SHARE
A report from the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, published today, details how the nuclear weapons states and some of their closest allies who are members of the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty are actively undermining the treaty while claiming they uphold it as the cornerstone of disarmament and non-proliferation.
|
The Cornerstone Report (available on this link from Monday 27 April) is published as the members of the NPT start their 11th Review Conference at the UN in New York. There has not been an agreed outcome to one of these five-yearly meetings since 2010 and there is little optimism this one will be different. Tensions between the NPT’s nuclear weapon states are running high, between China, Russia on one side and the US, France and the UK on the other, while both Moscow and Washington are involved in illegal wars against non-nuclear armed NPT states, Ukraine and Iran. As a result the risk that nuclear weapons will be used, either by accident or design, is assessed by many experts to be higher than it has ever been. The NPT committed the five original nuclear-armed countries - China, France, Russia, the UK and the US - to negotiate their disarmament, while in exchange the other countries who joined it agreed not to develop or acquire nuclear weapons - the so-called grand bargain. It has proved relatively successful in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, but the nuclear-armed countries have not honoured their commitment to disarm. Instead, they are now embarked on modernising and, in some cases, expanding their arsenals. The report examines how the nuclear-armed states have adopted similar diplomatic strategies to divert attention away from their failure to comply with the NPT using a series of performative actions that result in no real change. These include drafting working papers that discuss future options with no timetable; submitting transparency reports to conferences alongside expanding their arsenals behind varying degrees of secrecy; and issuing statements of unequivocal commitment to disarmament while raising warhead ceilings and commissioning new nuclear-armed submarines. In addition, the report identifies a new and troubling escalation of rhetoric and public statements from governments of several non-nuclear-weapon NPT states, mainly in Europe, that openly praises nuclear deterrence, and in some cases explicitly advocates for new nuclear capabilities. It concludes that the justifications used to explain the retention of nuclear arsenals is the same as that of would-be proliferators. ICAN’s Executive Director, Melissa Parke, said: “When the NPT was negotiated in the mid-1960s, the geopolitical environment was very tense following the Cuban Missile Crisis. Five countries had already tested nuclear weapons, stockpiles were increasing fast and several other countries were working actively on developing their own nuclear weapons programmes. Despite the security environment then, countries managed to agree this treaty. Decades later, many of those same countries offer the current state of global tensions as an excuse for failing to honour the legally binding commitments they made all those years ago. This is inexcusable. Modernising their arsenals and encouraging the spread of nuclear weapons is saddling the next generation of humanity with the existential threat of nuclear weapons that should have been consigned to the history books long ago.” The report concludes that the states that are genuinely committed to the NPT have tried hard to find common ground with states whose actions show they have no intention of disarming. It argues that the former group “... need to be more precise, more public, and more willing to name what is actually happening: That the NPT is not a system that has failed to produce results, but rather that a set of deliberate choices, made by identifiable states, substitutes the performance of compliance for its substance.” |
|
For further information, or to request an interview, contact: Alistair Burnett, ICAN Head of Media [email protected] +41 78 238 7179 |