Friday, 17 August, 2007

by Gareth Evans
The Canberra Times

IN JANUARY this year the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock, for six decades now the best-known symbolic indicator of the threat posed by nuclear proliferation, moved two minutes closer to midnight at 11.55pm, the closest to doomsday it has been since the Cold War. At the start of the nuclear arms race in 1953 its hands were set at two minutes to midnight. Under United States president Bush Sr, with the end of the Cold War and after the US and Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 1991, the clock moved the farthest from doomsday it has ever been, to 11.43pm.

Now, under his son's watch, the hands have been pushed back almost as close to midnight as they have ever been with the renewed value being attached to the possession of nuclear weapons by so many countries; with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in limbo and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty being steadily eroded; with North Korea's bomb test and Iran's nuclear plans; with the deal with India unaccompanied by any serious discipline on fissile material production or anything else; with continuing talk about the development of new generation weapons; with the emergence of talk almost unthinkable in the Cold War years of nuclear weapons being an acceptable means of war-fighting, even to the extent of their use in pre-emptive strikes; and with the new anxiety felt about non-state actors, combined with old fears about poor safeguards of nuclear materials.

In case anyone feels that I am over-emphasising the contributions to this alarming new nuclear insecurity environment of the current President Bush and I acknowledge that is always a temptation it is worth pondering whether anything would be any better under his likely Democrat successor.

When the increasingly struggling Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama recently said that he would rule out, as a profound mistake, the use of nuclear weapons in Afghanistan or Pakistan to target al-Qaeda, the increasingly confident Hillary Clinton pounced on him, saying that it was unwise to be so specific: "I don't believe any President should make blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons."

It's easy to quickly lose one's bearings in the arcane world of nuclear policy with, if you let it get you down its extraordinary technical complexity, jargon all its own, and multiplicity of closely interrelated issues, substantive and procedural. Let me try to cut through that a little and focus on just two big things for the world's policymakers to do: get serious about disarmament, about eliminating nuclear weapons once and for all; and get serious about overcoming the many and obvious weaknesses of the present non-proliferation regime.

There is no doubt that the current non-proliferation regime is under great and increasing stress. This is particularly so when one thinks of it, as one should, as comprising not just the treaty itself, and the International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards system which supports it, but as a whole constellation of mutually reinforcing elements, including the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty which has yet to enter into force because a number of designated states have failed to ratify (including China, North Korea, India, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, and, indefensibly, the US) and the long-hoped for Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty designed to ban any further production of weapons-usable highly enriched uranium and plutonium, but negotiations on which have been stalled for years.

The biggest single nuclear proliferation issue global policymakers now face is Iran. The situation with North Korea is at least partly back on track as a result of the Bush Administration learning the hard way, at the cost of up to another 10 weapons-worth of fissile material being added to North Korea's nuclear stock that negotiation can be a better option than confrontation. But for the moment Iran remains a paid-up member of the axis of evil, so far as the US is concerned, and tensions continue to mount as it becomes more and more obviously technically capable of enriching uranium up to weapons grade.

The most attractive solution, given Iran's less than honest and open record of reporting to the IAEA over a number of years, was to persuade it, by a mixture of incentives and disincentives, to forgo the acquisition of fissile-material making capacity or full fuel-cycle capability, as the jargon has it in return for guaranteed external supply of fuel to run its energy reactors.

But it does not appear that Iran is in any kind of mood to accept a guaranteed supply from offshore, either an international fuel bank if one existed, or from Russia, as Russia has proposed, or anyone else, in return for forgoing its fuel-cycle ambitions and agreeing to indefinitely relinquish whatever right as it has under the non-proliferation treaty to enrich uranium even in the context of all the sanctions and threatened sanctions that are now on the table, and incentives (including restored relations with the US) that could be put back on the table.

Some are confident that sanctions, particularly the back-door variety that the US, and Europeans under American pressure, are capable of applying through the banking system, to choke off both trade and investment finance, will ultimately force the Iranians to cave in. My reading is that, while the potential impact of these kinds of measures can never be understated (and was probably decisive, for example in South Africa against the apartheid regime), in Iran too many factors are pulling the other way, including:Iran's sense of national pride, consciousness of its history, and deeply rooted ideology of independence, which cuts across other internal political and cultural divisions, and makes it reluctant to be seen to be pushed around. Associated with this the sense that Iran is a major, not minor, league player, not least in its own region, and entitled to have the kind of capability that goes with that. The widespread sense that the West is trying to prevent Iran from having access to scientific progress, patronising it, to keep it in dependence and tutelage. The sense that the international community's heart is not really in a full-scale sanctions squeeze that Russia (although it has gone along with the security council so far), China and the great majority of non-proliferation treaty countries don't really believe that they are at present acting outside the letter or even spirit of the treaty in rushing to acquire full fuel-cycle capability.

Add to all that the Iranians' current perception that military strike action is a non-starter in the present environment with, except for a few fringe dwellers, the clear thinking in both the US and Israel that the negatives would far outweigh the positives and you have all the makings of a full-scale impasse.

The downside from the West's point of view which will be repeated over and over as this debate continues is that, although stretching out the process, delayed limited enrichment would permit Iran to eventually achieve full fuel-cycle capability, with the risk in turn of weapons acquisition when that happens.

But the reality of Iran having that choice, sooner rather than later, and with minimal inspection and supervision along the way, now stares us in the face.

Nobody wants to see the present diplomatic impasse slide into the kind of situation where the West's unwillingness to compromise strengthens its opponents' extremists to the point that their country walks away from the treaty, shrugs off any kind of international monitoring, produces a large stock of weapons-grade material and ultimately takes the risk of building its own bomb.

We have been there and done that with North Korea. Although there has at last been a breakthrough in the six-party talks, it is still going to be nightmarishly difficult to wholly recover the ground which has been lost to North Korea through earlier Western obduracy.

If the present diplomatic strategy is going nowhere, the only rational response is a new one which may be ideal for no one but has attractions for everyone. If all diplomacy fails, the alternative course of military action is simply too horrible to contemplate.

It is important to remember just how indiscriminately destructive these weapons are; to remain passionate about them being outlawed; and to be unyieldingly intolerant about arguments for their retention or use. We are right to be enraged about them, and to maintain that passion and commitment as long as we live.

Gareth Evans is chief executive of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group and a former foreign minister and deputy Labor leader. This is an edited extract of the first Dr John Gee Memorial Lecture delivered at the Australian National University last night.