The failing NPT: the case for institutional reform

Abstract

There is no question that the failure of the most recent Review Conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is the most serious in the long list of the treaty’s failed Review Conferences. But it is not the first time that a US� /Iranian stand-off has threatened Review progress. In 1995, Russia’s desire to sell reactors and lease nuclear fuels to Iran drew such strong US opposition through the mid-phases of the conference that it appeared for a time to undermine the possibility of the indefinite extension that otherwise totally preoccupied Washington. And a decade earlier, the new Islamic Republic was pretty much the last country to be brought into the consensus required for the release of a final text. But when compared to these earlier exercises in brinkmanship, what is most significant about the recent Review failure is its potential for further escalation. By the time of the next Review Conference, we are likely to have definite answers to the great unknowns that lay just beneath the surface of this year’s debacle. We will know whether or not the United States will resume nuclear testing in order to publicly demonstrate the capacities of its new generations of nuclear weapons. We will know whether or not Iran’s strategic competitors can resist the temptation to ‘do another Osiraq’. And we will know whether Tehran’s alleged civil nuclear program is really so peaceful. Wrong answers to any one of these questions would be, needless to say, extremely serious, probably sufficient to doom the next Review Conference. Wrong answers to more than one might well bring down the whole NPT framework. But there is an intervening period before these days of diplomatic reckoning arrive, and it begs the question of how that time might best be spent. To this end, the articles by Michael Wesley (2005) and Marianne Hanson (2005) anchor the ends of a spectrum of possible answers. Wesley favours the abandonment of the NPT*/ it should be emphasised, putting any faith at all in US counter-proliferation policies, which is how such arguments usually proceed. What concerns him are the NPT’s structural problems*/ the issues of unfairness and inefficiency, to which Wesley adds its mounting opportunity costs. Instead of sinking more good energy after bad, he would rather see us acknowledge the unpleasant fact of gradual nuclear proliferation and begin the process of redirecting scarce arms control resources towards a regime that would channel proliferation along more stable pathways. His argument is in the best spirit of the gloomy tradition of arms control where