All parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) are committed to pursue negotiations on atreaty “on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control”(Article VI). This obligation places a de facto and significant responsibility on the recognizedNuclear Weapons States (NWS), but the Non-Nuclear Weapons States (NNWS) parties to the NPTcertainly also share the responsibility for successful negotiations of such a treaty and for theestablishment of a suitable disarmament verification regime. If a treaty on complete nucleardisarmament were to be verified only among the NWS, it would prove futile to try to convince allstates that complete nuclear disarmament has indeed taken place. The NNWS and the NWS musttherefore join each other in a concerted effort to explore practical ways of building the necessaryconfidence in the nuclear disarmament process.Ironically, the very treaty that states the obligation to pursue complete and verifiable disarmamentin the first place, also places significant, but necessary, hurdles to that end. The NPT forbids thetransfer of nuclear weapons know-how between NWS and NNWS (Articles I and II), and thisrequirement obviously complicates the realization of effective verification measures. Nationalsecurity concerns also pose some challenges in this regard, but while the NPT presents nonnegotiablerestrictions, national security concerns are generally self-imposed by the state and thusnegotiable whenever both parties find it beneficial to do so.In our paper, we present some suggestions on how NNWS and NWS cooperation on nucleardisarmament verification may take shape, and we discuss the process of advancing the nuclearreductions agenda towards our common goal of zero nuclear weapons.
展开▼
