Nuclear disarmament the goal of Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Initiative

TOKYO // The Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Initiative (NPDI) countries will continue their dialogue with nuclear weapon states with the objective of promoting disarmament.

“The group have strong views calling upon all nuclear-weapons states to intensify efforts to reduce and eventually eliminate all types of nuclear weapons, deployed and non-deployed, in a transparent, verifiable and irreversible manner,” said Hamad Alkaabi, the UAE ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency. “The NPDI worked previously on the development of a draft standard reporting form to encourage progress in the implementation of nuclear disarmament and on confidence building - a form to be filled by nuclear weapons states on their nuclear arsenals quantities and types as a first step for disarmament.”

But more needs to be done, according to Deepti Choubey, senior director of nuclear and bio-security at the Nuclear Threat Initiative in Washington, DC. “The Non-Proliferation Treaty, in its essence, is something that is guaranteeing the security of the states that are party to it, in particular non-nuclear weapon states,” she said. “It means their neighbours are not going to acquire nuclear weapons and, in return, the acknowledged nuclear weapon states of the treaty - the US, France, the UK, Russia and China - agreed that they would share with these states peaceful uses of nuclear energy and that they would also disarm over time. That’s where there’s been a bit of a tension, on the disarmament front.”

She said the treaty’s core was to provide security benefits from the get-go.

“But the problem is there were always three states that stood outside of the treaty over time, that never signed up to it - India, Pakistan and Israel,” she said. “It is widely believed that Israel possesses nuclear weapon capabilities, and India and Pakistan in 1988, through the nuclear test that they conducted, declared themselves to be de-facto nuclear weapons states. The bigger issue also is that North Korea was also a party to the treaty and they essentially withdrew in 2003 and that’s been this other blow to the treaty.”

She said one of the biggest challenges was the control and management of some of the deadliest weapons and dual-use technology in the world.

“Currently, the US and Russia are the largest possessors between the two of them, they have about 95 per cent of the world’s nuclear weapons and material,” Ms Choubey said. “From their height, in terms of numbers, they are both down 80 per cent. That means they have dismantled them and these are things that won’t be reconstituted into weapons again. However, there is more to do.”

She said more reductions were made in the UK and France, with steps taken towards disarmament by China, but not in India or Pakistan, where they were, instead, producing more materials for their civilian and military programmes.

“That’s of concern,” she said. “We need to be getting to processes that will get to what President Obama has called for in his 2009 speech in Prague which is a world free of nuclear weapons.”