No prolif risk due to NPT resiliency

A number of analysts have in recent months contended that the NPT process is at risk of “crumbling” or is damaged “beyond repair”. But the fear-mongering is unfounded. In fact, the impending doom of the NPT has been prophesized again and again since the 1960s. However, not only is the NPT “collapse thesis” wrong, it is detrimental to the goals of non-proliferation and disarmament. The narrative that the NPT is endlessly on the verge of disintegration fuels the thinking that nuclear restraint is a painful sacrifice and implicitly calls on the NPT community to protect the status quo rather than to push for the advancement of the Treaty’s goals. The triumph of non-proliferation In the 1960s, several governments viewed the NPT with intense hostility. The German Cabinet Minister Franz-Josef Strauß branded the NPT a “Versailles of cosmic dimensions”. As late as 1978, the Chinese government described the Treaty as “a conspiracy concocted by the USSR and the U.S. to maintain their nuclear monopoly.” But over time, as the superpowers twisted their allies’ arms and the non-proliferation norm took hold, opposition to the Treaty waned. NPT sceptics such as Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, and Thailand all eventually joined. As of today, only five UN member states are not party to the NPT. Only a single state, North Korea, has withdrawn. Four of the NPT’s non-nuclear-weapon states parties have renounced nuclear weapons (South Africa, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan), and many more have reversed nuclear-weapon programmes. The poverty of the NPT collapse thesis It is striking, however, that the remarkable period of non-proliferation norm consolidation from the mid-1960s till today has produced a ceaseless flood of expert assertions that the NPT is about to collapse. Proponents of the collapse thesis commonly argue that a continued reluctance by the nuclear-weapon states to move more decisively towards disarmament will push non-nuclear weapon states to “go nuclear” or defect from the NPT. In other cases, collapse theorists argue that proliferation by one state (India, North Korea, Iran…) will lead to a chain reaction whereby numerous other states will defect from the NPT and construct their own nuclear armouries. The collapse thesis is often invoked in support of abolition. If the alternative to disarmament is NPT collapse and ensuing global pandemonium, so goes the argument, the nuclear-armed states might prefer to reduce and eliminate their nuclear arsenals. But the use of the collapse thesis as an argument for disarmament is in fact deeply counterproductive, let alone inaccurate. Based on the assumption that a large group of non-nuclear states are perpetually looking for reasons to arm themselves with weapons of mass destruction – implicitly representing nuclear restraint as a surrender of something positive – the collapse thesis upholds the trope that denuclearization is a struggle against nature. It supports the argument that meaningful disarmament measures can only be pursued once “those without nuclear weapons […] feel no need to acquire them”. One version of the collapse thesis states that the NPT will, or could be, seriously damaged by a failure by its parties to reach a negotiated final document at two review conferences in a row. But the NPT has not only survived such “failures”, it has thrived and increased its membership. In fact, the sixth NPT Review Conference, in 2000, was the first such conference to reach consensus on a fully negotiated final document. The CTBT, START, and New START were negotiated on the back of the “failed” conferences in 1990 and 2005.