A CRUCIAL international treaty seen as the cornerstone of nuclear relations is “really struggling” in the modern age as nuclear-armed states fail to meet their obligations under it, an expert has warned.
Speaking to The National from a UN summit on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), the University of Glasgow’s Dr Rhys Crilley said there was “a lot of frustration internationally” with nuclear-armed states like the UK failing to live up to their commitments under the older Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The NPT – to which the UK, US, France, China, and Russia are signatories – was intended to prevent any other states from acquiring nuclear weapons. It also included clauses aimed at pushing the nuclear-armed states to move towards disarmament.
One of these is NPT Article 6, which obliges signatories to engage “in good faith” with negotiations aimed at eliminating nuclear weapons globally. This clause is widely considered to include the TPNW, which is supported by a majority of the world’s nations and seeks to ban nuclear weapons outright.
Asked if the UK Government was failing to live up to its legal obligations on Article 6 earlier this week, Grethe Ostern – the editor of Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor editor – and Hans Kristensen – the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists – both said that it was.
Presented with the UK Government’s argument, Crilley was asked if he believes it holds up.
“No, not really,” he said. “I think I'm yet to see convincing evidence or reasons why the UK Government can't take the TPNW a bit more seriously – or at least engage, whether that be as an observer state or whether just as a state that just doesn't dismiss the TPNW as something that is irrelevant.”
Asked if the Labour Government was upholding Article 6 of the NPT, Crilley said: “I'm not convinced that they are, and I think the TPNW itself is evidence of the frustration felt by the global majority – that the five nuclear weapon states who are enshrined the right to have nuclear weapons under the NPT, that they're not keeping up with their obligations under the policy.
“So there's a lot of frustration internationally and that eventually gets to the TPNW – and we can see here that the states parties to the TPNW are using that frustration productively and they're trying to think about a specific treaty that bans nuclear weapons – which up until now were the only weapon of mass destruction that didn't have a ban treaty in existence, which is crazy, right?”
He added: “So they're trying to use that frustration productively, and I think the nuclear-weapon states could be doing a lot more to uphold this obligation to disarmament that they signed up to.”
The UK Government has itself called the NPT the "cornerstone [of] efforts to deliver a world free of nuclear weapons".
Elsewhere, Crilley spoke to The National about the arguments from his award-winning book Unparalleled Catastrophe: Life and Death in the Third Nuclear Age.
He argues that the world has left behind the first two nuclear ages, and entered a third.
“The first covered the Cold War era,” Crilley explained. “The key characteristic was bipolar superpower competition and an arms race between the US and the Soviet Union.
“With the end of the Cold War, we see the start of the second nuclear age, where the key concerns are different and there's denuclearisation, there's a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons that exist – but there's proliferation to other states … and there's fears about rogue states and nuclear terrorism in the context of the global war on terror.”
Crilley said the third nuclear age was characterised by “multipolarity, so we don't just have two superpowers”, by increased geopolitical tensions – such as the the Middle East, Russia, and the Pacific, by new technology like AI and hypersonic missiles, and finally, by “arms control treaties collapsing”.
He said: “Outside of this meeting, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which is going from strength to strength … other nuclear arms control treaties such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which meets every year through a series of different meetings with the UN, that's really struggling.
“Every meeting is failing to deliver an outcome document because states can't agree on what was even said at the meeting. And other treaties, between the US and Russia, like the [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty], they've collapsed.”
