On Monday Parliament debate the Nuclear Non
Proliferation Treaty (NPT)
This sounds obscure, but is central to both
security and spending policy of the next Government.
The NPT will have its quinquennial review at the
United Nations in New York, starting in April. The review will be held from 27 April–22 May straddle the UK General Election on 7 May, so little media
or political attention will be paid, which is unfortunate, but
predictable
Monday’s debate is thus is the penultimate chance,
before Thursday’s wider defence debate, that Parliament will have to debate this
important matter on the future security of the planet bristling with nuclear WMDs before the election,
Based on past experience, the minister will
to draw to MPs’ attention to the policy mantra always wheeled out in non-proliferation
debates, that:
-The Government has unilaterally reduced the number
of deployed nuclear warheads;
- The UK deploys the minimum number of nuclear
weapons for our security, what the will misleading call our “Nuclear Deterrent”
- The UK has participated in debates at the
Conference on Disarmament and Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review conference
preparatory meetings;
-and the
UK attended the conference in Vienna last December on the Humanitarian Effect
of Nuclear Weapons
All true. But this leaves out what has not
been done.
Errors of
Omission
The NPT negotiations
themselves really got started after the unanimous approval of a 1961 UN General
Assembly resolution on negotiation of a treaty that would ban countries without
nuclear weapons from acquiring them and that would require the inspections that
the IAEA treaty only authorized. In particular, the resolution asked the
countries “possessing nuclear weapons” to “undertake to refrain from
relinquishing control of nuclear weapons and from transmitting information
necessary for their manufacture” to nations not possessing nuclear weapons.
Papers available in the National Archives in Kew show that on 23 January 1968, Fred (later
Lord) Mulley, as the UK Labour Government's minister of state for foreign
affairs, addressed the 358th plenary meeting of the Eighteen Nation Committee on Disarmament (ENDC) in Geneva, the
predecessor committee to the CD, explaining why nations should sign up to the
newly negotiated NPT, he told the ministerial delegations:
"As I have made clear in
previous speeches, my government accepts the obligation to participate fully in
the negotiations required by [NPT] Article VI and it is our desire that these
negotiations should begin as soon as possible and should produce speedy
and successful results. There is no excuse now for allowing a long delay to
follow the signing of this treaty."(emphasis added)
A year later, on 24 January 1967, a refined joint draft by the US and Soviet
Union negotiators differed from the earlier US/UK draft, according to another
US embassy aide-memoire, "in that the former would ban the transfer of
nuclear warheads (as distinct from nuclear delivery vehicles) not only between
nuclear weapons states (NWS) and non-nuclear weapons states (NNWS) but also
between NWS themselves."
A secret US ‘Interpretations Memo’, dated May 1967, stated that the NPT would
thus prohibit "transfer to any recipient whatsoever 'nuclear weapons' or
control over them", meaning bombs and warheads.
That is just what buying
significant sections of Trident from the US does in practice, and thereby
undermines our compliance with the treaty which the UK Labour government helped
draft, and for which the UK is a depositary state with the US and Russia.
Next year, on 23 January 1968, Fred Mulley, in his address to the ENDC in
Geneva, told the representatives of the nations which Britain hoped to convince
to join up to the atomic self-denying NPT, that NPT "articles 1 and 2
effectively provide for the closing of all loopholes of practical significance
to the proliferation of nuclear weapons."
Sadly, with UK complicity, we can
see from subsequent history and the Polaris and Trident nuclear WMD import from
the United States that he was wrong.
Shortly after, on January 26 1968, a confidential memo by Mulley for the
cabinet defence and oversea (sic) policy committee laid out Britain's position
on the key nuclear disarmament clause, which became NPT article 6, commented:
"A number of countries may withhold their ratification of the treaty until
nuclear-weapon states show they are taking seriously the obligations which this
article imposes on them. It will therefore be essential to follow the treaty
up quickly with the further disarmament measures if it is to be brought into
force and remain in force thereafter. We have therefore begun to work on a
paper examining the most suitable measures on which we should concentrate our
attention once a non-proliferation treaty has been achieved."
A few days afterwards, on 30 January 1968, and the NPT was presented to the
cabinet for its endorsement. A supportive foreign office memo stated:
"a lot of the thinking
behind the treaty, and some of the language, originally came from us."
On 27 June that year, the NPT,
including the key article VI obligation on nuclear weapon signatory states, to
negotiate nuclear disarmament in good faith, was presented to Parliament as
Cmnd 3683.
A talking paper (number 38) prepared for ministers in mid-April that year
pointed out: "It should be remembered that the NPT is in the first instance,
in the interests of non-nuclear countries themselves, adding to their security
against the development of nuclear weapons in non-nuclear rival states, and
sparing them the vast expense of developing such weapons themselves."
If we fast forward to June 2007, Margaret Beckett was
coming to the end of her time as Foreign Secretary under the last Labour Government,
she made a very important speech to a prestigious and influential annual conference
held in Washington DC by the Carnegie International Endowment for Peace
Mrs Beckett
called for negotiators to take additional steps toward nuclear disarmament.
She
said:
“The judgment we made 40 years ago [at the
NPT’s signing] that the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons was in all our
interests is just as true today as it was then. For more than 60 years, good
management and good fortune have meant that nuclear arsenals have not been
used, but we cannot rely just on history to repeat itself.”
[Keynote address at Carnegie International
Nonproliferation Conference, Washington, D.C., June 25, 2007]
These were very wise words then, and remain
just as wise today.
Last week both US Secretary of State John
Kerry and President Obama made speeches to mark the 45th anniversary
of the entering into force of the NPT on 5th March 1970 (By contrast
no British minister mentioned it at all).
A month
earlier, after
their meeting on 6 February organized in London by the foreign Office, the UN Security Council Permanent Five member
states – the UK, US, Russia, France and China- dubbed the “P5”- diplomats issued a joint statement through the
Foreign Office which
included a very interesting passage, considering it is co-signed by
Russia, stating:
“At their 2015
Conference the P5 restated their belief that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty remains the essential cornerstone for the nuclear non-proliferation
regime and the foundation for the pursuit of nuclear disarmament, and is an
essential contribution to international security and stability.”
Indeed, less than a month ago in a Parliamentary
debate (on 20 January) on the Trident nuclear weapons system, the Defence
Secretary Michael Fallon told MPs
"we
also share the vision of a world that is without nuclear weapons, achieved
through multilateral disarmament.” (emphasis added)
Why is the
Government determined to continue a process that will result in £100
thousand million (£100 billion) on a nuclear weapons system when
the Defence Secretary has put it on the Parliamentary record as recently as January
he wants to realise a world without any
nuclear weapons of mass destruction at
all.
Instead of spending this unimaginably vast sum
of taxpayers money - at a time when public services are being eviscerated by austerity
cuts - why not implement the unilateral nuclear disarmament of which ministers
are proud to announce when reducing deployed nuclear warhead numbers, and
cancel the spending on Trident , which will be totally wasted when the Government’s
own desire to reach complete nuclear
disarmament is achieved?
Trident will become the ultimate ‘Stranded
asset.”
The missiles great shiny white nuclear
elephants!
The submarines great grey beached whales!
At the Vienna Conference on humanitarian
impacts of nuclear weapons last December in Vienna, which the Government - through
its Ambassador to Austria and United Nations institutions in Vienna - was
pleased to attend, the International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) proposed
as Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty.
As a recent ICAN briefing states:
“A treaty to ban nuclear weapons could be a straightforward legal instrument
with prohibitions on the use, deployment, development and production, transfer,
and stockpiling of nuclear weapons and on assistance with these prohibited
acts. It would require the elimination of nuclear weapons for states that
possess them, with the specific processes for elimination being the
responsibility of the nuclear-armed states to implement and verify, in
accordance with international laws and agreements.”
If the government wants to live up to its
clearly stated belief in a non- nuclear weapons world, it should surely back
such a treaty!
