CD Fails Again to Adopt a Program of Work

This is a pretty depressing account of the Conference on Disarmament’s most recent failure, in a long line of failures, to approve a program of work potentially leading to the negotiation of a new fissile material cut-off treaty. As in previous years, Pakistan is the lone holdout. And in a system that requires consensus, one is all that it takes to stop progress in its tracks (I can’t imagine running faculty meetings this way – they’re bad enough operating under a majority voting system! I was in a three-hour-long one on Monday).

I don’t have alot of deep thoughts about the CD, and I welcome others’ views. I do understand the general idea of moving forward only by consensus, in order to include all of the necessary players to make a resultant treaty worth having. But at some point doesn’t it become just patently obvious that some other mechanism needs to be employed to get to a new arms control treaty? It’s been 16 years now since any negotiations were conducted through the CD.

I mean, if treaties were only ever adopted when every country in the world endorsed them, we’d have precious few treaties. That may be desireable to some people, but it doesnt seem a good policy/practice to me. At some point, if a large majority of states can get on board with an agenda of work, it seems to me that it would be prudent to organize a conference outside of the CD forum in order to pursue the agenda. If Pakistan doesn’t sign the resulting treaty, that’s a shame but it shouldn’t be the cause of holding up the entire FMCT program.

And it would perhaps be good to remember that large, multilateral treaties (at least ones with universal obligations, unlike the NPT) tend over time to produce parallel customary international law, which would bind holdouts as well. This has been recognized to have occured in the cases of the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention and the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, among others. 

ElBaradei Resigns as Egyptian VP

When I woke up this morning, I heard about the violent displacement of pro-Morsy demonstrators in Egypt by the military-led government. I have been opposed to the military coup in Egypt from the beginning, and today the violent crackdown on essentially peaceful protesters who were unwilling to recognize the resulting military-led government, really brought the situation to a new low. It was in that state of mind that I wrote the following Tweet at 10:02 am:

How can ElBaradei, Nobel Peace Prize winner, justify participation in an unlawful military coup turned violent, repressive government?

Mohamed Elbaradei was, of course, the longtime Director General of the IAEA, who was proven correct in his approach to claims about Iraqi WMD, and who generally was a voice for reason, prudence, and the rule of law during his tenure (having previously served as the Director of the IAEA Office of Legal Affairs).  These qualities and achievements led to his being awarded, jointly with the IAEA, the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. ElBaradei is a man I have long respected.  And the fact that he had joined the interim government in Egypt as Vice President was something about which I was increasingly dismayed.

Imagine my happiness, then, when I heard just a couple of hours later, that ElBaradei had resigned from his government post in protest of the violence against Morsy supporters. In his resignation letter, he said that:

the beneficiaries of what happened today are those who call for violence, terrorism and the most extreme groups . . . As you know, I saw that there were peaceful ways to end this clash in society, there were proposed and acceptable solutions for beginnings that would take us to national consensus . . . It has become difficult for me to continue bearing responsibility for decisions that I do not agree with and whose consequences I fear. I cannot bear the responsibility for one drop of blood.

Now THAT is what I would expect from ElBaradei. Upon hearing the news, at 11:56am I Tweeted:

So glad to see that ElBaradei has resigned in protest of the gov’t’s violent crackdown on protesters!!! Respect restored!!!

I think ElBaradei has shown that his intentions all along were honorable, as is in complete harmony with his long-proven character. I don’t know all of the facts and considerations that led him to accept a post in the interim government, but I’m confident that he acted at all times in good faith, in furtherance of good principles, and in the best interests of the Egyptian people, as he perceived those principles and interests at the time. And now, in nobly standing up for similar good principles, he has fully restored any previously diminished respect that I have for him. I think he has made a powerful statement in today’s resignation – one that will have a significant effect on outside observers’ opinions of the interim government, due to his international stature.  I applaud his actions today, and I think in light of them, the interim government needs to do some serious reflection, and change its course.

New Blog – Atomic Reporters

I wanted to briefly mention the birth of a new blog called Atomic Reporters.  It describes itself as follows:

AR acts as an information broker improving journalistic understanding and coverage of nuclear issues. Policymakers themselves need to be better-informed as does the general public. The future of nuclear weapons, the safety of nuclear power, nuclear security, and concern about the soaring use of ionising radiation in medicine, for example, should be the focus of informed public debate. Better reporting would contribute to a more engaged public and more responsive policy.

I recommend it. It’s already got some very interesting material on it, including a link to a new Wilson Center report on Brazil’s clandestine nuclear program in the 1970’s-1980’s, which likely involved weapons-related activity, and the role China played in assisting this program.  Makes for very interesting reading, and helps to inform our understanding of other similar cases.

On August 6, the blog also covered several topics and then asked the following questions:

How are the Arms Control Lawyers holding up against the Arms Control Wonkers? There’s been something of an insurrection among arms-control theologians. Why are NPT and IAEA-CSA literalists cast as apologists? What lessons might be gleaned from the Brazilian experience of the 1970s to the Iran challenges of today? How does recognition of India as a de facto nuclear-weapons state affect the NPT? What utility would the NPT continue to serve were Pakistan to receive the same dispensation as India?

Those are darn good questions/observations. Especially the one about NPT/IAEA-CSA literalists being cast as apologists. I’d say that observation pretty much sums up my own situation. By insisting on a correct interpretation of these legal sources, according to well established legal principles, I am often cast as an apologist for the countries whose arguments these interpretations happen to support. It seems to be my particular burden to bear.

Paul Pillar: Iran’s Nuclear Legal Obligations

A very good piece by Paul Pillar out yesterday in The National Interest.  I’m pleased to see that he shares a number of the same views I’ve expressed, on some of the same topics I’ve covered recently, in my posts. I’ll go ahead and copy the whole thing here.

  Read the rest of this entry »

Myanmar Has a Clandestine Nuclear Weapons Program. And Nobody Cares.

This just came to my attention today. Read this story at Pro Publica, about some very important and alarming work that friend of ACL, and real life former weapons inspector Robert Kelley, has done on what he has concluded is a clandestine nuclear weapons program in Myanmar. Now, I am not in any way a technical guy. But I’ve gotten to know Bob, and he’s both the most qualified person to evaluate a nuclear weapons program, and the most independent, objective, and reserved technical person, that I know. So hearing Bob say this about Myanmar:

“I state this very clearly and strongly, this is a clandestine nuclear program”

makes me say, it’s time to listen up, people.  

I’m also confident that people like David Albright and Olli Heinonen, who have been so very concerned about possible nuclear weapons related activity in Iran, will be all over this situation too. After all, there is clearly enough evidence to convince Bob Kelley, and there are strong links to North Korea and therefore to regional proliferation implications. So on this case, the technical people can actually agree, and the international community can focus on effectively dealing with the problem, right?

Wrong.

Read what Heinonen and Albright have to say about Kelley’s conclusions in the Pro Publica piece.  When I read them, I was genuinely incredulous. Reading their critique of Bob’s analysis was just like reading someone else’s critique, word for word, about their analysis of Iran!  Listen to this: 

Other experts, including Olli Heinonen, the former deputy director of the IAEA, viewed the evidence as inconclusive. They said the equipment in the photos had other possible uses and that such serious charges should not rest on the testimony of a single defector . . .

“There is no smoking gun,” Heinonen said in an interview. “There is no one single piece which puts your mind at rest telling that this is solely for nuclear purposes and for nothing else.” . . .

Heinonen questioned this conclusion, saying both the glove box and bomb reactor could have other uses. He noted that the box appeared too small to easily accommodate the mixer typically used to combine magnesium and UF4. There were ways to overcome this deficiency, but they would be “cumbersome,” he said, suggesting that perhaps the box was made for another purpose.

“These pieces of equipment,” he said in an e-mail, “cannot be said with a high certainty to be for uranium metal production.” . . .

Albright said in an interview that he did not agree with Kelley’s findings. A close reading of the report, he said, suggests that Kelley assumed that Burma is attempting to make nuclear weapons and then looked at Win’s pictures “in a biased way ascribing nuclear purposes to them.” Albright said he believed each piece of equipment in the photos had alternate uses, some of which were non-nuclear. He noted that Win had no background in nuclear science or engineering.

“We learn the hard way,” said Albright. “This is what the whole thing was about with Iraqi WMD.”

“If you’re going to make accusations that a country has nuclear weapons program, you have to have credible evidence that that is true,” he said.

I swear these quotes literally make me laugh out loud. I’m not going to get into the technical aspects of the Myanmar case, or a comparison with the technical issues involved with the Iran case. I’ll let others do that. What I’m talking about is the overall attitude and approach of Heinonen and Albright in the Myanmar case, compared to the Iran case.  These are guys who think that every time there’s a wing added on to a building in Iran, it means there absolutely must be some nefarious new attempt to build a nuclear weapon going on in there. But in Myanmar’s case, their approach is: “Well, you know, all of this stuff could have other uses. We really can’t be sure. There’s no smoking gun here. It would be wrong of us to speculate. You need real, clear evidence to make such a very serious accusation. I’m sure everything’s fine.”

Albright even went so far as to write a letter to Senator Jim Webb, assuring him that there was “nothing to see here” in Myanmar, and saying Bob’s analysis is faulty. Read the letter here.   

There’s a Janus-like, two-facedness here that is just astounding to me, i.e. taking one approach to the Iran situation (incredibly hawkish), and then taking a completely different approach to the Myanmar situation (incredibly dovish), for no apparent reason. And an incredible complete lack of self-awareness of this fact as well.

So what’s the takeaway here? First, Bob’s assessment of Myanmar’s clandestine nuclear weapons program is serious business that deserves attention. I don’t know what should be done about it, but so far I’ve heard ear-splitting silence about it from the U.S. and E.U. and the U.N. Security Council.  That’s hard to reconcile in light of all the attention being paid to Iran.

Second, what explains Heinonen’s and Albright’s schizophrenia here? I am genuinely puzzled. Is it because Myanmar is not on the USG’s list of “places we want to demonize,” and Albright and Heinonen are dutifully following the prime directive (i.e. always follow Uncle Sam’s lead)? Or is it something else? Thoughts welcome.