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NPT’s Midlife Crisis

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Published in The Korea Times on June 16, 2021

In March 2020, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) turned fifty. The tenth Review Conference (RevCon), originally scheduled for April and May, was postponed to January 2021 and is now tentatively planned for August 2021.

The NPT is often described as the cornerstone of the global nuclear order. It is among the most widely adhered to global treaties. All countries except four (India, Israel, and Pakistan never joined, and North Korea withdrew in 2003) are parties to the NPT. Despite its enviable record, a sense of disquiet and uncertainty surround the RevCon and its future.

Any global order needs two enabling conditions: a convergence of interests among the present major powers to define a shared objective and an ability to package and present it to the world as a global public good. The conditions for nuclear order and the NPT were no exception.

In 1963, only four countries (the United States, France, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom) had tested a nuclear device when U.S. President John F. Kennedy sounded the alarm that by 1975 there could be as many as twenty countries with nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union shared similar concerns. This convergence of interests between the two Cold War adversaries enabled the NPT negotiations.

To make nuclear order attractive as a global public good, it was packaged as a three-legged stool: nonproliferation, obliging those without nuclear weapons to never acquire them and accept full-scope safeguards; disarmament, requiring the five countries with nuclear weapons (the United States, China, France, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom) to negotiate the reduction and eventual elimination of their nuclear weapons; and peaceful use of nuclear energy, guaranteeing non–nuclear weapons states full access to peaceful applications of nuclear science and technology.

Since the NPT was concluded, only the four countries outside the NPT have acquired nuclear weapons, bringing the total number of nuclear weapons states to nine, far fewer than Kennedy feared in 1963.

Among the oft-cited successes of the NPT is the dramatic reduction in the number of nuclear weapons from a peak of over 70,000 warheads in early 1980s to around 14,000 at present, with the United States and Russia accounting for over 12,500 of them. However, these reductions were a result of bilateral negotiations between the United States and Russia, reflecting the state of their relations. No negotiations have ever been held within the NPT framework. In fact, during the first fifteen years of the NPT, the U.S. and Soviet arsenals increased from below 40,000 to over 65,000, making it clear that the nuclear disarmament leg of the NPT was being ignored as the United States and Soviet Union embarked on a nuclear arms race.

Some claim that the NPT helped strengthen the taboo against nuclear weapons. However, a closer examination of recently declassified papers indicates that since 1970, there have been over a dozen instances where the United States and Soviet Union came close to initiating a nuclear exchange, many of which were based on system errors or misperceptions about the intentions of the other.

Today, the nuclear taboo is being challenged as major nuclear powers undertake research and development (R&D) for more usable low-yield nuclear weapons. Ballistic missile defense, hypersonic systems that carry both conventional and nuclear payloads, and growing offensive cyber capabilities further blur the line between conventional and nuclear weapons.

The NPT has reached the limits of its success as far as the proliferation objective is concerned. Further, its packaging as a balanced three-legged stool stands exposed as a wobbly, one-legged stool, for the NPT delegitimized proliferation but not nuclear weapons.

The clearest reflection of this growing frustration among the non–nuclear weapons states party to the NPT was the humanitarian initiative spearheaded by a coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society to negotiate a treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was concluded in 2017 and entered into force in January 2021, making it the only multilateral nuclear treaty to emerge since the NPT fifty years ago. Each of the TPNW’s eighty-six signatories and fifty-four ratifying states are members of the NPT in good standing.

For the first time, an NPT RevCon will take place with a new, unignorable divide between states that rely on nuclear weapons (or nuclear-armed allies) for their security and states that believe nuclear weapons are a threat to global security and accept that the NPT cannot be the route to nuclear disarmament.

However, the five nuclear weapons states party to the NPT are convinced that the TPNW undermines the NPT even though the TPNW’s 140 signatories and ratifiers provide legitimacy.

Other divisive political challenges for the RevCon include Iran and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was unilaterally discarded by the Donald Trump administration; a push by non–nuclear weapons states for substantive reductions in nuclear arsenals; lack of progress on the 1995 initiative for the Middle East as a zone free of all weapons of mass destruction; a U.S. push for universal adherence to the International Atomic Energy Agency Additional Protocol; and North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, among others.

For the last fifty years, a substantive consensus outcome has been the criteria for a successful RevCon. Yet anticipating the difficulties of a consensus, the NPT supporters are suggesting that the definition of a successful outcome should be reconsidered.

However, such an approach is at best a temporary resolution. Any permanent resolution would lie in accepting the limitations of the NPT and seeking to join the TPNW proponents in a constructive dialogue. This needs imaginative approaches and a shift from the zero-sum model of negotiation to a win-win outcome, preserving the NPT while looking beyond it. A mindset change is necessary for the NPT to overcome its midlife crisis.

Rakesh Sood is a Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, India, and a member of the Asia-Pacific Leadership for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (APLN). This is an abridged version of the paper originally published for the Council on Foreign Relations’ Council of Councils Tenth Annual Conference. His article was published in cooperation with the APLN (www.apln.network).

https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/opinion/2021/06/197_310524.html

The Long Shadow Of Political Turmoil In Nepal

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Published in The Hindu on 27th May, 2021

Nepali politics entered another phase of uncertainty last week. The country’s President, Bidya Devi Bhandari, dissolved the House of Representatives (lower house) late night on Friday, at the suggestion of Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli, in a partisan move that disregarded the Constitution. Fresh elections were announced for between 12 and 18 November. Announcing elections was just to ensure that Oli continues in office, controlling the state machinery, even as Nepal battles a second and deadlier COVID-19 wave.

Oli’s opportunistic politics

Mr. Oli came to power after the 2017 elections, the first undertaken in the federal republic of Nepal, established under the 2015 Constitution. He led his party, the CPN(UML) to an impressive tally of 121 seats and together with Maoist Centre’s 53, enjoyed a near absolute majority in the 275-strong House. In May 2018, the two allies merged to cement their alliance and created the Nepal Communist Party (NCP).

Relations with India saw positive movement. Delhi was willing to overcome its reservations about Mr. Oli’s anti-Indian nationalist tirades. Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Nepal in May 2018, shortly after Mr. Oli’s visit.

However, Oli’s autocratic tendencies soon began to surface. The power sharing arrangement worked out with former Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ started fraying. The original idea that both would take turns at being Prime Minister and run the NCP as co-chairs became irksome for Mr. Oli. While he weaned away the Maoists cabinet members, senior disgruntled UML leaders led by former Prime Ministers, Madhav Kumar Nepal and Jhala Nath Khanal, gravitated towards Prachanda. Differences emerged in the open and a growing demand surfaced for honouring the ‘one person one post’ policy. Prachanda was willing to let Mr. Oli continue the full term as Prime Minister, provided he gave up his role as co-chair of the party. Mr. Oli decided otherwise.

Mr. Oli needed a distraction and by end-2019, found one in the Kalapani boundary issue. India issued new maps following the division of the State of Jammu and Kashmir Union Territories, Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh. While 98% of the India-Nepal boundary was demarcated, two areas, Susta and Kalapani had remained pending. Though the new Indian map did not affect the India-Nepal boundary in any material way, it was an opportunity for Mr. Oli to don his nationalist mantle. He expanded the Kalapani area dispute from one covering approximately 60 square kilometres on Nepal’s northwest tip with Uttarakhand and China by raising the demand for restoring an additional 335 sq kms. The boundaries were fixed in 1816 by the British, and India inherited the areas over which the British had exercised territorial control in 1947.

Domestic politics takes over

Caught up in the first COVID-19 wave, India kept deferring bilateral talks, perhaps not realising the domestic political pressures on Mr. Oli. In May 2020 when Defence Minister Raj Nath Singh inaugurated the 75 km road through Kalapani that linked to the Kailash-Mansarovar pilgrimage route, Mr. Oli upped the ante by whipping up nationalist sentiment, getting a new map of Nepal endorsed by the House and adopting a constitutional amendment to sanctify Nepal’s new territory. While this did not alter the situation on the ground, it cramped the prospects of any dialogue with India. It was a short reprieve and Mr. Oli’s political troubles soon returned to haunt him.

President Bhandari has been Mr. Oli’s close comrade since she entered active politics after the untimely demise of her husband Madan Bhandari, a charismatic UML leader, in a car accident in 1993. Mr. Oli was her political mentor and backed her elevation as President. She reciprocated by ignoring constitutional propriety and approving dubious ordinances including amending the Constitutional Council Act that enabled Mr. Oli to pack constitutional positions with his loyalists.

Amid rumours that Prachanda and Mr. Nepal were planning to move a no-confidence-motion against him after he had studiously ignored the meetings and decisions of party’s Secretariat and the Standing Committee, Mr. Oli got President Bhandari to approve dissolution of the House on December 20, paving the way for elections in April-May. The President’s decision was uniformly criticised as unconstitutional as the NCP enjoyed a near-absolute majority.

India decided to steer clear of the mess, calling it an ‘internal matter’ while the Chinese Ambassador continued to actively push for a rapprochement between the NCP factions. A five-judge constitutional bench of the Supreme Court unanimously called for a restoration of the House on February 23 strengthening the Prachanda-Nepal faction but on March 7, delivered a bombshell by overturning the UML-Maoist merger of May 2018, against which an appeal had been pending for two years.

Mr. Oli took over the reins of the old CPN(UML), reviving prior structures but now excluding Mr. Nepal and his supporters. Some were served suspension notices. The Nepal faction was reduced to a minority; under the law, a split in the party requires a 40% of both the parliamentary party and the central committee. Prachanda, heading the Maoist Centre with 49 members since four had joined hands with Mr. Oli, needed new allies to wage his battles.

Though Mr. Oli had lost majority in the House as Maoist Centre was no longer supporting him, he challenged the opposition to file a no-confidence-motion, certain that the Maoists, Nepali Congress (NC) and the Janata Samajbadi Party (JSP) would fail to reach an agreement on a new Prime Minister. He was proven right but overtaken by hubris, he took another gamble. He called for a trust vote on 10 May that he lost as 28 UML dissident members were absent and half the JSP voted against him while the other half abstained.

Presidential improprieties

The opposition again failed to present an alternative. In a questionable decision, Mr. Oli was sworn in by President Bhandari on 14 May as Prime Minister under Article 76(3) that permits the leader of the largest party to be sworn in and given thirty days to demonstrate majority. Within a week, Mr. Oli announced that he would not seek another vote of confidence. Without resigning, however, he advised the President to explore other options. Within a day, as rumours gained ground that NC leader Sher Bahadur Deuba had managed to gather support from 149 members, including 49 Maoists, 26 UML dissidents and 12 from the JSP, Mr. Oli rushed to the President and gave her a list of 153 supporters that included all 121 UML and 32 JSP members, including UML dissidents and JSP members who voted against him on May 10. Without bothering to verify, President Bhandari dissolved the House and announced fresh elections, justifying that the rival claims exceeded the strength of the House.

Since 2008 when a new Constituent Assembly was elected to prepare a constitution for a federal republic, Nepal has seen three NC Prime Ministers (G. P. Koirala, Sushil Koirala and Deuba), two Maoist Prime Ministers (Prachanda twice and Baburam Bhattarai), three UML Prime MinisterMs (Nepal, Khanal and Oli sworn in thrice) and a Chief Justice as caretaker PM in 2013. None has damaged the constitution and the political fabric of Nepal as much as Mr. Oli, together with an obliging Ms. Bhandari. Opposition leaders have challenged the House dissolution in the Supreme Court but its outcome is uncertain. Meanwhile a raging COVID-19 puts a question mark on the election. In case an election is held, Mr. Oli will campaign on a nationalist anti-Indian platform.

It is clear that political uncertainty will continue. India has traditionally supported constitutionalism and multi-party democracy in Nepal. At this juncture, it needs to remain actively engaged with all the political actors, and equally importantly, avoid being perceived as partisan.

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The NPT’s Midlife Crisis

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My Background Memo for Council of Council’s Annual Conference, May 24-25. 2021

In March 2020, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) turned fifty. The tenth Review Conference (RevCon), originally scheduled for April and May, was postponed to January 2021 and is now tentatively planned for August 2021 amid continued monitoring of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The NPT is often described as the cornerstone of the global nuclear order. It is among the most widely adhered to global treaties. All countries except four (India, Israel, and Pakistan never joined, and North Korea withdrew in 2003) are parties to the NPT. Despite its enviable record, a sense of disquiet and uncertainty surround the RevCon and its future.

Shaping of a Global Order

Any global order needs two enabling conditions: a convergence of interests among the present major powers to define a shared objective and an ability to package and present it to the world as a global public good. The conditions for nuclear order and the NPT were no exception.

In 1963, only four countries (the United States, France, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom) had tested a nuclear device when U.S. President John F. Kennedy sounded the alarm that by 1975 there could be as many as twenty countries with nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union shared similar concerns. This convergence of interests between the two Cold War adversaries enabled the NPT negotiations.

To make nuclear order attractive as a global public good, it was packaged as a three-legged stool: nonproliferation, obliging those without nuclear weapons to never acquire them and accept full-scope safeguards; disarmament, requiring the five countries with nuclear weapons (the United States, China, France, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom) to negotiate the reduction and eventual elimination of their nuclear weapons; and peaceful use of nuclear energy, guaranteeing non–nuclear weapons states full access to peaceful applications of nuclear science and technology.

Evaluating the NPT

Since the NPT was concluded, only the four countries outside the NPT have acquired nuclear weapons, bringing the total number of nuclear weapons states to nine, far fewer than Kennedy feared in 1963. By this measure, the NPT has been enormously successful, even though it has no means of dealing with these four states.

Among the oft-cited successes of the NPT is the dramatic reduction in the number of nuclear weapons from a peak of over 70,000 warheads in early 1980s to around 14,000 at present, with the United States and Russia accounting for over 12,500 of them. However, these reductions were a result of bilateral negotiations between the United States and Russia, reflecting the state of their relations. No negotiations have ever been held within the NPT framework. In fact, during the first fifteen years of the NPT, the U.S. and Soviet arsenals increased from below 40,000 to over 65,000, making it clear that the nuclear disarmament leg of the NPT was being ignored as the United States and Soviet Union embarked on a nuclear arms race. 

Some claim that the NPT helped strengthen the taboo against nuclear weapons. However, a closer examination of recently declassified papers indicates that since 1970, there have been over a dozen instances where the United States and Soviet Union came close to initiating a nuclear exchange, many of which were based on system errors or misperceptions about the intentions of the other. Even today, with some nuclear weapons maintained on hair-trigger alert, the risk of an accidental or inadvertent nuclear exchange remains.

Today, the nuclear taboo is being challenged as major nuclear powers undertake research and development (R&D) for more usable low-yield nuclear weapons. Ballistic missile defense, hypersonic systems that carry both conventional and nuclear payloads, and growing offensive cyber capabilities further blur the line between conventional and nuclear weapons.

Challenges Before NPT RevCon

The NPT has reached the limits of its success as far as the proliferation objective is concerned. Further, its packaging as a balanced three-legged stool stands exposed as a wobbly, one-legged stool, for the NPT delegitimized proliferation but not nuclear weapons.

The clearest reflection of this growing frustration among the non–nuclear weapons states party to the NPT was the humanitarian initiative spearheaded by a coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society to negotiate a treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was concluded in 2017 and entered into force in January 2021, making it the only multilateral nuclear treaty to emerge since the NPT fifty years ago. (The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was concluded in 1996 but is yet to enter into force after twenty-five years, indicating its political infirmity.) Each of the TPNW’s eighty-six signatories and fifty-four ratifying states are members of the NPT in good standing.

For the first time, an NPT RevCon will take place with a new, unignorable divide between states that rely on nuclear weapons (or nuclear-armed allies) for their security and states that believe nuclear weapons are a threat to global security and accept that the NPT cannot be the route to nuclear disarmament.

However, the five nuclear weapons states party to the NPT are convinced that the TPNW undermines the NPT even though the TPNW’s 140 signatories and ratifiers provide legitimacy.

Other divisive political challenges for the RevCon include Iran and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was unilaterally discarded by the Donald Trump administration; a push by non–nuclear weapons states for substantive reductions in nuclear arsenals; lack of progress on the 1995 initiative for the Middle East as a zone free of all weapons of mass destruction; a U.S. push for universal adherence to the International Atomic Energy Agency Additional Protocol; and North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, among others.

Redefining Success

For the last fifty years, a substantive consensus outcome has been the criteria for a successful RevCon. Yet anticipating the difficulties of a consensus, the NPT supporters are suggesting that the definition of a successful outcome should be reconsidered.

The NPT record indicates that no consensus was reached in 1980, 1990, 2005, and 2015. In 1995, despite the failure to reach consensus on a comprehensive final document, the critical objective of an indefinite and unconditional extension of the NPT was achieved (it had an original duration of twenty-five years). Some use this outcome to argue that a consensus final document need not be a true measure of success. Conversely, the 2000 and 2010 RevCons reached consensus after difficult negotiations, but none of the agreed steps or recommendations were ever implemented. Even these past agreements are unlikely to be endorsed today. The convergence of interests among the major powers has broken down, removing the basic political pre-condition for any progress.

Nuclear weapons–dependent states suggest setting a lower bar for a successful outcome. Merely holding a conference should be enough, according to some, as this would avoid the acrimonious and time-consuming negotiations that create undue expectations. However, such an approach is at best a temporary resolution. Any permanent resolution would lie in accepting the limitations of the NPT and seeking to join the TPNW proponents in a constructive dialogue. This needs imaginative approaches and a shift from the zero-sum model of negotiation to a win-win outcome, preserving the NPT while looking beyond it. A mindset change is necessary for the NPT to overcome its midlife crisis.

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