The role of sanctions in non- proliferation

Abstract

When a government intends to shape the behavior of others, it has a wide range of instruments available, ranging from voicing discontent to using force. Almost every kind of measure beyond mere words and short of actual war has been called “sanctions”: an action aimed at harming a “target” whose behavior is to be changed. Since harming and supporting a target can both be seen as inducement strategies, “positive sanctions” are often discussed alongside “negative” ones. Although there is some logic to this argument, the following discussion focuses on harmful measures, which are overwhelmingly more common. In fact, non-proliferation has become a major objective of the sanction policies of the USA and several other actors in international politics. The US government, in particular, has a wide range of sanctions at its disposal, including those that have the purpose of preventing and punishing proliferation. The use of sanctions as a non-proliferation tool has spread considerably since its first explicit use after India’s 1974 nuclear test. But it has spread slowly and unevenly, driven largely by US government actions and specific events. In contrast to some of the other measures discussed in this volume, sanctions are not a new tool introduced recently as an alternative to negotiated arms control. They have existed for much longer. Multilateral sanctions are also an integral, though largely implicit, element of the existing non-proliferation regimes for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. The United Nations (UN) Security Council is arbiter of final resort for violations of all three regimes. While only the Chemical Weapons Convention explicitly mentions the possibility of sanctions as a possible measure to “redress a situation and to ensure compliance” (Article 12), both the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty contain references to the Security Council for cases of non-compliance. Furthermore, as a result of its prerogative under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to determine when a threat or breach of international peace and security has occurred, the Security Council has recourse,within the limits of international law, to the coercive measures mentioned in the UN Charter, one of which is sanctions (Farrall 2007). The General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency can also suspend technical cooperation and other privileges granted to member states – another form of sanction – under Article 19 of its Statute. Still, sanctions do go well together with the other instruments discussed in this volume. First, they are asymmetrical and non-cooperative, i.e., imposed by a sender on a target. They can be used as unilateral measures by one government. But unilateral measures only make sense if they have a probability of actually impacting on a target, so they are attractive as unilateral measures only for the most powerful governments. This reinforces the asymmetrical aspect of sanctions. Second, if sanctions are implemented by a group of states, such multilateral action need not necessarily be based on binding agreements. Although there is a forum for binding multilateral sanctions, namely the UN Security Council, sanctions can also be implemented informally. Finally, sanctions are flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of targets. They can be imposed against governments, but also against individuals, entities and groups of actors. In fact, sanctions have increasingly been targeted at non-state actors. In line with the plan of this volume, this chapter will primarily address questions of the legitimacy and efficacy of sanctions as a non-proliferation tool. I will first describe and analyze the non-proliferation sanction policies of three major actors: the USA, the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN). As part of that discussion I will address the issue of who has been pushing for non-proliferation sanctions and who has opposed the use of sanctions as a non-proliferation tool. In the second part of this chapter, I will address the success of sanctions, i.e., whether non-proliferation sanctions have helped to contain the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and nuclear weapons in particular. The chapter will conclude with a brief discussion of the future of nonproliferation sanctions.