 2000 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Final Document, NPT/CONF.2000/28 (Parts I and II), 2000, p. 4. See 2010 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Final Document, NPT/CONF.2010/50 (Vol. I), 2010, p. 25... |
8. UN General Assembly, Taking Forward Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament Negotiations, A/RES/71/258, January 11, 2017. |
9. For an online version of the text of the Chemical Weapons Convention, see Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction, n.d., https://www.opcw.org/fileadmin/OPCW/CWC/CWC_en.pdf. |
10. The IAEA recommended among other things destruction of photographs and drawings which could reveal significant dimensions or the design of the nuclear material core and any components that would simplify engineering design or reveal dimensions of other sensitive components. IAEA General Conference, The Denucleari... |
11. Ibid., p. 9. |
12. Ibid., p. 11. |
13. Adolf von Baeckmann, Garry Dillon, and Demetrius Perricos, Nuclear Verification in South Africa, IAEA Bulletin, No. 1 (1995), pp. 42-48. |
14. Olli Heinonen, Verifying the Dismantlement of South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Program, in Nuclear Weapons Materials Gone Missing: What Does History Teach? ed. Henry D. Sokolski, November 2014, p. 174, https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pdffiles/PUB1238.pdf. |
15. Ibid. |
16. Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, Status of World Nuclear Forces, n.d., https://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-forces (accessed March 1, 2017). |
17. Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories, 1945-2013, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 69, No. 5 (2013): 75-81. |
18. International Panel on Fissile Material (IPFM), Global Fissile Material Report 2013: Increasing Transparency of Nuclear Warhead and Fissile Material Stocks as a Step Toward Disarmament, October 2013, http://ipfmlibrary.org/gfmr13.pdf. |
19. Dominic Frisby, In Proof We Trust, AEON, April 2016, https://aeon.co/essays/how-blockchain-will-revolutionise-far-more-than-money; Joon Ian Wong, Even the U.S. Military Is Looking at Blockchain Technology—To Secure Nuclear Weapons, Quartz, October 2016, https://qz.com/801640/darpa-blockchain-a-blockchain-from-gua... |
20. IAEA General Conference, Denuclearization of Africa (GC(XXXVI)/RES/577), p. 4. |
21. Ibid., p. 12. |
22. Committee on International Security and Arms Control, National Academy of Sciences, The Future of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1997), p. 97. |
23. The idea of international plutonium storage was extensively discussed in the 1970s and 1980s, in particular as part of the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation. More recently, it has been proposed as a confidence-building measure for Japan’s growing stockpile of separated plutonium. Fred McGoldrick, IAEA C... |
24. Harold Feiveson et al., Unmaking the Bomb: A Fissile Material Approach to Nuclear Disarmament and Nonproliferation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), pp. 173-183. |
25. Article 3(a) of the African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty includes an undertaking [n]ot to conduct research on, develop, manufacture, stockpile or otherwise acquire, possess or have control over any nuclear explosive device by any means anywhere. For an online version of the text of the Treaty of Pelindaba, see... |
26. IAEA Board of Governors, Final Assessment on Past and Present Outstanding Issues Regarding Iran’s Nuclear Programme, GOV/2015/68, December 2, 2015, p. 2. |
27. Toby Dalton et al., Toward a Nuclear Firewall: Bridging the NPT’s Three Pillars, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 2017, http://carnegieendowment.org/files/CP_301_Dalton_et_al_Firewall_Final_Web.pdf. |
28. Ibid. |
29. UN General Assembly, Taking Forward Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament Negotiations: Note by the Secretary-General, A/71/371, September 1, 2016 (containing the report of the UN open-ended working group taking forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations, p. 24). |
30. Matthew Ferguson and Claude Norman, All-Source Information Acquisition and Analysis in the IAEA Department of Safeguards, IAEA-CN-184/048, n.d., https://www.iaea.org/safeguards/symposium/2010/Documents/PapersRepository/048.pdf. |
31. For an online version of the text of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, see https://www.ctbto.org/fileadmin/content/treaty/treaty_text.pdf (art. 4.a.11). |
32. IPFM, Global Fissile Material Report 2009: A Path to Nuclear Disarmament, October 2009, pp. 114-123, http://fissilematerials.org/library/gfmr09.pdf. |
33. Deborah Sontag, Israel Eases Secrecy Over Nuclear Whistle-Blower’s Trial, The New York Times, November 25, 1999. |
34. Joseph Rotblat, Societal Verification, in A Nuclear-Weapon-Free World, eds. Joseph Rotblat, Jack Steinberger, and Bhalchandra Udgaonkar (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 103-118. |
Posted: May 31, 2017 |
REMARKS: A “Realistic and Practical” Route to a World Free of Nuclear Weapons |
June 2017 |
By Fumio Kishida |
First of all, I would like to pay tribute to the efforts by the hibakushas and the communities affected by the atomic bombings, who have been calling for a world free of nuclear weapons. I would also like to pay respect to the efforts by the civil societies all over the world that promote discussions of the humanitaria... |
Fumio Kishida (Photo credit: Rick Bajornas/UN Photo)The recognition of the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons underpins all approaches toward a world free of such weapons. Meanwhile, North Korea’s nuclear and missile development has now reached a new level and is posing a real threat to the region and beyond. T... |
Efforts toward a world free of nuclear weapons should be carried out in a realistic manner, while taking into account the security environment. With the clear recognition of the humanitarian consequences of the use of nuclear weapons and the objective assessment of the severe international security environment, I am co... |
At this moment, the schism on approaches toward a world free of nuclear weapons has become salient among nuclear-weapon states, between nuclear- and non-nuclear-weapon states, and even among non-nuclear-weapon states. In light of this, I would like to put forward three points as a way to bridge nuclear-weapon and non-n... |
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