Extending the Npt? a Critical Oral History of the 1995 Review and Extension Conference
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EXTENDING THE NPT? A CRITICAL ORAL HISTORY OF THE 1995 REVIEW AND EXTENSION CONFERENCE Edited by Michal Onderco and Leopoldo Nuti History and Public Policy Program Critical Oral History Conference Series EXTENDING THE NPT? A CRITICAL ORAL HISTORY OF THE 1995 REVIEW AND EXTENSION CONFERENCE Edited by Michal Onderco and Leopoldo Nuti Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars One Woodrow Wilson Plaza 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20004-3027 www.wilsoncenter.org Cover image: Review and Extension Conference of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Opens at Headquarters. Seated on the podium from left to right are: Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali; Ambassador Jayantha Dhanapala (Sri Lanka), President of the Conference; Prvoslav Davinic, Secretary-General of the Conference. 17 April 1995. United Nations, New York Photo # 68537 Photo Credit: “UN Photo by Evan Schneider” © 2020 Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars ISBN - 978-1-938027-88-8 Contents Acknowledgements V About This Book VI Introduction X Extended Summary of Discussions XIV Participants XXII Session I: General Mood and Expectations 1 Session II: Hurdles for the Agreement 51 Session III: Overcoming the Opposition 85 Session IV: Middle East WMD-Free Zone 123 Session V: Principles & Objectives 157 Session VI: Strengthened Review Process 187 References 217 IV The Wilson Center, chartered by Congress as the official memorial to President Woodrow Wilson, is the nation’s key non-partisan policy forum for tackling global issues through independent research and open dialogue to inform actionable ideas for Congress, the Administration and the broader international policy community. Jane Harman, Director, President, and CEO CHAIR Scott Walker, Former Governor of Wisconsin VICE CHAIR Drew Maloney, President and CEO, American Investment Council Public Members: Alex Azar, Secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Elisabeth DeVos, Secretary, U.S. Department of Education David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States Carla D. Hayden, Librarian of Congress Jon Parrish Peede, Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities Michael Pompeo, Secretary, U.S. Department of State Lonnie G. Bunch III, Secretary, Smithsonian Institution Private Citizen Members: Peter J. Beshar, Executive Vice President & General Counsel, Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc. Thelma Duggin, President, AnBryce Foundation Barry S. Jackson, Managing Director, The Lindsey Group and Strategic Advisor, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck David Jacobson, Former U.S. Ambassador to Canada and Vice Chair, BMO Financial Group Nathalie Rayes, Vice President of Public Affairs, Grupo Salinas Earl W. Stafford, Chief Executive Officer, The Wentworth Group, LLC Louis Susman, Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom and Senior Advisor, Perella Weinberg Partners ABOUT THIS BOOK Michal Onderco What follows in Extending the NPT is a record of a conference conducted at the Erasmus University Rotterdam on 22-23 March, 2018 as a part of the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project. The conference in Rotterdam was not a traditional academic conference, but followed a critical oral history (COH) methodology with discussion between academic experts on one side and policy veterans on the other.1 This conference aimed at shedding new light on the indefinite extension of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1995. Given the upcoming 25th anniversary of the indefinite extension, and the growing role that the legacy of the extension plays for the NPT politics today, revisiting what happened and how in 1995 was an attractive prospect. For this reason, the conference brought together the main participants in the 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference (1995 NPTREC), including diplomats repre- senting the most important countries present at the conference, as well as a small number of academics. The deliberations were supported by a collection of primary documents related to the 1995 NPTREC, collected in various archives in Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, and South Africa. COH methodology expects that the presence of many policy veterans, academic experts, and available primary documents will provide a fruitful ground for a rich discussion of what happened and why in a particular moment in history. Soon after the 1995 NPTREC, there were a number of attempts to provide a sum- mary of what was discussed.2 Thus a major ‘post-mortem’ conference was organized at the Monterey Institute for International Studies less than three months after the 1995 NPTREC with all major participants involved. Some participants in the conference would reference the 1995 NPTREC in their memoirs.3 Yet, the Rotterdam conference is different in several and important ways. Firstly, the time lag of 23 years allowed access to primary documents which were unavailable until recently. Secondly, retirement of major 1 For other similar recent examples, see Onslow and van Wyk 2013, Mallea, et al. 2015 2 Johnson 1995, Rauf and Johnson 1995, Welsh 1995 3 Graham 2002, Markram 2004, Dhanapala and Rydell 2005, Dhanapala 2015, von Wielligh and von Wielligh-Steyn 2015, Dhanapala and Rauf 2017 VI VI PARTICIPANTS participants from the active government service meant that they were freer to discuss events which happened over 20 years ago, compared to the situation immediately after the conference. Thirdly, the Rotterdam Conference focused on aspects which were simply not considered by researchers and scholars back in 1995. Two examples illustrate these differences: the discussion about the origins of the Decision on Principles and Objectives; and the discussion of its relevance by the community of experts in the Programme for Promoting Nuclear Non-Proliferation (PPNN). Back at the ‘post-mortem’ conference in Monterey, the Decision on Principles and Objectives had been discussed as a given. Other accounts had also shed little light on the deliberations leading to the Decision and the seeds that were sown well before the conference. By contrast, the Rotterdam conference extensively discussed the origins of the Decision on Principles and Objectives in the bilateral exchanges prior to the 1995 NPTREC, as well as the negotiation of the document at the NPTREC itself. Similarly, back in 1995, very little attention was given to PPNN’s role in informing, socializing, and networking diplomats prior to the conference. These two examples only illustrate how the present project has opened new avenues for scholarly in- quiry into the key development in non-proliferation regime; and one of the most important moments in post-Cold War arms control history. The Rotterdam conference was the pinnacle of a two-year effort which consisted of three (often overlapping) building blocks. Firstly, we conducted oral history interviews with twenty-eight policy veterans, usually with heads of delegations or chief negotiators from individual countries. These inter- views took place between September 2016 and May 2017. The list of questions for these interviews was composed based on the review of available secondary literature related to the NPT regime, particularly the NPT’s extension in 1995. A vast majority of these were conducted by Michal Onderco, except two which were conducted by Hassan Elbahtimy and Katrin Heilman respectively. With some of the interviewees, follow-up questions were arranged via phone or e-mail. Secondly, we started collecting primary documents in a number of archives. Declassification requests were filed with the National Archives in Washington, Archives of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation in Pretoria, Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin, Archives of the Secretariat of the European Council in Brussels, and Archive of the Canada Global (Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department) in Ottawa. Unfortunately, in the two years preceding the Rotterdam conference, only some of these requests were processed and declassified. Additional documents were therefore sought in the Archive of the University of Southampton, Rockefeller Archive Center in Pocantico, NY, and in private archives of some of our attendees. A selection of these VII VII EXTENDING THE NPT? A CRITICAL ORAL HISTORY OF THE 1995 REVIEW AND EXTENSION CONFERENCE documents were included in the document reader distributed to participants ahead of the conference, and are now available at the Wilson Center’s website. Thirdly, on the basis of interviews and available archival documents, we determined what was still unknown or not well understood about the 1995 NPTREC. We then formulated a brief list of ques- tions which policy veterans were encouraged to consider before the Rotterdam conference began. At the same time, we had to select the policy veterans to invite to our conference. As stated before, we opted to invite heads of delegations. However, when these heads were unavailable, their senior policy or academic advisors were invited instead. Only a small number of invited participants turned down our invitation to come to the Rotterdam conference, usually due to scheduling conflicts or due to poor health which would not allow them to travel to The Netherlands. Although these practitioners knew each other from their previous experiences, in most cases they had not been in touch for a decade or more. It is important to note that we did not send policy veterans each other’s interviews. As Mallea et al4 advised, we wanted to avoid giving the policy veterans “too many axes to grind” and invited them to participate