Abstract
Article X of the NPT provides that in 1995 “a conference shall be convened to decide whether the treaty shall continue in force indefinitely, or shall be extended for an additional fixed period or periods.” Theoretically, the period of extension could be a matter of months or even days.1
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Notes and References
The prospects for extension of the NPT and some of the problems likely to arise before and during the 1995 conference are examined in a study by the author in chap. 11 of John Simpson, Nuclear Nonproliferation: An Agenda for the 1990s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
In effect, the NPT permits nonpeaceful uses of nuclear energy, such as nuclear propulsion of submarines, but prohibits any explosive use of nuclear energy for any purpose. Obviously, international safeguards cannot be applied to military activities.
See paragraph 26 of the standard IAEA/NPT safeguards agreement, IAEA document DMFCIRC/153.
At the end of December 1988, there were 136 NNWSs and 3 NWSs in the NPT.
Full-scope safeguards are in place in Belgium, Denmark, the Federal Republic of Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain; partial safeguards in Britain and France.
See IAEA document INFCIRC/66/Rev. 2.
These new agreements would have to be concluded under the INFCIRC/66 safeguards system, which was drawn up in the mid-1960s before the NPT came into force. This system is still applied in non-NPT NNWSs. In the NPT, NNWS safeguards are applied under the NPT system (IAEA document INFCIRC/153, drawn up in 1970 and 1971), but in many NPT NNWSs, the demise of the NPT would revive earlier INFCIRC/66/Rev. 2 agreements, concluded before the NNWSs in question had joined the NPT and now “in suspense.” These earlier agreements have become, in effect, fall-back agreements.
It would probably be correct to say that these states would be debarred from using “any plant or material that is in their possession today” rather than “that was in their possession in November 1987.” However, it is possible that Spain (alone amongst this group) may have acquired plant or material since it ratified the NPT (on November 5, 1987), that is, plant or material that would not be covered by fall-back IAEA safeguards. The author believes all nuclear plants and material in the other members of the group are subject to fall-back IAEA safeguards. It should also be noted that even after the demise of the NPT, nuclear material that had been derived from plant or from other nuclear material under non-NPT IAEA safeguards would again fall under those safeguards. It would be a difficult task, especially in Spain with its large and varied nuclear program, to differentiate between such “IAEA contaminated” material and “new” material subject only to Euratom safeguards.
The relevant clause requires an agreement with the IAEA “for the application of safeguards to its [the state’s] nuclear activities.” This has been interpreted as requiring the application of safeguards to all the state’s activities. Anything less would hardly be compatible with the aim of the treaty to ensure that the Latin American region remains entirely free from nuclear weapons.
The ambiguity is essentially whether or not the Tlatelolco Treaty permits its parties to carry out nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes and hence to manufacture nuclear explosives for such purposes. The treaty’s language can be read both ways. A legal purist would consider it necessary to amend the IAEA’s existing agreements with the twenty-three NNWSs parties to the treaty and to the NPT so as to take account of the fact that after the demise of the latter their obligations would stem only from the Tlatelolco Treaty.
Partial IAEA safeguards under the non-NPT system will continue to apply in Argentina and Brazil, irrespective of what may happen to the NPT. Non-NPT IAEA safeguards now apply to all nuclear plants and material in Chile and Cuba. This position seems likely to continue indefinitely, at least in Cuba, whose future nuclear plants (like those it has at present) will almost certainly come from the USSR (or its European allies) or be derived from Soviet technology.
The Republic of China ratified the NPT while it was still recognized by the United States and the IAEA as the government of China. The IAEA Board of Governors withdrew recognition before the NPT safeguards agreement between it and the IAEA was approved. All nuclear plants and material produced in or imported into Taiwan are, however, automatically listed under the inventory of the earlier U.S.-Taiwan-IAEA safeguards agreement. It is probable that this arrangement would continue even if the NPT expired.
This was the case as of 31 December 1988. The figure includes the Pacific Island NNWSs.
Apart from some fall-back bilateral safeguards, now in suspense, the only safeguards applicable to countries in these groups are those of the IAEA.
Indonesia bought a second research reactor from West Germany, and Libya bought its research reactor from the USSR. The author does not know whether the relevant supply agreements provide for fall-back IAEA safeguards if the NPT should expire.
In Taiwan, these are the pre-NPT INFCIRC/66/Rev. 2 safeguards now being applied there; nearly all the plants in operation or under construction in South Korea were or are being supplied under “suspended” safeguards agreements with the United States or France and the IAEA that would revive if the NPT lapsed. South Korea’s agreement with Canada, under which it obtained a CANDU power reactor, would also require the application of IAEA safeguards even if the NPT lapsed.
As party to the recently established South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone (the Rarotonga Treaty), Australia would, however, be obliged to accept continuing full-scope safeguards even if the NPT were to expire. Australia is the only party to the Rarotonga Treaty which has any nuclear plant or material that would require the application of IAEA safeguards. It is, of course, possible that other countries in these groups might buy unsafeguarded plants or materials from states that are not bound by the Nuclear Suppliers’ Guidelines, such as Argentina, Brazil, India, or Pakistan. Such indications as we have, for instance, the declared policy of Argentina, indicate that even if they do not accept the guidelines, the new suppliers will require IAEA safeguards on their exports.
Paper presented at a workshop in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, May 25–27, 1987, by Dr. Kathlyn Saba, Instituto de Cuestiones Internacionales, Madrid.
Unlike other Warsaw Pact countries, Romania has turned to Canada rather than to the Soviet Union for its nuclear power reactors and has sought uranium supplies from South Africa; the CANDU reactors it is acquiring can be rather easily used as producers of weapon-grade plutonium.
At that time all plants and material in Euratom Nnwss were not only under Euratom safeguards, but were probably also still subject to prohibitions against any military use imposed by the United States and by other suppliers. The Soviets presumably required the return of all spent fuel from Eastern European reactors and from the research reactors that the USSR had exported to Egypt and Iraq (Bertrand Goldschmidt has described this requirement as the most effective of all safeguards). The only significant unsafeguarded plant in Spain was the Vandellos I power reactor; all spent fuel from this reactor went to France.
The danger of a “nuclear capability” or nuclear arms race between non-NPT Israel and the Arab states and between non-NPT India and Pakistan is with us already.
For a penetrating analysis of the South Korean approach toward the nuclear threshold, see Mitchell Reiss, Without the Bomb, the Politics of Nuclear Nonproliferation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 78–108. Reiss argues convincingly that the South Korean Government used the threat of “going nuclear” in order to ensure the continuing presence of U.S. conventional forces in South Korea and regarded the acquisition of the bomb only as a last resort if its threat failed. Its threat succeeded; U.S. troops remained.
In David Fischer and Paul Szasz, Safeguarding the Atom, for SIPRI (London: Taylor and Francis, 1985), p. 84, we wrote: “What was left of the nonproliferation regime would be a disparate and weakened structure, full of gaps at crucial points, having lost much of its international credibility.”
With the U.S. Senate’s ratification of the INF agreement for the elimination of medium-range nuclear missiles, we witness the first arms reduction agreement verified by on-site inspection. Until agreement is reached on a treaty to abolish chemical weapons, the NPT will remain the only arms control agreement verified by international controls including on-site inspection.
I assume that the circumstances that have led to the demise of the NPT would make it virtually impossible to negotiate a successor treaty acceptable to the NWSs and the leading NNWSs. This question is further examined below.
In 1967–1968, one of the main objects of this undertaking was to give assurance that the NWSs would not assist in the nuclear armament of their nonnuclear allies and specifically to signal the demise of the Multilateral Force, which had been proposed by the United States and would have been equipped with nuclear weapons and manned multinationally by NATO countries. Provided that, in 1995, the NWSs had not changed their minds, and it seems increasingly unlikely that they would have done so, it should be relatively easy to find an appropriate means of reaffirming this undertaking. One possibility would be a resolution in the Security Council taking note of such undertakings given by the NWSs. A more formal arrangement would be a pact between the NWSs open to accession by NNWSs.
The main changes would have to be in
• Paragraph 1 of the standard NPT safeguards agreement—at present this links the safeguards agreement to the undertaking given by the NNWSs in the NPT. A new “basic undertaking” would have to be devised.
• Paragraph 12—at present this terminates safeguards when a nuclear item is exported. It would have to be changed so as to prohibit exports unless the item concerned and its products would be under IAEA safeguards in the importing country. (Under Article III.2 of the NPT, this requirement applies to NWSs as well as to NNWSs. Nuclear states would also have to find a means of binding themselves to accept it.)
• Paragraph 26—at present this links the duration of the safeguards agreement to the state’s membership of the NPT.
It would also be necessary to find a way of sanctioning the use, in the new agreements, of the technical procedures that are at present authorized for use in NPT agreements. None of this need present serious difficulties.
The ensuing negotiations with individual states and with EURATOM would, however, be time-consuming and would offer tempting opportunities to seek new constraints on IAEA safeguards, such as those already contained in the IAEA-EURATOM and IAEA-Japan agreements. Seven years elapsed between the beginning of negotiations between the IAEA and EURATOM and the final entry into force of the agreement!
Under Article III of the NPT, IAEA safeguards are applied to all nuclear material in the peaceful nuclear fuel cycle of the NNWSs concerned and for the exclusive purpose of verifying that there is no diversion of such material to nuclear explosive use. They are not designed (and could hardly be designed) to monitor the broader undertakings that the NNWSs are given in Article II of the NPT “not to receive... nuclear weapons... or control over them... directly or indirectly”(author’s emphasis).
Most of these fifty-two states have no nuclear activities. The group includes three states that have research reactors (Vietnam, North Korea, and Colombia). It is assumed that the reactors in North Korea and Vietnam are covered by Soviet safeguards. Colombia has a binding nonproliferation commitment under the Tlatelolco Treaty and has concluded a safeguards agreement with the IAEA under that treaty.
One need only mention Three Mile Island and Chernobyl to illustrate this point.
Since the mid-1970s, no multinational initiative that has been proposed for peaceful nuclear cooperation has succeeded—the plans for regional fuel cycle centers, for international plutonium storage, and for an international nuclear fuel supply agency, and the work of the Committee on Assurances of Supply, the U.N. Conference to Promote International Cooperation in the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy, etc. They bear witness to the irreconcilable clashes of interest that ultimately doomed them to failure.
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© 1990 Plenum Press, New York
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Fischer, D. (1990). What Happens to Safeguards if the NPT Goes?. In: Pilat, J.F., Pendley, R.E. (eds) Beyond 1995. Issues in International Security. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-1315-1_5
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