DisarmingConflict is Moving
After four years of weekly posts here, the Disarming Conflict blog is taking a break and will go offline until early fall when it will re-emerge on another site. Stay connected.
Postings will resume in September, in essence continuing to monitor the international community’s progress in making good on one of the boldest and far-reaching goals set out in the United Nations Charter in 1945. Article 26 mandates the Security Council to establish "a system for the regulation of armaments" as part of a larger effort to "promote the establishment and maintenance of international peace and security with the least diversion for armaments of the world's human and economic resources."
And the progress thus far in implementing Article 26?
Finishing the job by starting to talk in Afghanistan
The coming months will no doubt bring some extravagant pleas from certain Afghan and NATO politicians that Canada not follow through on the commitment to withdraw its combat forces from Afghanistan in 2011, but an effective antidote to such pressures is available in beefed-up diplomacy.
“You have to finish the job,” says Ahmad Wali Karzai – head of the Kandahar provincial council, half brother to President Hamid Karzai, controversial politician, entrepreneur with rumored links to the drug trade, and survivor of at least one assassination attempt.
The Canada-India civilian nuclear cooperation deal
The wisdom and benefits of strongly improved Canadian trade and political relations with India are obvious. But if civilian nuclear cooperation[i] is to be a primary fixture and symbol of the cordialization of Indo-Canadian relations, it should be built on the most robust of nonproliferation conditions.
The G8 and the Prime Minister on Iran: Getting the charges right
In his press conference statement at the conclusion of the Muskoka G8 meeting, Prime Minister Stephen Harper stated mater-of-factly, but wrongly, that Iran has “chosen to acquire [nuclear] weapons to threaten its neighbours.[i]
Neither the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) nor the UN Security Council claims that Iran has made a decision to acquire nuclear weapons. Nor did the G8 itself make that claim in its Muskoka communiqué.
The NPT Review Conference IV: Reaffirming the basic disarmament agenda
A basic disarmament agenda has been in place for the past decade. The priorities set in the 1990s and even earlier were essentially confirmed at the 2010 NPT Review Conference.
The final document[i] of the 2010 Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) reaffirmed the key decisions and agreements reached at the critically important Review Conferences of 1995 and 2000. In particular it “reaffirms the continued validity of the practical steps agreed to…in 2000” (para 5) – practical steps which were then supported then by the Bill Clinton administration of the US, and later repudiated by the George W. Bush administration.
The NPT Review Conference III: Reporting and Transparency
The centrality of transparency in nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament was acknowledged and even advanced at the 2010 Review Conerence.
When the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was indefinitely extended in 1995, the agreement included a collective commitment by States Parties to strengthen the Treaty’s review process. States called in particular for a heightened acknowledgement of mutual accountability for actions taken, or not taken, in support of the implementation of the Treaty and the furtherance of it aims and objectives.
The NPT Review Conference II: The Institutional Deficit
Canada has for some time led efforts to expand and reshape the institutional infrastructure of the NPT, and thus to also improve its review and decision-making processes. The proposals this time were modest, though eminently worthwhile, and the results even more modest.
A working paper,[i] initiated by Canada but with a broad group of co-sponsors,[ii] proposed three specific and fairly far-reaching changes.
The NPT Review Conference I: More than empty promises
The story line adopted by many NGOs in the immediate wake of the 2010 Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was one of “empty promises.”[i] But now, with broad expressions of disappointment out of the way, observers increasingly point to the achievements.
A primary accomplishment was avoiding the disaster of the 2005 Conference – no small thing. But there were others.
Exploring post-2011 military deployments in peace support operations
A combination of the national interest, prosperity and stability at home, and decades of peacekeeping experience means that Canada will continue to offer and be called upon to support multilateral missions to advance international peace and security after 2011 and the withdrawal of combat troops from Afghanistan.
It is likely that most future Canadian participation in multilateral peace operations will not be much easier or more obviously successful than has been the intervention in Afghanistan. Peace operations, after all, are by definition mounted in extraordinarily difficult circumstances – where even after peace agreements are signed, state governance remains dangerously fragile, economies are shattered, security forces are seriously compromised, and political loyalties are complex and frayed.
No heaven, farther from nuclear hell
The following commentary by Douglas Roche and Ernie Regehr appeared in today’s Embassy, available at: http://www.embassymag.ca.
There are two ways of looking at the outcome of the month-long Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, which wrapped up last Friday at the United Nations in New York with a standing ovation for its president, Ambassador Libran Cabactulan of the Philippines.
Was it a minor diplomatic triumph or was it yet another delay on the long and tortuous road to the elimination of nuclear weapons?