ESTABLISHING NON-NUCLEAR WEAPONS STATES CONFIDENCE IN VERIFICATION

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