2012 Conference on Disarmament Pakistan’s Approach towards FMCT

Introduction

The Conference on Disarmament (CD), the world’s sole multilateral forum for disarmament negotiations, held the first public plenary of its 2012 session on January 24, 2012, at the Palais des Nations in Geneva.  The Conference adopted its annual agenda, but was not able to agree on a program of work, due to divergence of opinion among the CD delegates on core items of the Agenda. Mr. Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG) delivered the United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon’s message to the CD on January 24, 2012,  advising the members of the CD to create global legal norms to cap the proliferation of nuclear weapons grade fissile material. He also appealed to the Conference to commence substantive work without further delay and to adopt a Program of Work at the earliest possible date.

Ban Ki-moon, in his message to the CD, also opined: “It is possible to create global legal norms even in times of great political disagreements.”  The message probably refers to the fact that the super powers during the Cold War were able to negotiate a few treaties at the Conference on Disarmament despite their ideological and political differences. Importantly, they had strategic equilibrium and their negotiated treaties neither undermined their strategic balance of power nor initiated a process which gradually wore down the military capability of the negotiators. Therefore, the strategic peers were able to create global norms without lowering down or fracturing their defensive fences. Presently, the CD has been failing to start negotiations entailing the constitution of the draft of a treaty because militarily insecure states are invariably conscious of the persisting asymmetry of conventional weapons, worrying about the likely transformation of strategic equilibrium into strategic imbalance in their regional strategic environment.       

The Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT) has remained a captivating subject for the nuclear abolitionists during the recent years. President Obama, in his famous Prague speech on April 5, 2009, declared the need for a treaty that “verifiably ends the production of fissile materials intended for use in state nuclear weapons,”  reversing the Bush administration’s position first stated in 2004 that an FMCT could not be effectively verified. While Obama’s affirmative approach referred to the ‘verification issue’ and secured Washington’s support for the negotiation on FMCT at CD, it failed to address the puzzle of ‘preexisting stocks’. Nevertheless, it congregated support for the FMCT at other arenas. For instance, the FMCT received a substantial support in the UNSC Resolution 1887, which called upon the CD to negotiate a treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices as soon as possible.  On October 29, 2009, for the first time since 2004, the First Committee of the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution without a vote on a treaty specifically banning the production of materials for use in nuclear weapons. The consensus action plan adopted by the 2010 NPT Review Conference also made direct reference to the FMCT. In Action 15 of the 2010 NPT Review Conference Final Document’s Action Plan, all state parties agreed that the CD should begin immediate negotiation on FMCT.  Despite these initiatives, the negotiation on FMCT still remains far-fetched illusion.

Many delegates in CD had expressed their willingness to negotiate FMCT draft outside the Conference in 2011 due to its incapability. On April 30, 2011, the foreign ministers of 10 non-nuclear nations stretching across continents—Australia, Canada, Chile, Germany, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates—held a conference in Berlin, in which they proposed an action plan for nuclear non proliferation and emphasized that the further delays on FMCT at CD should be avoided. It recommended that if the CD, in its 2011 substantive session, remained unable to find agreement on launching FMCT negotiations, they would ask the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) to address the issue and consider ways to proceed with the aim of beginning negotiations.  Similar concerns were reverberated in Ban Ki-moon’s message on January 24, 2012, when he stated: “Not only do the members of the Conference disagree over its priorities, but the consensus rule, which has served this body so well in the past, is currently used as a de-facto veto power to stall every attempt to break the impasse.”  He added: “The future of the Conference is in the hands of its member states. But I cannot stand by and watch it decline into irrelevancy, as states consider other negotiating arenas.”

Rhetorically, the nuclear weapon states did support President Obama’s utopian call for a nuclear weapons-free world, but practically, none of the states is ready to relinquish its nuclear deterrence capability. In Reality, the Indo-US nuclear deal—entered into force in 2008 after the amendment in the Nuclear Supplier Groups (NSG)—and the prevailing trends in the international high-politics are not conducive for consensus building on the CD Agenda in 2012. These trends in the global and regional strategic environment particularly harden Pakistan’s stance on FMCT. The following discussion is divided into two sections. First section briefly spells out the CD Agenda for the 2012 session and highlights the factors, responsible for the stalemate at CD. Second section contains discussion on Pakistan’s stance on FMCT.