SPECIAL REPORTS Asia: Non-proliferation and safeguards A view from India on international and regional developments, the NPT, and the role of the IAEA's safeguards system I he international community and the IAEA document was finalised by the IAEA Board of By S.K. Singh have been worried over the years about certain Governors only in February 1972. This takes Asian countries which have not been agreeable into account Article III of the NPT, which indi- to signing the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of cates that the required safeguards "shall be ap- Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The extraordinary chan- plied on all source or special fissionable material ges that have overtaken the world, especially Asia, in all peaceful nuclear activities within the ter- in the last two or three dozen months have changed ritory of such state, under its jurisdiction, or this. Now the world is worried about certain coun- carried out under its control anywhere". tries that have signed the NPT but have been If the idea of the NPT is to free the world functioning as if no such Treaty existed. from the curse of nuclear weapons, then why is Israel and Pakistan have refrained from sign- it that a few nations continue to claim the posses- ing the Treaty. Iraq, Iran, and North Korea are sion of nuclear weapons as their exclusive and signatories of fairly long standing. Experts in legitimate right? And the IAEA does not con- international law are not unanimous about tradict them. Terror cannot replace logic. The whether or not Kazakhstan is bound by the com- world cannot accept the thesis that for many mitments made by the former Soviet Union, as a countries scientific and technological freedom signatory of the Treaty. Anyway, the Foreign should be induced to wither because of what Minister of Kazakhstan has indicated that his some call the selective imperatives of horizontal country is not averse to signing the Treaty, after non-proliferation. becoming a member of the United Nations. We should also note here that the IAEA itself The mandate of the IAEA is to deal with is not a party to the NPT. However, the NPT peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The IAEA States have assumed obligations vis-a-vis the Statute nowhere mentions or uses the expres- Agency under consequential safeguards agree- sions "proliferation" or "non-proliferation". ments, which under the NPT itself they are ob- Between the time the Agency was set up in 1957 liged to conclude with the Agency. and the NPT came to be negotiated and opened The use of atomic bombs against Japan in for signatures in 1969, France and China too had August 1945, in terms of customary international become nuclear-weapon States. It may be re- law, has been considered illegal by most interna- called that the USA, USSR, and UK had dev- tional lawyers. International law maintains a dis- eloped and deployed their nuclear weapons prior tinction between combatants and non-comba- to the NPT being negotiated. tants, between military and other targets, The safeguards system (as contained in prohibits the use of poisoned weapons, prohibits IAEA document INFCIRC/66) was evolved by commission of crimes against humanity, insists the Agency prior to the signing of the NPT. on the protection of the civilian populations, and After the coming into force of the NPT, this does not permit any disproportionality in self- safeguards system was made considerably more defence. There was some thought given to the strict and rigid. It now also took into account the banning of any further use of the nuclear wea- commitments and obligations assumed by IAEA pon, and, in that process, the non-utilisation of Member States in respect of non-proliferation. this technology. But as L.W. Herron notes, this The post-NPT safeguards system of Ihe IAEA technology was found to be too fascinating, its is contained in document INFCIRC/153. This power too seductive for the genie to be left in the bottle.* Mr Singh, the former Foreign Secretary of India, was the Ambassador to Austria and India's Governor on the IAEA * See "A lawyer's view of safeguards and non-proliferation", Board of Governors from 1982-85. by L.W. Herron, \AEA Bulletin, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1982). IAEA BULLETIN, 1/1992 41 SPECIAL REPORTS IAEA safeguards At one time, before the USSR and the UK Recent nuclear developments inspectors (centre) became powers possessing nuclear weapons, it checking fresh fuel had appeared possible that the USA would be The changing world has seen, during the last elements at a nuclear power plant. persuaded to move towards unilateral nuclear 2 years, a number of developments in the nuclear disarmament. field in Asia. However, once this proliferation had taken For some time now, Israel has been acknow- place, first from one nuclear-weapon State, to ledged as a virtual nuclear-weapon State. At the three, and later on to five, the world found that end of the Iraq/Kuwait war came revelations proliferation had run amuck. It was only after that about how far Iraq, a signatory of the NPT, had stage that the vertical proliferators chose to become moved in the direction of acquiring clandestinely passionately hostile to the idea of horizontal the wherewithal for fabricating nuclear wea- proliferation. Hence the NPT. And hence indeed pons. Indeed, without the victory of the allied the involvement of the Agency with the implemen- powers against Iraq, it would not have been pos- tation of obligations assumed under the NPT. sible to uncover so much evidence about Iraq's It is useful to recall this background. clandestine march towards acquiring nuclear 42 IAEA BULLETIN, 1/1992 SPECIAL REPORTS weapons. Pakistan, according to Western intel- ly the error in counting the nuclear weapons in ligence reports, has received advice and assis- the former Soviet Union. The error according to tance from China enabling it to come very close experts could be as high as 20%. indeed to making a nuclear weapon. US Presi- And what about the suspicion of some of dent Bush has been forced to deny to Pakistan these inaccurately counted weapons falling into the certification which is required under the irresponsible hands? The Pakistani and Iraqi Pressler Amendment, before the US Congress clandestine nuclear-weapon programmes il- can authorise funds for providing Pakistan any lustrate how a signatory as well as a non-sig- economic and/or military aid. And now the natory to the NPT can receive advice, assistance, Pakistan Foreign Secretary has acknowledged and nuclear material to pursue their respective that they can assemble the bomb at will. North ambitious weapons programmes. Supplies, ad- Korea, another signatory of the NPT, is sus- vice, and assistance have obviously been forth- pected to have covered considerable ground on coming from "countries" that are developed in the road to acquiring nuclear weapons capacity. the nuclear field, and are either signatories to the Consequent to the collapse of the old Soviet NPT or those that have promised to abide by its Union, its republics became independent. These terms. It would appear that more than political republics wish to retain some unity of purpose friendship, the magic of the market place has and functioning in certain specific areas. They been the motivating force in this field too. The are all committed to transferring all the nuclear desire to make profits has motivated the indus- weapons, which may be on their territory, to the trialists of certain States to overcome their ab- territory of President Boris Yeltsin's Russian horrence of nuclear weapons and their squea- Federation. However, there have been certain mishness in respect of breaking their pledged worrisome delays in the transfer of weapons word. from former republics like Kazakhstan. What the international community faces in these situations in Asia are not problems con- cerning the IAEA's safeguards system, but Safeguards and the IAEA rather of non-proliferation. And what lies behind that is the question of the political will of the We are passing through not merely a period international community to move significantly of change but also of contradictions. towards general and complete disarmament. On the one hand, the two most major wea- The preamble of the NPT mentions interna- pons States have agreed to carry out deep cuts in tional tensions and the need to strengthen trust armaments, and to defuse conflict situations between States, so that they could cease man- around the world. But on the other hand, neither ufacturing nuclear weapons and liquidate their side has shown any inclination to move towards existing stockpiles, and eliminate from their na- a comprehensive Test Ban Treaty or to acknow- tional arsenals nuclear weapons, as well as the ledge the need to achieve, in a time bound frame- means of their delivery. work, general and complete disarmament. All this can be achieved under a Treaty on There is a new security environment in the general and complete disarmament and a system world. And it would appear that the great powers of international verification, under strict and ef- are all interested in reorganising their nuclear fective international control. Immediately after arsenals in this new context. But they are adverse the end of the Cold War and the dismantling of to giving up their quest for achieving superior the Warsaw Treaty, this could have been worked power. out. But this seems to have faded away already, There is talk of strengthening safeguards and mainly due to the desire of the five nuclear- giving more teeth to the IAEA, but it is confined weapon powers to keep maintaining, acquiring, only to the horizontal aspect of the nuclear pro- and inventing new nuclear armaments.