The 1999 NPT PrepCom

Results of the 1999 PrepCom

After the presentation of national opening statements by delegates, attention turned to a May 14 Working Paper presented by the Chair. This document was the Chairman’s first attempt to reflect a core consensus among all NPT members. Although broadly supported by most Western states, especially members of NATO, this document proved to be a disappointment for many states in the Nonaligned Movement (NAM), the New Agenda Coalition (NAC), and the League of Arab States, led by Indonesia, Brazil, and Algeria, respectively. In particular, most States Parties outside of NATO (and also Canada, a NATO member) favored much stronger and concrete language on the obligations of the P-5 to disarm, as called for under the provisions of Article VI of the NPT. Additionally, the League of Arab States opened with a statement focusing on the need for Israel to accede to the NPT as specified in the 1995 Middle East Resolution, a sentiment that was reiterated by Egypt in its own opening remarks.

In response to numerous and strongly worded proposals for amending the original Working Paper, a May 20th revision incorporated comprehensive and controversial disarmament language taken almost verbatim from recommendations by Canada and the New Agenda Coalition. These individual statements included multiple suggestions for the bilateral de-alerting of arsenals by the US and Russia; movement towards negotiations on START III; the inclusion of Britain, France, and China in multilateral disarmament negotiations; speedy entry-into-force of the CTBT; transparency in nuclear deployments and operations (including those of tactical nuclear weapons); sharp reductions in tactical nuclear weapons; and commitment to a global regime of Negative Security Assurances (NSAs). The United States was consistently opposed to all of these proposals either in private consultations or in conference debates, while China tacitly or explicitly backed all of them (with the possible exception of increased transparency in daily operations). Britain, France, and Russia fell somewhere in between, with Russia’s opinions being tied to U.S. positions on these issues.

Disagreements over disarmament obligations inevitably were linked to the NATO Summit, which took place in Washington on 23-25 April as a celebration of NATO's 50th anniversary. Prior to the Summit, NATO allies Germany and Canada had pressed for a discussion of the Alliance's policy of first use of nuclear weapons during conflicts, a controversial doctrine that potentially undermines numerous politically-binding assurances made by the US, France, and Britain that nuclear weapons would never be used against non-nuclear Parties of the NPT. Another controversial component of the alliance is its nuclear sharing provisions, under which six nominally non-nuclear countries have nuclear weapons stored on their territories and are trained to use them during war. Many experts believe that these latter provisions contradict Articles I and II of the NPT, which forbid the transfer and reception of nuclear technology between nuclear weapons states (NWS) and non-nuclear weapons states. At the 1998 PrepCom, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) formally opposed these arrangements and proposed language for ending them.

In response to these pressures emanating from both inside and outside the alliance, the 50^th Anniversary Summit endorsed a new Strategic Concept as part of NATO's mission statement. The most significant shift was NATO's statement concerning disarmament, in which the use of nuclear weapons is now characterized as "extremely remote." The Washington Summit Communiqué also committed NATO to initiate a review of its nuclear weapons.

However, these changes represented only cosmetic alterations of traditional nuclear policies. In response to these largely static NATO practices, the revised section on Negative Security Assurances (NSAs) in the Chairman's May 20 Working Paper, based largely on a draft protocol by South Africa, called for an end to "first-use" doctrines by most of the P-5 and NATO. Of the P-5, only China supported the two clauses on NSAs. Britain, France, and the U.S. were obvious opponents because of their own recent doctrinal statements that nuclear weapons might be necessary to preempt the chemical and biological arsenals of potential "rogue states" in future conflicts. Russia also viewed these clauses with a skeptical eye, but for different reasons. According to one Russian official that briefed NGOs during the 1999 PrepCom, Russia is concerned about the possibility of first-use of nuclear weapons by those NATO states that are still technically "non-nuclear" under the NPT treaty during peacetime. Blanket negative security assurances given by Russia before a conflict with NATO would presumably cover all "non-nuclear" NATO allies, leaving out only Britain, France, and the United States. Given NATO enlargement and recent operations in Kosovo, Russia is not willing to support such assurances. In general, this section on NSAs contradicted many 1998 and 1999 PrepCom statements by calling for a global set of legal assurances, as opposed to the piecemeal, regional approach currently favored by many Western states in the form of Nuclear Weapons Free Zones (which by default involve promises by all signatories not to use or deploy nuclear weapons within the stipulated zones).

NATO allies also objected to a clause under Section (I) of the Chairman’s revised Working Paper, which called for an "Affirmation that all the articles of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons are binding on all States parties and at all times and in all circumstances." Based partially on language from proposals by the New Agenda Coalition, this statement implicitly targeted the nuclear sharing arrangements under NATO, under which the provisions of NPT Articles I and II would cease to apply during a major war involving alliance forces.

Rather than amending or negotiating final agreed texts for these contentious issue groupings, delegates decided to preserve in their entirety all documents directly relating to substance and "annex" them to the agreed Draft Final Report under a section titled "Annex II: List of Documents." The Draft Final Report deals strictly with procedural issues. The documents appended as an Annex to this procedural Report constitute substantive "elements for consideration" by States Parties at the 2000 Review Conference. Unlike the procedural decisions, they have no official status. At best, they will serve as guideposts for further negotiations at the 2000 Conference within the existing Main Committee structures. None of the details of consultations between parties on the May 20 Revised Paper were recorded in this Annex. The nature of objections to various paragraphs by the States Parties was not noted.

Lastly, there were two agreed documents that fall somewhere in between procedural and substantive issues. The document on Background Documentation for the 2000 Review Conference was highly contentious, as the United States disagreed with all Arab and Middle Eastern states on information relating to Israel and the 1995 Middle East Resolution. Led by Egypt and Algeria, the Middle Eastern states wanted documentation highlighting Israel’s status as a non-NPT state, with special emphasis on Israel’s unsafeguarded nuclear facilities, its nuclear weapons research program, and its presumed nuclear arsenal. There were also disagreements on all issues of disarmament, relating to Article VI of the NPT and Main Committee I of the 2000 Review Conference. The States Delegates eventually bypassed these difficulties by calling on the Secretariat to produce its own, original documentation with an eye for "balanced, objective, and factual" accounts of progress made since 1995.

There was also deep disagreement between Arab countries and nearly all other States Parties over the statement on expected "products" of the 2000 Review Conference [NOTE: The final text of this document is not yet released]. The purpose of this document is to provide a rough sketch of the overall goals of the 2000 Review process by outlining the general structure of the expected outcomes. Although purely procedural on the surface, arguments over language for this document represented a fundamental split between the Arab states and the West over Israel. On the one hand, Egypt (backed by Mexico and all Middle Eastern states, but not ultimately by the entire Non-aligned Movement) persistently called for just one expected product that would incorporate both the Main Committee findings and the debates concerning the 1995 Resolution on the Middle East. The primary idea behind this position was that the 1995 extension of the NPT constituted a "package deal" that included the issue of a nuclear-armed Israel, and that by breaking up the products of the 2000 conference into multiple discrete documents, the concerns of the Arab states would be slighted. In contrast, the West (including not only the US but also Canada, most European countries, Australia, and New Zealand) argued that such a negotiating structure would be too constraining, and that it could lead to a complete failure of the 2000 Review Conference if disagreements in any one area sabotaged other, less divisive, subjects. Ultimately, the West (joined by Indonesia and the non-Arab NAM states) won on this issue, producing a statement on "expected outcomes" that did not substantially deviate from the initial Chairman’s text at the beginning of the PrepCom’s proceedings. Although the Middle East Resolution was highlighted, the recommended outcomes for the 2000 Conference were split into four general areas: a Review document examining the good-faith implementation of the NPT since 1995; a judgement on the effectiveness of the Review process itself; a "forward-looking" document, which might also include substantive additions to the 1995 Principles and Objectives (without undermining the original 1995 language); and an outcome on the Middle East Resolution.

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