Is the nuclear nonproliferation regime effective?

11/13/2013

By Lenka Kollar

There is an embedded topical meeting on nuclear nonproliferation at the American Nuclear Society (ANS) conference in Washington, DC this week. A common theme among speakers and attendees is about how effective the nuclear nonproliferation regime has been. The regime includes many measures instituted by countries and international organizations to mitigate the spread of technology and material that can be used for nuclear weapons and to disarm the current fleet of nuclear weapons.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is the cornerstone of this regime and signed by 190 countries. President John F. Kennedy said that this treaty was important because he warned that there would be dozens of nuclear weapons states by now. There are currently five countries recognized as "weapons states" by the NPT, including the United States, Russia, China, France, and United Kingdom. There are three countries commonly known to have nuclear weapons, India, Pakistan, and Israel, and they are not signatories to the NPT. Finally, there are a couple of countries that are accused of violating the treaty by attempting to develop nuclear weapons. Therefore, it can be said that the NPT has been successful because there are a total of 8-10 countries that have nuclear weapons, and not dozens, as was predicted in the 1960s.

Former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn (also founder of the Nuclear Threat Institute) was a speaker at the ANS conference opening plenary on Monday and shared his concerns about the nonproliferation regime. He stated that the biggest issue today is the security of nuclear materials and technologies from rogue and terrorist organizations. Currently there is no global regime for nuclear security but there are many measures being taken by the United States and other countries, as explained by Laura Holgate (Senior Director, National Security Council) during the nonproliferation opening plenary on Tuesday.

In the same session, Rose Gottemoeller (Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security) stated that the Non-Proliferation Treaty has been successful. She also highlighted that disarmament of nuclear weapons between Russia and the United States is moving along. Did you know that about 10% of the total electricity in the United States comes from old Soviet weapons? Russia actually dismantles nuclear weapons and downblends the uranium to a concentration that cannot be used for weapons. This uranium is then sent to the United States and fabricating into fuel for our commercial reactors. The fuel is the same as the regular fuel that is used in reactors, where the uranium is mined from the ground instead of downblended from nuclear weapons.

It seems that the government officials implementing policies and programs (Gottemoeller and Holgate) are more optimistic about the nonproliferation regime than those outside of the government that are advocating for more action (Nunn).

Do you think the nuclear nonproliferation regime is effective?

9 Comments

Rod Adams link

11/14/2013 12:02:41 am

Judging the effectiveness of the non-proliferation regime depends on what you think the real goals of the effort are. The regime has done a good job making it difficult to obtain nuclear material, increasing the cost of successful acquisition. It has probably discouraged a country or two from obtaining weapons by peer pressure or by making the effort prohibitively expensive.

It has also accomplished what I think has always been the underlying goal of many of the original architects of the regime; it has increased the cost of using nuclear energy to the point where it has discouraged dozens of countries from becoming nuclear energy consumers.

That has helped to maintain the business of selling petroleum and other fossil fuels as one of the most profitable enterprises the world has ever known. That furthers the interests of a large portion of the political and economic establishment.

I hope this is one of the nuclear myths that you attempt to undo. IMHO, the NPT really is a discriminatory treaty -- as some non-nuclear weapons states have always claimed -- that is designed to cement the superiority of the nuclear weapons states.

It also functions on another level to ensure that multinational hydrocarbon corporations (both investor and government owned) do not have to compete against atomic energy on anything close to a level playing field.

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights

Lenka Kollar link

11/18/2013 01:20:31 pm

I agree that the Treaty is discriminatory, especially since disarmament is slow-going. I think that we would have many more nuclear weapons states now if the nonproliferation regime had been unsuccessful. That being said, it is true that the success should be measured by the goals that were intended. The architects of the Treaty did not see non-state actors as a threat, judging by the emphasis on nuclear safeguards versus security.

Helio Perroni Filho link

12/7/2013 06:21:10 am

Developing nuclear weapons was never going to be easy, much less cheap. From John von Neumann's work on the hydrogen bomb to Cray's long run with the US's Department of Defense, a lot of computer technology had to be developed just to handle the math involved in bomb detonation. And then of course there's the real-world engineering part, with all those pesky questions of error margins, material procurement, safety requirements and so on...

I think that much more than the non-proliferation program, what has made nuclear weapons not so widespread is that for most countries they would be a dubious proposition: they're expensive to develop and maintain, and of limited use. For an aggressor state, taking a territory – so its population, factories, natural resources etc. can be exploited – is much more lucrative than simply turning the place into a radioactive glass crater. So for any country that *wants* to go to war, conventional weapons are a much more effective option. On the other hand, if a country has no impending conflicts with its neighbors, it has not much need for weapons, nuclear or otherwise.

The only case where nuclear weapons are appealing, is when a country feels threatened by a neighbor or powerful rival it has no intention to battle, and thus requires a deterrent. Cold-war era powers fall in this category, as well as Israel, Pakistan and India. So pretty much all countries that had reasons to want nuclear weapons, and even the slightest chance at amassing the necessary resources and human expertise, have got them – what good was the non-proliferation program then?

Lenka Kollar link

12/9/2013 06:23:20 am

Your point of view is interesting but it is impossible to know how many countries would have nuclear weapons now without the nonproliferation regime. Take the case of South Africa, for example. They were able to secretly produce nuclear weapons and then decided to dismantle them. Would South Africa have dismantled it's weapons program without the nonproliferation regime and the international pressure that comes from it? The other factor to consider is the so-called "nuclear umbrella," where other countries have no need to develop their own nuclear weapons because their nuclear allies will protect them. I think that many more countries, especially in Europe, would have their own nuclear weapons if the umbrella didn't exist.

Helio Perroni Filho link

12/9/2013 03:44:45 pm

Dear Ms. Kollar,

> Your point of view is interesting but it is impossible
> to know how many countries would have nuclear
> weapons now without the nonproliferation regime.

If it is impossible to know, then it's impossible both ways – we cannot say with any certainty we have less nuclear weapons because of the program. In that case, the answer to your original question, if "the nuclear nonproliferation regime is effective", becomes "I don't know".

Of course it's impossible to *know* how effective the program was without some real-world reference for comparison – but we can always try to achieve a reasonable estimate, starting from an hypothesis and then extrapolating from the invariants.

As I said before, developing nuclear weapons was always going to be difficult and expensive, whether or not there was an effort to further complicate things. It took years, many billions of dollars and the coordinated efforts of three countries (US, UK and Canada) to build the first bombs. Even Germany, which at the time led technological progress in many fronts, couldn't manage on its own; and the USSR effort was arguably successful only because of leaked information from the US.

The practical and political complications of owning, much less using a nuclear device, wouldn't be any lighter without a non-proliferation program either. This would inevitably weigh on any government's decision to pursue the needed technology. And as yourself noticed, once the first nuclear weapons were developed by a few rich and powerful countries (as they'd have to be, to amass the necessary resources), many others would need not bother, leaning on their "big brothers" for their deterrent needs.

So I must ask again: if nuclear weapon development was always going to be expensive, and the practical / political arguments against it (such as its limited tactical use and the "nuclear umbrella", which predates the Nonproliferation Treaty) would always be true, what good the nonproliferation regime actually was?

My take is that apart from crippling a few nuclear energy programs, the Treaty as it came to be did little more than provide formal recognition for countries that would have stayed away from nuclear weapons anyway. In that sense I think that in some form the Treaty would be inevitable: the countries who saw no use to nuclear weapons would want to signal that in some way or another. But as I noticed in my previous message, nearly all countries that had a compelling case for owning nuclear weapons actually have them, and none of the nuclear weapon-owning countries that took part in the Treaty gave up the privilege, so it didn't have much impact in the expected flow of events, either.

Angela

3/8/2016 07:48:06 pm

hey, btw North Korea produces and has many nuclear weapons, just saying. i actually like this post a lot, and it was really helpful.

Helio Perroni Filho link

3/8/2016 10:14:11 pm

Define "many".

Cristiano Valois

9/13/2016 08:55:45 pm

I think quantity is not so relevant. If you allow me to quote a wuote from the Wikipedias article on the Treaty:
As one U.S. official and NPT expert warned in 2007, "logic suggests that as the number of nuclear weapons decreases, the 'marginal utility' of a nuclear weapon as an instrument of military power increases. At the extreme, which it is precisely disarmament's hope to create, the strategic utility of even one or two nuclear weapons would be huge."

Cristiano Valois link

9/13/2016 08:42:35 pm

As Angela and different from Dr. Helio Perroni and Dr. Lenka Kollar, I am no expert on the matter and only want to contribute by pointing out some events which came into play after the NPT, part of which was entailed by its signature, which I perceive as being important to assess whether it failed to achieve its goal, now that press talks that the treaty is going through a midlife crisis, and with the recent development as North Korea has settled the claim as being recognized as a nuclear state.
Firsty, one of the aims of the treaty was to reduce the actual array of existing weapons. For those who lived the years under the threat of nuclear extinction, that was perceived as the main purpose of the treaty. The number was alas only söightly reduced but we have to consider that the old nukes where replace by high-tech ones, what amounts to say that the world is far more fitted with nuclear weapons than before.
Secondly, there is the contrary to the umbrella effect. A recognized nuclear state can bully its neighbors and use its status to enforce their illegitimate claim. Of course even a state governed by rogues will not make use of it at all events, but we cannot deny that the Syrian War would not have taken place if there was not the threat posed by Russia, and that Russia abuses its international rights against the Ukraine and George and will do so against any non-alligned neighbor. So there is this perception that nuclear states, instead of bearing the costs of having a privileged status and care for the security in the world, in fact use it only to their private interest.
Thirdly, it is true that the high cost of nuclear access has helped keep the world dependent on fossil fuels. Whereas in the 90s about 90 percent of energy consumed in France and about 40 percent in America came from nuclear plants, signatories like Brazil and Argentina had to face all the drama of the rise in petrol prices after Israel victory and appropriation of Gaza and the Canal, and the debt crisis and the following hyperinflation, which stumped their progress amd whose effects endure in their resilient underdevelopment up to date.

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