Nonproliferation, Arms Control, and Disarmament

Even if Congress declines to reinstate sanctions on Iran after President Trump’s address, the nuclear agreement will still be on shaky footing.

The Group of Twenty (G20) summit in Hangzhou brought big news: U.S.-China ratification of the Paris climate agreement, heralded as an important sign of “climate change cooperation.” The world’s two largest carbon emitters called upon other Paris signatories to join them in bringing the global agreement into effect. India remains the third largest carbon emitter globally, although its per capita emissions are much lower than those of the United States or China, so many eyes have been watching to see what New Delhi does next. But New Delhi’s next steps now look a little less clear. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi met President Barack Obama in Washington this past June, one line in the joint statement referred to the U.S. commitment to bring the Paris accord into effect this year, and that India “similarly has begun its processes to work toward this shared objective.” Yet the G20 summit produced instead talk of a “linkage” that India has made between membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and accession to the Paris accord. What does the NSG have to do with Paris? Back in June, the NSG plenary meeting in Seoul, which considered membership for India, did not result in a decision. It was the group’s first formal plenary discussion of the matter, and China held back its approval, stating that Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty accession should be a requirement. Many in India were disappointed with the non-decision outcome, criticizing the government for acting too hastily, or having failed to do sufficient diplomatic spadework before making a public bid for NSG membership. I wrote at the time that contrary to some public critique, Seoul had not been a “fiasco,” and that a membership process for a forty-eight nation organization that works by consensus could hardly be expected to happen instantly. If anything, India’s overt push for membership had demonstrated decisive leadership, and the United States and India should continue their efforts toward formal inclusion for India in the group. For its part, the United States continues to affirm its strong support for Indian membership. In the wake of the June NSG disappointment, India’s Ministry of External Affairs issued a statement that contained this sentence: “Our application has acquired an immediacy in view of India’s INDC [intended nationally determined contributions] envisaging 40% non-fossil power generation capacity by 2030. An early positive decision by the NSG would have allowed us to move forward on the Paris Agreement.” Since the NSG had issued an exemption to India back in 2008, a major step in the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement and one that opened up the possibility of civil nuclear commerce with India for any NSG participating government, it was not clear why the lack of NSG membership would hurt India’s ability to ramp up its civil nuclear power sector. But even if it did, according to one calculation by Business Standard reporter Nitin Sethi, it is not clear that the percentage of civil nuclear energy in India’s non-fossil power capacity commitments (16 GW, or 3.91 percent of its clean energy capacity commitments) would make or break its Paris commitments. Most of India’s new clean energy capacity will come from solar and wind. With this muddle as the backdrop, the news from Hangzhou that India would not be ready to ratify the Paris agreement by the end of 2016 spurred a series of fresh news reports. India’s G20 sherpa, Dr. Arvind Panagariya, went on the record stating that India was “not quite ready yet in terms of domestic actions” to ratify by the end of 2016. Some press accounts  took as fact that India had created a new diplomatic linkage between receiving NSG membership and moving ahead with Paris commitment ratification. If this is a bargaining tactic, it’s hard to see how it would be persuasive, for ratification of the Paris accord is not a “give” in exchange for something else but rather a step toward collective action to solve a global problem. If this linkage proves to be real, India loses some of the goodwill gained by its leadership last year in Paris. Count me confused on this one. Follow me on Twitter: @AyresAlyssa   Or like me on Facebook (fb.me/ayresalyssa) or Instagram (instagr.am/ayresalyssa) 

Last week the forty-eight “participating governments” of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) met in a plenary session in Seoul. Among the subjects of discussion: how to consider for membership countries that have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Discussion of membership for non-NPT signatories was the result of India’s application for membership, an application the United States has vocally supported. Some high-profile voices have weighed in against the idea of India’s membership, including eighteen senior nonproliferation experts, who viewed the idea of an exception for India as a step that would weaken global nonproliferation efforts. (I disagree with this view, and believe the legal changes India has made to become part of the global nonproliferation regime marks a net positive for nonproliferation concerns.) Pakistan decided to apply for membership as well, despite its past with the A.Q. Khan network. China pressed for NPT adherence as a requirement for entry. India’s status as a non-NPT signatory meant that this application was never going to be easy. The Seoul plenary ended without a decision on the membership discussion. Specifically, as the plenary public statement from Seoul put it, The NSG had discussions on the issue of “Technical, Legal and Political Aspects of the Participation of non-NPT States in the NSG” and decided to continue its discussion. Since the plenary produced no outcome on the question of India’s membership other than a deferral, Indian public debate has begun over matters like whether it was a good idea to pursue membership in the first place; whether the diplomatic strategy was appropriate; and even whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visible push for support around the world cast India in the proper light. People have also focused on the Seoul outcome as a “failure.” My own view, which appears in today’s Indian Express, is that India has done the right thing to be out there trying, that it has the support of forty-plus NSG members which is a significant accomplishment, and that it should keep trying. Read the entire opinion piece here. Follow me on Twitter @AyresAlyssa or like me on Facebook: fb.me/ayresalyssa

The following is a guest post by Naomi Egel, research associate in the International Institutions and Global Governance program. The nuclear security summits, one of President Obama’s greatest legacies, have unquestionably made the world safer by reducing global quantities of fissile materials and improving the security of existing nuclear and radioactive materials. When President Obama hosted the first such summit in 2010, there was plenty of skepticism about what an ad hoc gathering of heads of state could accomplish. But that meeting surpassed expectations—as did subsequent ones in Seoul in 2012 and The Hague in 2014. World leaders arrived at each summit with meaningful pledges to lock up the world’s most dangerous materials—and they followed through on them. The fourth (and last) summit, held just two weeks ago (March 31-April 1, 2016) in Washington, went even further. It established mechanisms to ensure continued progress on nuclear security without summitry. The 2016 summit attained several noteworthy goals. First, it achieved the required number of ratifications to bring into force the amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Materials, paving the way for more rigorous global physical nuclear security standards. Second, China and India endorsed a joint statement from the 2014 summit in The Hague, through which states agreed to implement International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recommendations to strengthen nuclear and radiological source security. Third, Argentina completed the removal of all of its highly enriched uranium (HEU), effectively making Latin American an HEU-free zone. Fourth, Japan announced the successful removal of more than five hundred kilograms of HEU and separated plutonium from its territory. Most importantly, world leaders guaranteed that cooperation on nuclear security would outlive the summit process, creating a contact group led by the sherpas (national points of contact for the summits) to sustain momentum on the issue. They also endorsed five action plans, each of which will be carried out by a different multilateral agency or initiative: the United Nations, the IAEA, INTERPOL, the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, and the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction. Delivering on these action plans will not be easy. It remains to be seen how the five multilateral bodies—each with its own distinctive politics, institutional culture, and membership—will incorporate the nuclear security agenda into their existing operations. At the UN and IAEA, for instance, political jockeying already threatens many worthwhile initiatives. Moreover, these organizations and initiatives will require increased and sustained funding to accomplish the additional missions they have now adopted. There are also areas where the summit fell short. Most importantly, it focused entirely on improving the security and transparency of civilian stocks of nuclear material, while remaining silent on the military stocks that comprise roughly 83 percent of fissile material worldwide. In addition, Russia’s nonattendance meant that the summit made no progress with the country that holds the most fissile material in the world. And while China engaged far more actively than in past summits, both India and Pakistan remained reluctant to participate. But there are also issues the summit was never intended to address—namely, disarmament—and the success of the summit should not be measured against false metrics. More positively, the new contact group is a laudable innovation, which will help ensure the implementation and consolidation of commitments agreed through the summit process. While it is not intended to generate new commitments, it could help push forward new thinking and generate momentum to hold another nuclear summit in the future. Beyond their tangible contributions to nuclear security, the summits have introduced a promising new model of international cooperation. They are part of a larger shift away from formal, standing institutions—which tend to seek consensus-based outcome documents—to informal groupings that make progress through “opt-in” contributions from individual countries (or groups of countries). The second nuclear security summit in Seoul popularized the concept of “gift baskets”—voluntary initiatives offered by different groupings of countries. That approach has since been picked up by the Global Health Security Agenda (as “action packages”) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (as “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” or INDCs). At the Paris climate conference last December, this approach helped break the deadlock on climate change negotiations and drive global contributions to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This individualized model—whether termed gift baskets, action packages, or INDCs—is a pragmatic approach to global governance. It recognizes that national interests and capacities are diverse and uneven, and that the most promising route to cooperation is to allow states to contribute what their own circumstances permit, rather than seeking the lowest common denominator that can command consensus. Less certain is whether this general approach will lead to sustained—and intensified—contributions, or whether its primary value is in galvanizing action where there is low-hanging fruit ready to be picked. The future trajectories of gift baskets are also unclear: will they be opened up to allow all states—including those not invited to the summits—to participate? The nuclear security summits have made the world a safer place—surely a cause for celebration. At the same time, much hard work lies ahead, as the world seeks to turn these ad-hoc initiatives into a sustainable framework for preventing nuclear terrorism.