Photo: Ambassador Rakhmetullin presenting the draft Factual Summary of the 2024 NPT Prep Com at the final session in the United Nations.
On August 2, the final day of the 2024 NPT Prep Com at the United Nations in Geneva, the Chair, Ambassador Akan Rakhmetullin of Kazakhstan, released a Revised Factual Summary of the two-week long meeting. Amongst other things, the summary noted support for a nuclear weapons convention:
“Some States Parties noted the importance of a phased programme for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons, within a specified framework of time or with clearly defined timeframes and benchmarks, including a comprehensive convention on nuclear weapons to prohibit their possession, development, production, acquisition, testing, stockpiling, transfer, use or threat of use and to provide for their destruction.”
2024 NPT Chair’s Factual Summary Rev 1. Paragraph 8.
The proposed nuclear weapons convention is distinguished in the Factual Summary from the Treaty on the Prohibition on Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which also received support, but which some states argued “is not an “effective measure” contributing to the Treaty’s disarmament goals, as it fails to address the enormously complex military, political, and technical requirements for the elimination of nuclear weapons.”
In this update we look at the origins of the nuclear weapons convention proposal, the shift to negotiations of the TPNW, subsequent proposals in the working paper NWC Reset: Frameworks for a Nuclear Weapon Free World, and why there appears now to be renewed interest in the proposal for an NWC.
Origins of the nuclear weapons convention
In October 1996, the United Nations General Assembly, by a large majority vote, called on governments to commence negotiations that would lead to the conclusion of a nuclear weapons convention (NWC). The call was made in follow-up to the historic Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons, and in particular on the obligation affirmed unanimously by the Court that “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith, and bring to a conclusion, negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control“.
The UN resolution, which was supported by four of the nine nuclear-armed States, envisaged a convention that would include nuclear-armed, nuclear-allied and non-nuclear states, and which would outline an agreed program for the phased reduction and elimination of nuclear weapons, facilitated by effective verification and compliance mechanisms.
The proposal received support from successive UN Secretary-General’s, including circulation by Kofi Annan of a Model NWC drafted by the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, and inclusion of the proposed NWC in the 5-point plan for nuclear disarmament released by Ban Ki-Moon in October, 2008.
The proposal for a NWC also received support in the final document agreed by the States Parties to the NPT in 2010, which affirmed that “All States need to make special efforts to establish the necessary framework to achieve and maintain a world without nuclear weapons. The Conference notes the Five-Point Proposal for Nuclear Disarmament of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, which proposes inter alia the consideration of negotiations on a nuclear weapons convention or a framework of separate mutually reinforcing instruments backed by a strong system of verification.“
However, a pronounced lack of good faith from the nuclear-armed States in implementing the UNGA resolution and NPT commitments, meant that the envisaged negotiations failed to commence.
Shift in approach – the TPNW
Frustrated with this lack of progress, non-nuclear States decided to negotiate a Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in 2017 without participation of the nuclear armed and allied states (with the exception of Netherlands who participated in the negotiations but did not sign the adopted treaty).
The TPNW, which entered into force in January 2021, provides a possibility for nuclear armed and allied States to join, but none of them have done so, with most of them indicating that the TPNW does not take into consideration the political/security and technical issues regarding the relinquishment of nuclear deterrence and the elimination of nuclear weapons. The TPNW for example, unlike the envisaged NWC, does not provide a phased program for mutual reduction of nuclear stockpiles under effective measures and mechanisms for verification and compliance, which would provide the confidence to move to complete elimination. These are some of the elements that would be required to get possible support from nuclear armed and allied states.
NWC Reset
In 2020, the Abolition 2000 Working Group on the UN Disarmament Agenda and a Nuclear Weapons Convention established an initiative NWC Reset: Frameworks for a Nuclear Weapon Free World to take a new look at the NWC proposal in the context of current and emerging political realities including the entry-into-force of the TPNW, the responses of the nuclear armed and allied states to this, and the deteriorating diplomatic environment for nuclear disarmament.
The group submitted a working paper to the 2022 NPT Review Conference (and a revised version to the 2023 NPT Prep Com) entitled Abolition 2000 NWC Reset: Frameworks for a Nuclear-Weapon-Free World which outlines three types of agreement for achieving a nuclear-weapon-free world:
- A comprehensive nuclear weapons convention or package of agreements;
- A framework agreement which includes the legal commitment to achieve a nuclear-weapon-free world, identifies the measures and pathways required in general terms, and provides a process for agreeing on details over time;
- Protocols to the TPNW or related instruments – on mutual/phased reductions, verification and compliance – which nuclear armed and allied states would negotiate and adopt as part of a process for them to join the TPNW.
Any of the three types of agreement outlined above could provide the framework for achieving a nuclear-weapon-free world. It’s not vitally important which approach is taken. What is most important is to move the nuclear armed and allied states to commence deliberations and negotiations according to the approach that they can agree upon. The NWC Reset paper, therefore, recommends that NPT States parties commence deliberations, and that they provide a timebound commitment to the adoption and implementation of the chosen agreement.
This approach, and the three possible types of agreement, were promoted at the 2024 NPT Prep Com in some of the civil society statements made to the plenary (including statements by Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer and Ayleen Roy of the Transnational Interfaith Working Group), as well as in some appeals presented to the NPT including the parliamentary appeal Turn Back the Doomsday Clock and the inter-faith appeal Pursuing Peace, Security and Nuclear Disarmament through our Common Humanity, and also in a NWC Reset Flyer which was circulated at the conference.
Conclusion
The environment for making progress on comprehensive nuclear disarmament is bleak. There are no disarmament negotiations among the nuclear armed states in progress or even on the horizon. All of the nuclear-armed states parties to the NPT today are involved, directly or indirectly, in the largest war in Europe since World War II, a war in which a country possessing close to half the world’s nuclear weapons has made repeated threats to use them.
However, it is precisely in these times of heightened threat, that disarmament diplomacy with bold vision is necessary. Envisioning the modalities for multilateral nuclear disarmament that would be verifiable and credible is more urgent than ever. This is perhaps the reason for the renewed interest in a NWC expressed by States to the NPT and included in the Chair’s Factual Summary.