Thanks to Henry Sokolski and the Nonproliferation Policy  Education Center (NPEC) for inviting me to speak with you today, and to the rest of the participants for what I hope will be a very interesting discussion.  

Unfortunately, today’s topic – that of how to deter further withdrawals from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) – is by no means a new one.  I certainly wish the topic of how to deter further countries, such as Iran, from withdrawing from the NPT were a more novel one, but we’ve obviously been worrying about it for a long time.   

North Korea completed withdrawing from the NPT fully 18 years ago now, just before I first arrived at the State Department to work on issues in arms control and nonproliferation compliance, so this issue struck home for me from the very beginning of my Executive Branch career.  

But it’s been a long time since then, and while the international community has done things such as imposing very tough U.N. Security Council sanctions that I hope will indeed help disincentivize others from following North Korea’s its footsteps, those moves were on their own terms aimed at punishing Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons development and testing more than its withdrawal from the NPT per se.  

Indeed, very little was done to North Korea after its NPT withdrawal before its first weapons test. This raises the concern that if countries such as Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia – all of which have at least muttered about the possibility of withdrawal – simply want to acquire a legal nuclear weaponization option, rather than actually building such devices and setting them off like North Korea did, they might read the DPRK example as a relatively encouraging one.

NPEC has been focused on this challenge from the outset, and under its aegis Pierre Goldschmidt has made some especially important contributions to thinking about how the international community might try to disincentivize such withdrawal. I assume most of you have read Pierre’s most recent paper on the topic.

Pierre suggests having the Security Council adopt of “a legally binding generic resolution” providing the IAEA expanded verification rights when a state is found to be in noncompliance with safeguards, ensuring that all sensitive fuel cycle facilities in a withdrawing state remain covered by “irreversible” safeguards agreements, and mandating that previously safeguarded materials and facilities not be used for weapons production after withdrawal. He would also have the Council declare, in advance, that any announcement of NPT withdrawal would be “a threat to international peace and security” under Article 39 of the U.N. Charter, thus opening a path to legally-binding sanctions as soon as such withdrawal became effective. Pierre also recommended that the Nuclear Suppliers Group require recipient states to have “irreversible” IAEA safeguards that do not depend – as normal INFCIRC/153-based Comprehensive Safeguards Agreements do – upon a country being a State Party to the NPT. 

I’ve also tried to help deal with this withdrawal challenge, such as with the paper we co-authored with South Korea back when I was running U.S. NPT diplomacy at the State Department in 2008. (We also published a paper of our own on this in 2007.)  It called upon all states to cease nuclear cooperation with any country withdrawing, for steps to ensure that withdrawing states can no longer benefit from nuclear items and material they acquired while a Party to the Treaty – such as by securing their elimination or return to their original supplier – and for the Security Council to ensure continuity of safeguards in a country that withdraws from the NPT.

But even all these years later – and with the huge geopolitical problem of a now very nuclear-armed North Korea staring us in the face – the international community has not yet actually acted along any of these lines, with the single exception of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1887 of 2009, a non-binding measure which simply “encouraged” nuclear suppliers to acquire the return of items or material in the event that a recipient withdraws from the NPT, and “urged” states to make permanent IAEA safeguards a condition of nuclear supply.

Why hasn’t it been possible to do more?  

Well, to being with, some states appear to have an interest in not seeing more done to deter withdrawal because they themselves might actually wish to take advantage of that option in the future. Even among the nuclear weapons possessors, moreover, both Russia and China have effectively signaled over the years that they do not actually mind nuclear weapons proliferation very much, provided that it does not directly threaten them and that it does threaten the interests of the United States and its allies.  

Another group of states uneasy with doing more is the Non-Aligned Movement, many of whose members are motivated, in this regard, by their political investment in narratives depicting the NPT as “unfairly” privileging weapons-possessors. In theory, this should not prevent NAM support for measures to deter withdrawal by a state that has been found in violation of the NPT, but it does.

And indeed there is a sound argument against measures that would restrict the exercise of withdrawal per se – not least because one cannot say that it is impossible for a country ever to have a sound reason for withdrawal. Specifically, in some hypothetical future in which U.S. alliance guarantees have collapsed and an otherwise all but defenseless ally of ours faced an overwhelming threat of invasion and conquest by Russia or China, for instance, I would myself find it difficult, in good conscience, to tell that country that it must sacrifice its very existence on the altar of nonproliferation scrupulousness.  

So I could imagine an extreme scenario in which a threatened country could probably truthfully declare – as the withdrawal provisions in the NPT require – that “extraordinary events” have “jeopardized … [its] supreme interests” in ways that require the recovery of a nuclear weapons option to deter that aggression. The International Court of Justice made clear in its 1996 advisory opinion on nuclear weapons, after all, that the use of such weapons would be lawful “in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.” If such survival were indeed potentially at stake – and as much as it should be a huge priority for our foreign policy to ever let such a situation develop – it would be hard to argue that NPT withdrawal under such circumstances would be entirely inappropriate.

But you shouldn’t overread my caution here. That would surely be an exceedingly rare case, and one which corresponds to none of the actual or threatened cases of withdrawal that the world has actually seen. There are all sorts of circumstances in which NPT withdrawal would clearly be deeply destabilizing, and indeed present in itself a threat to international peace and security.

The most obvious is the prospect of withdrawal by a country in violation of the Treaty. If you’re caught cheating, as North Korea was years ago, and as Iran was in the 2000s, and then you withdraw, only a fool would argue that’s not terribly problematic.  

Given the dangers that would clearly arise from any proliferation, it would surely be a threat to international peace and security for any country to pursue withdrawal where it doesn’t actually face some kind of existential threat that needs to be deterred by indigenous nuclear weaponization. No country has yet made a serious case that it faces such circumstances, and unless and until one truly can, we should be working very hard to deter and penalize NPT withdrawal.

(This would also apply, of course, to withdrawal undertaken out of some weird sense of political pique or ideological principle, such as the allegation that the NPT is “unfair” in some fashion. Or to withdrawal pursued simply in order to make more viable some future weaponization option.)

So you’re probably getting my point. While I do think it is possible to imagine justified withdrawal, that would be a very extraordinary case, which no country has made or is likely in the near future to be able to make. All of which means that a good deal still needs to be done to deter withdrawal.

Given the degree to which there doesn’t seem to be enough agreement in the international community to adopt the sort of measures Pierre Goldschmidt has outlined, however, what is it that can still be done? I think there may well be useful things we can do in conjunction with our likeminded friends who are serious about nonproliferation.

1. Such states, for instance, should agree among themselves – in advance – to act resolutely among themselves (whether or not the United Nations does) against any state that withdraws from the NPT under circumstances that create a threat to international peace and security.  
   
2. States should also establish authorities in national legislation for the imposition of mandatory sanctions triggered by a country’s withdrawal from the NPT after having been either (a) found by the IAEA or by the U.N. Security Council to be in violation of IAEA safeguards or Article II of the NPT, or (b) found to be in such violation by appropriate national authorities in the state having such legislation. Even in the absence of a finding of violation, moreover, this sanctions legislation would also be triggered where national authorities deemed the circumstances to be such in which another state’s NPT withdrawal presented a threat to the country’s national security or to international peace and security more generally.  
   
3. We should establish agreed public understandings within their alliance networks, in advance, that withdrawal from the NPT by a country that has violated that Treaty or that has expressed hostility toward one or more members of such an alliance inherently presents a threat to collective security, and that such withdrawal could provide a legitimate basis for requesting alliance assistance (e.g., through NATO’s Article 5) as that threat develops.
   
4. Such states should also press for all non-nuclear weapon states to negotiate provisions with the IAEA pursuant to which indefinitely continuing INFCIRC/66-type safeguards would supersede Comprehensive Safeguards Agreements under INFCIRC/153 in the event of NPT withdrawal. States might even make such “backup” agreements a condition of nuclear supply and an accepted “best practices” standard for safeguards implementation.  
   
5. Like-minded countries serious about nonproliferation should insist that “disgorgement” provisions be included in nuclear cooperation agreements, pursuant to which items, technology, or material provided under such agreements would have to be returned to their country of origin (or otherwise appropriately disposed of) in the event of NPT withdrawal by their recipient.
   

Having like-minded nonproliferation-responsible states adopt such measures as collective national policy priorities would not be as useful as having such things be done via legally-binding Security Council resolutions, of course. Nevertheless, moves in this direction by coalitions of like-minded governments would still represent important steps beyond current practice.  

There may also be more to do in heading off circumstances in which a U.S. ally threatened by Russian or Chinese aggression might feel it needs indigenous weaponization. To do this, we must invest in the continued efficacy of collective nuclear deterrence strategies, and ensure that our allies to not take steps that undermine this deterrence – e.g., the refusal of NATO Allies to recapitalize dual-capable aircraft as legacy platforms reach obsolescence, or to permit U.S. deployments of nuclear weaponry needed as part of the Atlantic Alliance deterrent.  

America’s allies thus have much work to do in shoring up these alliance networks, but the biggest burden here still falls upon Washington. It is absolutely essential that U.S. leaders remain strongly committed to preserving the credibility and effectiveness of the security guarantees – including the “extended” nuclear deterrence guarantees – to allies that might otherwise feel the need to resort to more autonomous varieties of nuclear deterrence. Ensuring the solidity of these guarantees has both nuclear and conventional force posture implications, as well as requiring that the United States credibly signal not just its capability but also its willingness to come to allies’ aid when needed, and in either conventional or nuclear ways, or both.

It will not be enough, as may sometimes have happened in the past, for American officials to adopt the force posture and declaratory policies they want, and then lecture U.S. allies about how those choices should be reassuring to them. As threats grow in the security environment, power balances shift, and alliance solidarity comes to depend increasingly upon genuinely collective endeavor, we must also ensure that we truly listen to what our allies tell us – even if often only very privately – would be most reassuring to them, and we must make their desires and needs an important factor in our own procurement and planning, including in the nuclear arena. If regional threats to U.S. allies grow especially severe, we must also not be afraid to consider creative ways to make our allies more invested in nuclear planning and potential employment in time of crisis. 

The United States has partners who take nonproliferation seriously, and who seem to be deeply concerned about the possibility of further destabilizing withdrawals from the NPT, particularly by Iran. These are states with whom we ought to be able to work in implementing such an agenda.  

We should not give up hope on more internationalist answers, but rather than simply waiting for the international community, as a whole, to do what it seems manifestly unwilling to do, we have before us an opportunity to use our own statesmanship to make at least progress in a dangerous world.

-- Christopher Ford